For most of her eighteen years, Julie Temple had led a lonely but idyllic life with her artist father on a tiny island in the Caribbean. Julie would have been happy for it to have gone on forever, but everything vanished overnight when her father returned from a trip with a glamorous young second wife, Gisela, who lost no time in trying to persuade him to sell the island. Lost and bewildered, in her loneliness Julie turned to the only other man she knew - Simon Tiernan, the prospective buyer - and accepted his proposal of marriage. And perhaps her problems might have sorted themselves out, if Gisela's malicious influence had not followed her even into her marriage, to wreck her life yet again.