Sometimes fairy tales can come true-even for plain,shy spinsters like Missy Wright. Neither as pretty as cousin Alicia, nor as domineering as mother Drusilla, she seems doomed to a quiet life of near poverty at Missalonghi, her family's pitifully small homestead in Australia's Blue Mountains. But It's a brand new century-the twentieth-a time for new thoughts and bold, new actions. And Missy Wright is about to set every self-righteous tongue in the town of Byron wagging. Because she has just set her sights on a mysterious, mistrusted and unsuspecting stranger ... who just might be Prince-Charming in disguise.