When schoolteacher Rebecca Sims ventures up on Hazel Mountain in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia to check on one of her young students, she is warned that this can be a very dangerous place to be for a beautiful young woman on her own. After being stranded on the mountain with a handsome and dangerous moonshiner and bootlegger named Jack Berry, she soon finds herself to be a "ruined woman" in the eyes of the townspeople and is forced into a shotgun wedding.

Facing angry relatives, nosy revenuers, armed killers and hot, steamy romance, Rebecca discovers that true love sometimes come wrapped in one very dangerous package.