All Joanne could remember about her 'uncle' Matthew Wilder was a kindly, bearded man, a friend of her father's, who had made a pet of her when she was a child. Now she was grown up, and had been sent on a mission to find him. Find him she did — and now Matthew Wilder bore no resemblance to that childhood memory. The beard had gone, he was still an attractive man in his late thirties — and Joanne lost no time in falling in love with him. But what was the mystery surrounding him? Why had he shut himself off from the world on a remote Florida key? Joanne had been waiting for someone like Matthew all her life — but what was the use, when it was so clear that he had not been waiting for her?