Synopsis
Lee Soo-jung is at the end of her rope when her boyfriend leaves her and their newborn baby due to financial problems. So Soo-jung gives up her daughter for adoption, then migrates to the United States in search of the American dream. There, she changes her name to Rena Jung and enrolls at culinary school. But success eludes her, forcing her to return to Korea twenty years later. Still beautiful and extremely ambitious, Rena becomes a celebrity chef who hosts her own cooking show. She has no qualms about forging her credentials, manipulating people, and stealing others' ideas. Her ultimate goal is to enter a loveless marriage for wealth and fame, and her target is Park Min-joon, eldest son of the chairman of TNC Group.
Park Min-joon lost his mother at a young age, and his father Park Tae-soo remarried, but his stepmother Ma Hee-ra drove a wedge between father and son with her scheming ways. Min-joon grows up to become a cynical, overly serious workaholic who has no interest in women and doesn't find them worth his time, but who hides a lonely soul craving for connection. Then one day, he meets Rena, who was hired to manage one of TNC Group's new restaurants. Min-joon becomes smitten with her and asks her to marry him. When he eventually finds out that Rena had orchestrated the whole ploy to seduce him so that she could someday take over TNC Group, he feels shocked and betrayed. But as Min-joon withdraws emotionally, Rena's feelings of love for him become real.
Min-joon's younger half-brother is rich playboy Park Jae-joon. He is obedient to the wishes of his mother Hee-ra, who dotes on him and pressured him to enter medical school and become a plastic surgeon. She sets up a matchmaking blind date in Kaohsiung, Taiwan with her son and Seo Yoo-ra, the only daughter of doctor couple Seo In-chul and Choi Hye-jin. But instead Jae-joon meets Kang Yi-sol, who unbeknownst to him Yoo-ra had paid to take her place. He falls for Yi-sol instantly, then becomes bitter and disappointed upon learning the truth, and mistakenly assumes Yi-sol to be mercenary.
Kang Yi-sol had a happy and loving upbringing in Taiwan despite her poverty. Nursing a broken heart after her short, failed relationship with Jae-joon, she flies to Korea to attend her grandmother's funeral. While going through her grandmother's belongings, Yi-sol learns that the woman who raised her, Gu Yang-soon, is not her biological mother. She tracks down her biological father, who turns out to be Yoo-ra's father Seo In-chul, but he wants nothing to do with her. As she does further digging into the past, Yi-sol comes ever closer to finding out that the biological mother who abandoned her is none other than Rena Jung.
