Twenty-year-old Jessie Warfield is branded a disgrace for riding as a
jockey on her father's racehorses, wearing men's clothing, exposing her
skin to the sun and, in general, not acting like a lady at all.
James Wyndham, eligible widower and owner of a nearby horse farm, is
Jessie's rival on the race track. Outwardly competitive to the extreme
with James, she is secretly in love with him. James, having known her
since she was fourteen, sees her only as a little sister and a bratty
one at that.
Together they are the unlikeliest romantic duo among their native
Baltimore riding set. When Jessie sets out to protect James from a
marriage entrapment, she ends up compromising her own reputation and is
pressured into leaving town. She flees to an unlikely haven: the estate
of James's British cousins, the Earl and "Duchess" of Chase. There she
is pampered, dressed, and transformed into a lady. Smitten by the new
Jessie, James proposes and they marry.
Their new, shared passion results in hideous nightmares--nightmares that
soon reveal themselves to be recovered memories of a long-ago attempted
rape and murder. When connections are made between those events and the
pirate Blackbeard's diaries, the hunt is on for his buried treasure.
