Jasper Finley, Baron Montford, is twenty-five years old and bored. He is London's most notorious daredevil and much admired by his male peers. He has never lost a wager, though he has taken on some hair-raising ones. But there seems to be no new challenge left to him and life looks empty and dreary as it stretches before him. He is also very drunk following his birthday celebrations-as are all his male friends. And so from the depths of the forbidden a new challenge is both suggested and accepted. Jasper is to seduce a virtuous female within two weeks, something beyond the pale of decency even for him. And the virtuous female is to be Katherine Huxtable, the beautiful, virtuous, and naïve sister of the new young Earl of Merton.

It seems like a wager too easy for his considerable skills. When Jasper sets out to win it, though, he finds the challenge far more difficult than he had expected-though not for any predictable reason. Chagrined and humiliated at his failure, he withdraws to the country and does not encounter Katherine again for three years.

At the start of this book they meet again to mutual embarrassment and hostility, though soon there is a new wager between them more challenging than anything Jasper has ever experienced or Katherine contemplated. Even that pales into insignificance, however, before a growing scandal that erupts into open disaster and threatens to ruin both their lives.