Natasha Melikov was a Countess and a hostage. Kidnapped from her home in Tzarist Russia by Moslem rebels, she and her young brother were being held captive high in the Caucasian mountains.

Overcome with fear, Natasha made an otherwise unthinkable bargain: her brother would go free and she would give herself in marriage to a rebel ally, the Sultan of Turkey.

Knowing Natasha needed an escort out of the mountains to guarantee her safe delivery to the Sultan, her captors turned to the handsome, irreproachable Lord Athelstan --already in the Caucasians on a diplomatic mission. But Athelstan refused to lend either his name or his country's to such an unprincipled exchange.

His cool rejection of her impassioned pleas for her brother's life was transforming the Countess's fear into frenzied desperation....