Lovely Alina Langley was desperately wondering how she could earn some money when her childhood friend, Denise Windham, arrived unexpectedly from London. In a gamble, Denise begged Alina to pretend to be her own mother, a widowed aristocrat, and accompany her to Rome, where she is intent on pursuing the Earl of Wescott, with whom she has fallen in love. Alina acepted, to visit Rome was a wish that she had never dreamed would come true.

Yet here she was, a sheltered young country miss, impersonating an aristocratic, widowed Beauty in a dangerous, perhaps even wicked, gamble to reconcile her friend with an adored Beau. In Rome the girls' host was the handsome and scathing Marquis of Teverton, the "Casanova of London." And he kissed her. Alina's heart was tossed in a tempest of emotion. Her first kiss -- and from a man who surely despised her! Alina was seared by the fire of his lips, stunned by his arrogant confidence but most of all shocked... to find that she loved the forbidding Marquis of Teverton!