Lovely Sophia Forest was a very intellectual young lady for the year 1816 in Regency England — quite different from her beautiful and flighty sister, Daphne. All London was agog when Sophia rather than Daphne wed the dashing Earl of Gresham, whose scorn for bookish females was well-known.

The marriage was intended as a business arrangement only — to preserve the Earl's fortune and give Sophia financial independence. But what was Sophia to do when she found herself enamoured of her husband, though too proud to admit it? Sophia needed all her wit and womanly wiles in a game of pretense and passion, to make the man she loved, love her.