Determined not to be a burden on her cash-strapped family, vicar’s widow Caroline Fayre Cummings resolves to support herself and her small son by taking a position as governess to the children of Lord Westermain. But Caroline quickly learns that all is not well in the earl’s household. Lord Westermain is deeply embittered by the death of his wife, and seems to hold his daughter in active dislike. Worse, seventeen-year-old Lucia appears to have found a substitute for her father’s affection in the person of a handsome stable hand.

Lord Westermain was once married to a famous beauty known as the Venetian Nightingale, the darling of the Italian opera, whose death still casts a shadow over the earl’s household. So what is it about this prim vicar’s widow that threatens to stir up feelings he’d thought were dead and buried? Suddenly he finds himself longing to teach the governess a lesson—by shaking her out of her calm demeanor and kissing her senseless.

When a trip to Bartholomew Fair reveals the secrets of the Westermain household, the earl and the governess each come to realize they must lay the ghosts of the past if they are ever to face the future—even if it means opening hearts once more to the risks of love, betrayal, and loss.