The widowed Sophia Armitage has a chance encounter in Hyde Park with three friends she had known during the Peninsular Wars when she was there with her husband. The three men remember her only as a dear comrade, but soon Nathaniel Gascoigne is seeing her in a different light. Sophie, though, harbors a dark secret she can confide to no one--least of all Nathaniel. His friend Eden, Lord Pelham, meanwhile, is engaged in his own volatile, humorous love story with Lavinia Bergland, Nat's prickly ward.