The Duke of Portsmouth offers an impecunious relative a job as his young son's nanny. What he quickly discovers is that he wants her, badly. He also learns that she isn't at all what she seems.

Evangeline de Beauchamp is in way over her head. She has far more to cope with than a nineteen-year-old should. To top it all off, she must play an experienced widow with a man who knows women as well as he knows horses—or so he thinks.

Phillip and Sabrina Mercerault, who appeared in The Offer, are also in The Deception.