A promise made Eighteen-year-old Sarah Blackstone and her younger brother, Tobias, have been raised by their widowed father on a plantation in Virginia. To protect a family secret, Sarah has sworn to remain unmarried and care for Toby and the family fortune upon her father's death. The promise, made as a child, becomes an unbearable burden when uncontrollable desires are awakened in the young woman by the dashing pirate captain, Drake. An innocence lost As a boy, Drake was raised as Jake Durant, heir to a vast plantation in Virginia. One night strangers invaded his home and murdered his parents, and he barely escaped. Now a grown man, Drake lives only for revenge until a red-haired beauty named Sarah shows him the way home. Their destiny discovered Sarah's father's untimely death and the abduction of her brother ignites a race for his rescue that takes her from the confines of a lunatic hospital in London to a pirate hideaway in the Caribbean, back to her plantation home, and into the arms of the man she's come to love.