Yvain had been named after a character in a fairy-tale, a maiden who had been assisted by a lion in her fight against a dragon – and in her present situation she could not help feeling that the fairy-tale had come true. Shipwrecked while on a cruise, she had been washed up on to the shores of a tiny Spanish island, the Isla de Leon – Island of the Lion – and taken to the castle of the Lion himself, the autocratic Don Juan de Conques y Aranda, Margues de Leon. The Marques was kindness itself: he took her under his wing, made her his ward, arranged for her to stay at the castle indefinitely – a lot for a man to do who should really, she thought, have been concentrating on the lovely Spanish girl, Dona Raquel, whom he was expected to marry shortly. Then Yvain realised that like her namesake she had a fight with the dragon on her hands – the dragon of her growing love for the Marques. But how could the Lion help her in this particular battle?