When Mallory accepted the job of governess to Raife Benedict's niece and arrives at the Morven Grange, his beautiful house on the romantic Welsh Borderland, she had no idea how much the 'Black Benedicts' -- all of them as dark as gipsies, and strikingly handsome -- as they were called, were to affect her own future.

There was Raife, her employer, arrogant and unapproachable -- Adrian, the music-lover, who had been badly injured in an accident which had deprived him of his wife -- and Adrian's daughter Serena.

The three of them wove a kind of spell about Mallory and drew her, inextricable, into the patterns of their lives.