When her father loses everything in a gambling debt, including her, Matilda can take her role as a passive and dutiful daughter no longer. She finds a strength and willfulness she never recognized before and the courage to leave this intolerable situation. Fleeing the kisses of the fifty-year old Earl of Lark, a man notorious for his womanizing ways, Matilda finds work as a cook in London. Her culinary skills so impress Major Robert Bruce that he hires her as his personal chef. But the earl is still pursing her and Matilda has been trapped in a whirlwind. Her love is beginning to grow for the handsome duke, but does he love enough to give her shelter from the nefarious earl?