Shy, dreamy, and incurably romantic, Harriet Poole was shattered when her brief affair with Simon Villers, Oxford's leading playoboy undergraduate, ended abruptly, leaving her penniless, alone and pregnant. Still hopelessly in love with Simon, she took baby William and buried herself in deepest Yorkshire as nanny to the children of Cory Erskine, a somewhat eccentric scriptwriter.

Local tongues were just starting to wag when a whole host of visitors began to arrive to disrupt Harriet's peaceful routine: first Noel, Cory's estranged wife, hellbent on winning Cory back, then Cory's glamourous brother Kit, whose old affair with Noel didn't stop him from making passes at Harriet, and finally, of all people, Simon...