A present-day love story which springs from a tragic wartime romance ... It is the 1990s. Cassie Johns is a young, lovely writer on the threshold of success after a less-than-silver-spooned girlhood. Driving through glorious countryside to a fancy-dress party in the Vale of Boland, she gives a lift to a mysteriously attractive man wearing the uniform of an RAF pilot: ready for the party Cassie assumes. But in the evening there is no sign of the airman. Cassie -- hitherto rational, sceptical, a woman of her times -- becomes obsessed by Jack Hunter, a pilot whose plane had crashed in 1944, but whose long-ago love for a girl at Deer's Leap makes him unable to rest in peace. Cassie's love for the dead hero takes her into an unknown war-torn past, where old passion burns and becomes entwined with new.