The Count de Montfort had never sought the warmth of another's body — and at thirty-nine, this icy emptiness had become both his curse and his shield. He needs only an heir, not a wife, but society does not forgive a man without desire, attributing to him secret vices or witchcraft. In a desperate attempt to avoid disgrace, he enters into a marriage with an impoverished noblewoman, hoping for silence and formality. But in the girl who brings him nothing but a name and debts, he suddenly notices something he has never seen in any woman: not beauty, but a strange, almost painful calm, akin to his own. She does not flatter, does not flirt, does not fear him — and this disturbs him more than any advances. Yet the Count does not yet know: the secret she carried from her parents' home could either shatter his cold world or — for the first time in years — make him feel something other than boredom.