The Present

The Malory family gathers at Haverston for the Christmas season, and an unsigned gift turns up among the others: an old journal. Nobody knows who sent it. Its pages record a love affair from the family's past.

The journal follows Christopher Malory, the second Marquis, and Anastasia, a dark-haired gypsy woman. Anastasia is promised in marriage to a brute. To escape him, she sets out to win the love of a man outside her own people.

She chooses Christopher, an English lord. He wants her badly, yet he cannot bring himself to marry a woman of such low birth. Their difference in station stands between them from the start.

The story moves between the family's holiday gathering and the older romance in the journal. Anastasia and Christopher spar with will and cunning, and the attraction between them is tender at times and stormy at others. It is a historical romance with a Christmas setting, and the question it turns on is whether a marquis and a gypsy can overcome birth and custom to be together.