Polly Fairchild has just turned twenty-one. To say that she celebrated her birthday would have been to suppose that anybody had remembered or cared that the event had taken place. In the eyes of our modern world, she’s a young woman with her life before her. In her world - post Civil War London, thriving and reborn following civil war, plague, and fire - she’s an old maid who will likely spend her life as a spinster. She is stuck in the boarding school that has been her home for the past thirteen years. Her father, a respected judge and attorney at law in the New World, dispatched her to the other side of the world following the death of her mother. Five thousand miles away from her father, she has found, at least, respect for her own merits, rather than a life lived under the sad cloud of grief and disappointment.

Polly has long since come to terms with the notion that she isn't wanted, but then a letter arrives which contradicts her assumptions. She is given an opportunity to undertake a journey that will change her life.

Nathanial Weston's life was tied to the sea before he left his mother's womb, but it hasn’t turned out quite as he expected. As the son of a fisherman, he always knew his life lay out on the waves, but being press-ganged into the Navy changed the path of his future. Now he is Captain Nate West, a mutineer turned pirate. He owns a fearsome reputation and commands a skilled and vicious crew. He is further away from his first life than he has ever been.

Nate is chasing a valuable prize in order to pay a debt, but when he captures it, he finds a treasure beyond anything he ever expected or even dreamed; one that might prove life-changing…