In the wake of a costly gaffe committed by his aging literary agent, an affair with his editor, and a major fraud perpetrated by his money manager brother-in-law, Philip Maguire, bestselling author of the popular Del Colton series of suspense thrillers, finds himself with his writing career in a shambles, divorced, and almost destitute. Forced by circumstances to start his life all over again, he has moved from New York to Lexington, Kentucky, where he's bought a modest little Craftsman bungalow near downtown and found employment as a fine-finish carpenter, his trade before getting his first big break in the publishing world.
Enter Gwen Sinclair, the much younger wife of Texas oil billionaire Ross Sinclair, owner of a thoroughbred horse farm where Phil is working on a new bloodstock library. Fascinated to have "Del Colton's dad" right there on the premises, Gwen becomes determined to find Phil a new woman, plucked from her circle of multi-millionaire divorcee and widowed friends. When she invites three of the most eligible of them to Lexington to meet him, Christine Nygaard, a gorgeous forty-something widow bequeathed half-a-billion dollars by her shipping magnate husband when he died, makes him an offer he doesn't think he can refuse. As a woman in her position, Christine is plagued by a legion of fortune-hunting suitors from all over the globe. She needs a credible man to masquerade as her life partner and Phil has all the bona fides she is looking for. The gig will involve him cohabitating with her for most of the year in her palatial Naples, Florida home, an exotic dream car for him to drive, international travel and fine dining in her company, and playing lots of tennis, but will also afford him an annual allowance and a thirty-day yearly vacation where he can go anywhere and do whatever he wants, no questions asked. It would be nothing like the life he once lived, but at least he'd be back in the chips again, right? Heck, it might even enable him to once again kick-start his writing career.
Christine is as anxious to have him agree to that role as he is to be flush again. Her private jet is waiting, which doesn't give him much time to consider what the reality of being a kept man might actually entail, and so he jumps in with both feet without taking the time to consider what could possibly go wrong.
