When Emma Tremayne leaves her family's wildly beautiful estate on the Cornish coast and accompanies her adored father to Paris, their holiday seems to hold only delight in store. And at a glittering ball at the Tuileries, she finds herself in the arms of a darly mysterious Frenchman, young Lucien de Fontenay. But beneath the gaiety of Parisian society, the elaborate picnics at Versaille, the morning rides in the misty Bois de Boulogne, the star shower of fireworks at the Palai Royal lies the grim shadow of war. This is 1803 and the peace treaty between England and Napoleon Bonaparte is now only paper-thin. Suddenly Emma's reckless happiness with Lucien de Fontenay is shattered. She learns that her gay and charming father is not what he seems and that the perilous secret mission he has undertaken will leave her stranded in a French hotel, facing the bleak prospect of wartime internment. Smuggled out of Paris by Lucien to his home in the south of France under the guise of governess to his small brother, Emma finds that even the tranquil beauty of Villeroy holds no peace. Dark memories of betrayal and death under the Revolution haunt the old chateau. And anti-Bonaparte feeling runs high among the fiercely independent men and women of Provence, where the "devil's wind" - the scorching and unpredictable mistral-fance jealousies and intrigue to violent conclusion. Before Emma Tremayne can puzzle out her adventurer father's real role in the tumultuous affairs of post-revolutionary France and his relationship to her lover Lucien, the disinherited Marquis de Fontenay and his mother, the exquisitely lovely Martine, Emma finds herself thrust into the heart of a plot to capture Napoleon Bonaparte and remove him to England - a rash attempt that forces Emma to hazard life itself to save her lover.