The bespectacled, very bookish Miss Rebecca Peabody, who pens enlightening essays under the name P. Corpus, simply must marry. Since she abhors that disgusting "bedchamber business," she decides Lord Aynsley is the perfect man to become her husband. At the advanced age of three and forty, he surely has gotten that repellant bedchamber business out of his system.

For reasons quite unknown to her, he accepts her bizarre marriage proposal, though he assures her a chaste marriage is NOT what he has in mind.

John Compton, the Earl of Aynsley, needs a wife to see to his brood of seven motherless children, a wastrel ward, and an uncle with a most peculiar habit. But he's not interested in the way-too-young Miss Rebecca Peabody . . . until he discovers she is the brilliant P. Corpus who writes political essays with such passion, a passion he vows to unleash. Thus he embarks on the adventure of his life . . . that of tutoring his young wife in the ways of love.