Beauty Meets Beast in San Francisco ...<P>Heiress Rosalind Hawkins was a thoroughly modern medieval scholar, her road through life well planned and already embarked upon: by breaking new ground in the Groves of Academe she would show the world that brains and creativity trumped gender prejudice every time — and make a name for herself in the process. But when her family fortune suddenly disappeared in a cloud of debt and recrimination Rosalind was forced to the traditional haven of a previously well-to-do woman fallen on hard times: she accepted employment as a governess. She wasn't quite sure how the job — perhaps the only governess position ever on offer that required skill in medieval French — had come her way, but she did know that it would pay her several times more than she had expected to be able to earn.<P>But when she arrives at her employer's mansion overlooking San Francisco Bay, Rosalind discovers that she is to be a governess in a house without children, or even a wife, and with only a single servant to keep the huge old house as immaculate as it was somehow kept. Furthermore, it seemed that she was never to meet her employer face-to-face, but merely to read to him through a speaking tube from ancient manuscripts in obscure and forgotten dialects. Still, if she persevered she might be able to resume her chosen life-path a decade earlier than would otherwise be the case ....<P>As time passes, "governess" and employer learn first respect and then affection for each other. At last they do meet face-to-face, and Rosalind learns Jason Cameron's terrible secret, and despite, or because of it, she comes to love him. And — the earth moves....

San Francisco, 1905: Rosalind, a medieval scholar, is hired by Jason, a powerful sorcerer. Jason's enemy offers to restore Rosalind's family fortune if she will betray Jason. And then the earthquake strikes. . . .