Autumn Prelude

Gillian Falconer is living in a small cottage and working as a cook/groom at her cousin's farm - a far cry from her gilded life at Falcon Park, her former home. Her half-sister Laura has, for several years, been using her considerable entrepreneurial skills to good purpose elsewhere, having been prevented by their father from fulfilling her ambition to run the family-owned mill. One September day, Major Iain Hampshire appears in Great Bowland - a man very much in the news having just escaped, with his men, from hostile captivity during a military exercise. He is the new owner of Falcon Park and Mill. Laura is certain that she is the one to help him restore the ailing mill and equally sure that she must be his obvious choice of bride. But Gillian, once she has got over her initial hostility, is more concerned with aiding his recovery from the injuries and starvation he has so recently endured...