Cool, gracious, international-relations attorney Whitney Benedict hasn't completely given up on marriage, but she does have a checklist of qualities for the man of her dreams: affluence, intelligence, good looks and no baggage (!). When she travels to California to make an offer on Gabriel Mendoza's famous Lipizzan horses for a European client she encounters a man who doesn’t have anything on her list: he is divorced, near financial ruin, and trying to raise two teenagers and an autistic younger daughter with his mother. When an accident prolongs her stay at the “hacienda,” and Whitney tries to establish some kind of order in the dysfunctional family, she discovers that horses and children have a way of rearranging the best-laid plans—and the course of her heart.