After years of caring for her ailing father, the Earl of Medwin, the ethereally beautiful young Lady Ancella Winn is pale, drawn and exhausted now that he has died and she is devastated.
Worse still, she has nowhere to go, except for the home of her strait-laced and disapproving aunts.
So when family friend and doctor, Sir Felix Johnson, suggests that it would be good for her health to travel to the French Riviera to work as the nurse-companion to an ageing Russian Princess, she nervously agrees.
Although her new employer is difficult and demanding, Ancella is bewitched, first by the beauty of the Côte d’Azur and then by the Princess’s ineffably handsome son, Prince Vladimer.
Caught up in the glamour of the Monte Carlo Casino, the den of iniquity against which her aunts had warned her in no uncertain terms, it seems that she has won the Prince’s heart as the feckless aristocrats around her lose fortunes at Roulette and Baccarat.
But then to her horror her hopes of the love she has always dreamt about are dashed when it she finds that Prince Vladimer has betrayed her with the grasping but alluring Marchioness of Chiswick. ( )

It's been a long time since I've read a Barbara Cartland book. I am not a romance reader. This one I picked up in a stack of old books I had in storage. Someone had given me a box of books and I was sorting through. I picked it up and started at the first page, found it interesting and decided to read through. This one didn't have a lot of the usual heart fluttering, heaving and such.

The story line is of a young lady whose father passes away leaving her a small allowance to live on. Being single, she cannot live alone. She finds she has two choices: go to live with her strait-laced spinster aunts and probably become like them under their strict control, or take a position as a nurse-companion for an aging Russian princess. She chooses the Russian princess and finds herself living among the extremely rich society of Monte Carlo.

She chooses to masquerade as a plain English girl, rather than use the title of Lady which is hers by birth. She finds the beauty of the Cote d'Azure intoxicating, the people fascinating, intrigue happening among the social set. She also finds that the son of the Princess is more than she ever imagined in a man. But even though she is taken with him, would ever fall in love with her, not knowing that she also has social status in line with his?

A scheming Marchioness, who has a lover on the side, has the Prince in her sights. Will she win him? What is the story of the bitterness the Princess expresses towards men and the extreme protectiveness she has of her son?

The story moves along at a good pace and is an easy read. ( )

Angel finds herself amidst a conspiracy. Only she can unravel it and escape from this hell and into the arms of her love.
The story is very Cartland. She has invented a genre of her own! ( )