As a 72-year-old author of more than thirty successful romance novels, Kate Caldwell had all but given up on finding her perfect love connection. To offset her loneliness, she spends her time writing and visiting with her granddaughter, Ellie, who lives near Kate’s Texas Hill Country home. While the first two books of her newest Passion series had been best-sellers, partly because of the help of her secret collaborator, Captain Edward Peregrine, Kate now faces a creative shut-down as she tries to start the third book. Her publisher is pressuring her to put more explicit love-making scenes in her novels, which goes against Kate’s principles. She believes love was more than just sex. At the same time, Edward seems to have abandoned her. Frustrated, Kate and Ellie embark on a two-week cruise to the Panama Canal in hopes that it will get Kate’s creative juices flowing again.
Edward returns to Kate on the first night of the cruise. They settle their past differences and begin collaborating on the third book—The Fiery Passion of a Thousand Burning Suns. After Edward’s visit, Kate is finally making progress with her book and is well into the first draft after a few days. At her dinner table aboard the cruise ship, she meets two attractive and available men, David Mitchell, a professor traveling partly on business and partly for pleasure, and Marco Antonini, traveling with his sister. Both men offer Kate the love possibilities that she so desired, and they open up feelings that she had long suppressed. Little did Kate know that troubled waters lay ahead or that she was in for the adventure of her life as a merging of the time continuum brings forth conflicts and desires that upsets the tranquility of her life, yet brings her closer to realizing her dream of true love.