Blessed with an absence of his high-powered deputy-ambassador wife, the recent purchase of a vintage Jaguar convertible, and a reservation in the room Daphne du Maurier occupied while she was writing Rebecca, bisexual American novelist Collin Stevens taps his inner carefree nature to take a week's vacation from settling in to a tour at the American embassy. He escapes to the venerable British colonial-period mountain hotel, the Forest Park, in Pano Platres, Cyprus. Upon meeting charismatic, sensual, and seductive Greek Cypriot actor, Nico Christou, at the hotel, Collin is quickly taken up—literally—in the arms of a group of talented and randy artists, musicians, and writers conclaved in Platres for a week of creativity, during which the young American novelist finds himself celebrated in both art and casual sex. Much as he subsequently tries to write the whirlwind week off as a last fling before dutifully settling down as an embassy spouse, Collin finds he cannot escape the intensity and arousal of either the conclave experience or Nico Christou.
