Charlie Briarman's life is a contradiction-she is an avid reader of classic romance, but when encountering anything close to love in her own life, she tends to run for the hills. When she is forced to move to Newport, Rhode Island for the summer and live with her dad, Charlie has a few goals to make the downtime worthwhile: stockpile money for tuition, read through Jane Austen's entire literary collection, and avoid phone calls from her mother at all costs.

To work on her first and most important goal, Charlie finds herself a job at a horse barn where she is dropped into an unfamiliar social scene and introduced to new friends...and enemies. She meets James, an intriguing yet guarded equestrian who doesn't give her the time of day...not that she cares. She also meets Ren, a sweet veterinarian's assistant, who Charlie strikes up an immediate friendship with.

Charlie's complex relationship with her mother and the fallout of her parents' very recent divorce cause her to struggle with opening up, but as she gets closer to her friends at the stables and uncovers the truth about James, she begins to discover that romance might be worth a try after all, despite the inevitability of it all going wrong.