Isabel Jimenez is a teenager witnessing a horrible feud between her own family and the Fuentes family, a feud involving broken hearts, property disputes and a mysterious fire that destroyed the Fuentes house. Isabel's uncle is murdered by Jeronimo Fuentes, who later tries to stab her father. After Jeronimo dies in jail, Isabel must look outside of her family for the truth, learning from the village idiot that her father may have set fire to the Fuentes home.
The action takes place in a typical French town in the early sixties, at the end of the Algerian war. In a fit of criminal madness, a married, affluent and respected town-citizen named Gregoire Duval kills a young woman who spurns his advances. As no one witnesses him committing this crime, he chooses to remain silent while the girl's boyfriend, a young Algerian farm worker, is wrongly convicted. In a strange twist of fate, the killer becomes one of the jurors of the trial and suddenly does everything in his power to defend the wrongly accused young man.
American tour guide Mo Alexander misses her tour group, and then her flight out of Paris. Stuck in the city of romance, Mo runs into the very suave -- and very married -- Xavier, who attempts to seduce Mo while his family is out of town. His charms prove hard to resist, and Mo succumbs, though her conscience weighs heavy. Soon their bickering romance of convenience takes a serious turn, and, in spite of himself, Xavier finds he's falling in love.
