Jessie Blake is on her way to a Halloween costume party with her friend Kyle who is a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They decide to stop in at his lab so he can show her the time travel machine that he has been working on. He asks her where she would want to go back in time, theoretically speaking. She suggests she would like to go back to eighteenth-century Scotland to meet the Bard, Robert Burns. Jessie is working on a thesis on Burns, one of the first Romantic poets and national poet of Scotland. She is accidently sent back in time, and meets the Bard in a tavern in Dumfries, Scotland. They are instantly attracted to each other and Jessie discovers why Robert Burns has a reputation as a womanizer as well as a poetic genius. Eventually, Jessie returns to the present but then decides to bring Robert Burns back with her. How will an eighteenth-century man who is interested in poetry and sexual adventures fare in the modern world?