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Miles Vorkosigan washes out military school and heads to another planetary system to spend time with his grandmother and her family. There he decides to bail out some down & outers using his name and a bit of family money and do some smuggling/inter system trade to recover the money. Things go poorly and the only way through each obstacle is bluffing, and at every step he succeeds but has to face every larger obstacles afterward.

As a sci-fi adventure plot, it's adequate. But Miles "I'm a nice guy using my position to try to get in the pants of the woman who reports to me" vibe really brought me down. At least the character who raped women in the previous book wasn't given a "I was just following orders and feel bad about" pass from the narrative. Which it seemed like it would. There's still some amount of "we still have to honor him for the good stuff he did" though.

Cordelia Naismith's science team is ambushed by a Barrayaran military unit while conducting a survey of what they thought was an unclaimed world. In a double-cross, some in the unit mutiny and strand their leader Aral Vorkosigan on the planet as well. Vorkosigan, known as the butcher of Komarr for slaughtering innocent people there, has claims to wanting a bloodless capture. In order to survive, both of them must trek tens of kilometers to a claimed supply cache and learn to trust each other.

Thus begins a number of encounters between Cordelia and Aral, interspersed with a few scenes of Cordelia on her own. Nobody believes her that she thinks Aral is different. And will Aral be forced by his war-like society to live up to the stereotypes with respect to Cordelia?

I'm not going to explicitly spoil this, but this follows romance rules in a very romance inspired book. Don't read this for the unexpected plot twists. Read this for the solid characterization and some clever plotting for how Cordelia turns her relationship with Aral into an advantage for her world, the Beta Colony.