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her right here, against the wall, hits my gritted restraint. This woman isn’t just a whim. She’s not a fuck-then-flee socialite, or remotely close to my other preferred social distraction: haute couture bimbo, sans panties. In my jacket pocket is a phone with hundreds of those women on it, willing to be ready the moment my plane touches down in New York once more.
    The thought of it makes me ill.
    It will pass—it always does—but as I dip toward her, needing one more taste before giving her up forever, I give in to the illusion that it won’t. That Mishella Santelle has pulled a real Circe on me, and accomplished the impossible.
    Transformed me.
    Changed me back into a creature I recognize. A man I respect.
    Impossible.
    Impossible.
    I am so screwed.

THREE
    *
    Mishella
    M y eyes itch. My back aches. The indents in my palms are likely permanent by now, considering the hours my fingernails have been digging into them. How many hours, I have no idea. At this point, time has been slammed into the same category as my physical comfort level. Irrelevant.
    I sit in a stiff chair in Father’s study, scooted forward, hands tucked in my lap, knees at a ninety-degree angle. I focus on my toes, flat against the floor, peeking from beneath my sleep pants. Distractedly, I note how they have changed color through the hours, going bluish at the brink of dawn. Living in Sancti, the warmest part of Arcadia, still means ocean breezes that chill the air at night.
    Winds capable of lifting Cassian’s hair off his high, straight forehead…
    Of teasing that hair into his eyes, changing like ripples across a lagoon with his rising desire…
    Of infusing wild new scent across his skin, so taut and tanned over all the hard ridges of his body…
    “ Salpu .”
    Not even whispering the profanity against myself is effective against the relentless images of him. And maybe, as awful as the torture is, it is for the best. The pictures are all I will have now.
    He is gone.
    And I am a selfish salpu for lamenting the bizarre sense of loss in my heart, when so much more has walked out the door with him.
    New memories assault, making me grimace. That moment, having let down my hair and climbed into bed, when the door of my chamber burst open…then my gape when Father filled the portal. Luckily, the curse I had prepared for Saynt was not yet at my lips. I had expected nobody else, since Mother retired to her own quarters after we bid good night to Father and Cassian, immediately following dinner. I had not diverted from acceptable decorum during the meal, despite the yearning to do exactly that—cheese soup, crème fraiche, and stuffed chicken breast gained new meaning when one dined across the table from Cassian Court’s intense gaze—but when Father stormed in, rage mottling his face, I discerned the awful truth before he spat it.
    Did I not tell you, two damn days ago, not to throw yourself at the man like a common rospute ? Do you know what you have done, Mishella? Do you know what you have ruined?
    “Tell me again.” Mother’s mandate jerks me back to the present—though it is no less agonizing than the flashback. “Word for word, Fortin—what Court said before he left, and when.”
    Father growls. “I do not fathom how this will—”
    “Tell. Me. Again.”
    “ Woman .”
    “ Husband .” She jerks the edges of her dressing robe tighter. Firms her stance. She doesn’t need to say more. Even with a bare face and tangled hair, etched in the unforgiving gray of early morning, Selyna Santelle’s golden beauty arrests a whole room.
    Suddenly—strangely—I feel sorry for her. Father and she are children of equally ambitious court schemers who married them off for political gain. For many years now, it has been plain that little connects them but a mutual drive for more. And, I suppose, Saynt and me. They love us, in their bizarre way—which might be the only way they know how.
    “He is likely preparing his plane for takeoff as we