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she’d made a horrible mistake and she had to go home. But the words stuck in her throat, kept there both by her fear of the gruff stranger and her reluctance to admit defeat.
    It wasn’t just the exhaustion of travel that was eating at her. Even her complete ignorance of what it would be like to live and go to school in France was not what was making her feel almost sick. It was the anticipation of what her fellow students might be like.
    A little Internet research had shown her that the Fortune School was meant for the daughters of blue-blooded, filthy-rich families, not for daughters of log truck drivers from Oregon. The girls at the Fortune School probably spoke several languages, skied in the Alps, vacationed on private yachts in the Mediterranean, and bought their clothes from shops like Chanel and Dior.
    She had spent the last several months too engrossed in getting to France to worry about what would happen once she did. Now that the flights were over and she was on the ground, only an hour from the Fortune School, she finally began to wonder not just what she would think of the people she met, but what they would think of her .
    And she knew they were going to think she was a hick.
    She was a hick.
    Her eyelid fluttered at the thought, and she pressed her hand against it. After all she’d gone through to get here, she would never forgive herself if she gave up on day one.
    She closed her eyes and lay her head back against the headrest and tried to relax.
    Suddenly, the brilliant glare of headlights pierced the rain and filled the car, a semi’s horn blaring a warning. Caitlyn screamed as a massive truck bore down on them out of the gray drizzle, aiming straight for her in the backseat of the Mercedes. The truck’s front grill filled her window, the headlights turning the driver’s head into an abstract shape of white illumination and black shadow. There was a violent jerk, and then all went black.
    The car was gone. As if in a dream, she was flying with the graceful ease of a bird, skimming low over summer-bleached farms and forests of oak. She saw the Dordogne River, wide, smooth, and green, with poplars and willows edging its banks and golden limestone cliffs rising roughly above on one side. Narrow honey-colored stone villages clung to the bottom of the cliffs, bounded by the river. The stone-shingled buildings looked centuries old.
    She flew over a long-ago peasant family harvesting wheat by hand, flying so close that she could hear the mother’s scythe as it cut through the stalks and feel the dust of the harvest in her nose. She left them and came up behind a group of riders on horseback, on a dirt road. They wore clothes out of a Shakespearean play: doublets and trunk hose, tall boots and plumed hats. As she approached, one of the figures turned in his saddle as if to stare at her: a beautiful young man with bronze curls, a straight narrow nose, and gently curved lips framed by a square jaw shadowed with stubble.
    The Knight of Cups , something inside Caitlyn said. You have found him.
    The young man’s dark hazel eyes narrowed as she flew up close and hovered for a long moment mere feet from him, like a hummingbird examining a flower. Was this him, the one she had been waiting for?
    She wanted to touch him; she wanted to feel that rough stubble on his cheek. She stretched her hand toward him, fingertips reaching for the plane of his cheek. He couldn’t see her, his gaze going right through her, but his eyes were hard and suspicious, as if he knew someone or something was watching him. As if he knew that she was reaching out of the ether to touch him.
    “Raphael, what is it?” one of the other men asked when her fingertips were an inch shy of his cheek.
    The bronze-curled young man shrugged and faced forward. “Nothing.”
    Nothing? Caitlyn lay both hands on the back of his neck and ran her fingers up into his hair, knocking off his hat, and then flew beyond the chaos she had caused: Raphael jerked,