No; the twice-jilted Abraham was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the smell of new-cut grass nor the full knowledge that her fate was now sealed impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that dashing Boris Dambach, the forbidden man who had taught her how to feel, had a full life in which he was away again on safari, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one looming, ophidian girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most darkest day when Brother Becky had brought him to her attention.
   Suddenly, the sound of her own name being called shattered her composure into a million burning pieces! She instinctively checked her fingernails. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the tenebrous, nigh-ophidian and masculine face she had come to know so well! “We marry tonight,” he murmured in his halting Spanish while he excitedly began to show her his plans for the villa they were to share. “I need you, my perfect little carrot!”
   Just then, as the truth — the whole truth — slowly came home to her, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not romantic. Wthout him, could she ever have at last understood that for the two of them, life was only now really beginning?