For your reading pleasure, Tempest presents yet another exquisite example of romantic narrative…

Byzantine Lair
by Judas Farmer

   No; Jacqueline was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the aroma of fresh mulberry pies nor the now-familiar confines of Paul’s grass hut impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Baron Obadiah, the arcane soldier-lover of her youthful imaginings, had a full life in which he was prospecting for silver in the Andes, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one incendiary girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most byzantine day when his scheming partner, Jacqueline had brought him to her attention.
   Then, without any warning, a confused chorus of greetings from the courtyard shattered her composure into a million incarnadine pieces! She leapt to her feet with hope — and alarm — in her eyes. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the perilous and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Without you I just plain ain’t nothin’,” he chuckled while the music in her heart rose to a new crescendo of happiness. “I need you, Diaphanous One!”
   Abruptly, as the horror of these last months vanished in a blaze of joy, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not foreign, ultramarine. Wthout him, could she ever have woke up. Incredibly enough, it had all been a dream?

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