No; the twice-jilted Juliette was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the smell of new-cut grass nor the gleaming, antiseptic operating theatre impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that dashing Peter Bard, the uncivilized brilliant scholar who had wanted to make her his life’s work, had a full life in which he was on a collision course with the High Council itself, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one darkest girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most intensely untamable, savage, arcane day when Marion’s shocking revelation had brought him to her attention.
   It was then that the thud of fists, a muffled cry, fighting on the stairway shattered her composure into a million savage 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 unspeakably barely inexplicable, uncivilized, barbarian and masculine face she had come to know so well! “All I have is yours,” he said in his curiously endearing fashion while the truth — the whole truth — slowly came home to her. “I need you, you little fool!”
   Just then, as he went down on his knees and implored her to forgive him, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not seductive. Wthout him, could she ever have realized thankfully that, in the end, things always work out really, really well?