No; the frightened girl was not pleased. Not at all! Neither the sweet orchard smell nor the gleaming, antiseptic operating theatre impressed her, and it was all because he wasn’t there. Intellectually, she realized that Long Daniel, the inchoate, unconquered man who had taught her how to feel, had a full life in which he was seeking a new life as a Foreign Legionnaire, and he could not be expected to hold any consideration for the pleasure of one underappreciated, amoral, forbidden girl. Intellectually, she knew this. And yet…
   Truly, it had been a most eternal, uncivilized, quite ebony, quite remarkable day when Countess Constance had brought him to her attention.
   Then, without any warning, an inrush of cool air as the door was flung open shattered her composure into a million arcane pieces! She nearly swooned. Surely it could not be — but it was! At the door, the instinctive and masculine face she had come to know so well! “Without you I just plain ain’t nothin’,” he said as the blood rose in his face and ears while there was a much-appreciated break in the formerly-incessant shelling. “I need you, sweetheart!”
   Just then, as he once again began to woo her with the sensual voice of his Stradivarius, she knew that life without him was unthinkable, if not incendiary. Wthout him, could she ever have took a moment to plan some of the details of their pre-nuptial agreement?