I knew I was sitting there gape-eyed, but I quickly tried to look like I knew more than I indicated and was not really that shocked at her frank talk.

“Your mother might get very angry at me for telling you all this, but I believe in telling a girl who’s reached your stage of life everything.”

Oh yes, she was right about that, I thought. My mother would be very angry and never use her for anything else.

“I promise. I won’t tell her anything you said.”

“It’s far better than learning it on the street or from some sexually active girl. The key thing,” she insisted, “is never rushing into it. Stop when you feel yourself losing control.”

Me lose control? That wasn’t going to be my problem, I thought. The responsibility was surely something every man who dared to court me would bear.

Probably from the first day I had studied my image in my mother’s antique French Regency carved wood mirror, a glass that supposedly had reflected the faces of royals, even princesses, I had realized I was special. Grace Rose knew it, I was sure.

“You’re going to be very beautiful, Corrine,” she said, pausing in my bedroom doorway on her way out. “But with beauty comes great risk. Don’t forget that. Men will lose themselves over you.”

She was so convincing that she took my breath away.

But after my talk with Grace Rose and as my body continued its march toward womanhood, I became even more confident of what she had predicted. When I looked into this magic historical mirror my mother had put up in the hallway outside her bedroom, I saw the brilliant faces of femmes fatales, women who had always been in control of their lives and especially their relationships with men. No one else could see it, but I saw it, the tiny, spidery threads that emanated from my face and body. I could will one to touch a boy, a young man, and hold him tightly in my web until I was tired of him and then simply let him go, drifting through the rest of his life frustrated. To make proper love to any other woman, he’d have to be able to superimpose my face onto his fiancée’s or his bride’s, and even then, he wouldn’t be totally satisfied.

Other women would always envy me. Some would absolutely hate me. But alas, I thought, that was the sacrifice I must endure.

Was it a curse or a blessing?

It wouldn’t be that long before I knew the answer.

Chapter 1

“It’s easier for you, Corrine,” my best friend, Daisy Herman, declared. “You’re so pretty that boys flop about like silly seals at your feet.”