“You’ve missed me, you gorgeous beast, admit it or not.” Still laughing, Sebastian slapped the gleaming flank and sent Eros dancing around the paddock. On the second trip around, Sebastian grabbed a handful of mane and swung onto the restless mount, giving them what they both wanted. A fast, reckless ride.

As they soared over the fence, Psyche watched them, her eyes as indulgent—and as superior—as a mother watching little boys wrestling.

*  *  *

Sebastian felt better by the afternoon. The hollowness he’d brought back from Chicago was gradually being filled. But he continued to avoid the little yellow teddy bear sitting lonely on the long, empty sofa. And he had yet to look at the photograph.

In the library, with its coffered ceiling and its walls of books, he sat at a massive mahogany desk and toyed with some paperwork. At any given time, Sebastian might have between five and ten businesses of which he was either sole owner or majority partner. They were hobbies to him—real estate, import-export firms, magazines, a catfish farm in Mississippi that amused him, and his current pet, a minor-league baseball team in Nebraska.

He was shrewd enough to make a healthy profit, wise enough to leave day-to-day management in the hands of experts, and capricious enough to buy and sell on a whim.

He enjoyed what money could give him, and he often used those profits lavishly. But he had grown up with wealth, and amounts of money that would have startled many were hardly more than numbers on paper to him. The simple game of mathematics, the increasing or decreasing, was a never-ending source of entertainment.

He was generous with pet charities, because he believed in them. His donations were a matter not of tax breaks or philanthropy, but of morals.

It would probably have embarrassed him, and it would certainly have irritated him, to be thought of as an unshakably moral man.

He pleased himself until sunset, working, reading, toying with a new spell he hoped to perfect. Magic was his cousin Morgana’s speciality. Sebastian could never hope to equal her power there, but his innate competitive streak kept him struggling to try.

Oh, he could make fire—but that was a witch’s first and last skill. He could levitate, but that, too, was an elementary talent. Beyond that and a few hat tricks—that was Mel sneaking back into his mind again—he was no magician. His gift was one of sight.

In much the same way that a brilliant actor might yearn to sing and dance, Sebastian yearned to cast spells.

After two hours with little success, he gave up in disgust. He fixed himself an elaborate meal for one, put some Irish ballads on the stereo, and uncorked a three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine with the same casualness another man might show in popping open a can of beer.