She was the model of decorum, taking great pains to play the part of doting wife and mother, even while she worried that Steve had resorted to his old ways. If he had—If he had, she would be desolate. The past years had taught her how much she wanted peace in her life, a real family, with husband and children around her, not the tempestuous tumult that she had lived in far too long.

And oddly, even though she was nearly thirty years old now, she felt as if she had just grown up. It was a shocking realization, the knowledge that she had been so selfish and self-absorbed these past years, so caught up in the private struggle with Steve, that she had failed to notice how her own actions were to blame for many of her tragedies.

Not all of them, of course, for she hadn’t chosen to be taken hostage by Steve so long ago, and certainly had not chosen to be taken prisoner by that fat Colonel Devereaux right after marrying Steve. Those events had been thrust upon her. And so had Tom Beal. God! She still shuddered in horror at the memories of his cruelty, and was fiercely glad that she had killed the mercenary. He’d deserved it.

But the girl she had been then had become the woman she was now, more mature, aware of what she wanted finally—Steve, of course.

Steve was the only man she had ever really loved, though she had thought she could forget him with others, thought for a time—with Richard Avery—that she could pretend he never existed. But it was all a lie, for she had not been able to forget Steve even when she’d hated him, even when she had thought him executed in the revolution and her life no longer worth living. Nothing seemed to matter after that: not the men, the gaiety of life in Mexico City, nor when she danced for Emperor Maximilian in Chapultepec.

And Steve had survived after all, had been one of the Juaristas who fought against the French invaders in Mexico, finally driving them out of the country. Steve, a fierce Juarista, alive and hating her then for what he had thought was her betrayal. But she hadn’t allowed him to hate her, had followed him to the small hacienda where Concepciόn waited for him, had fought the Mexican gypsy for him and won the right to wait for his return. After that, Steve had looked at her with new respect, and a wariness that was more revealing than any confessions.

There was the same look in his eyes at times now, as if he were reassessing her. As if they were still in Mexico.

Mexico!