He gazed down at her through narrowed eyes, amused by her defiance of public convention. Ginny, his green-eyed temptress, his nemesis, the woman who bedeviled and tempted him, the one woman he had never been able to get out of his mind for long. It was just this sort of thing that made him want her, her unexpected flouting of all the rules society expected to be followed, her fiery nature and passionate little body that he knew so well—yet hardly knew at all.

No matter how many times he’d made love to her in the past, there was always something new and surprising when he was with her.

“Have I told you how lovely you are tonight?” he said in a soft drawl, deftly turning her toward the open French doors at the far end of the ballroom. “And how much I would like to kiss you all over?”

“No, you have not.” Her murmur and the tempting pout of her mouth reminded him once again how sweet her lips were and how long it had been since they’d made love. He had spent their first night together with Ginny in his arms, but not made love to her since then. He knew she wondered why, as he did himself.

There were so many memories between them, so many times they had fought one another, the verbal spats no less vicious than the physical ones. He still bore the scar from where she had stabbed him so long ago, that time in the desert when he had forced her into submission, taking her on the burning hot sands with only a thin blanket beneath them, not caring if she wanted him—until she had shocked him into taking her seriously. Then she had yielded to him, his passionate little gypsy. With the fresh knife wound bleeding in his side, he had taken her again….

Ginny. When the news had been given to him of her death in an earthquake in Cuba, he had thought—known—it couldn’t be true. How could such life, such beauty and passion die without his knowing the exact moment of its death? First a kind of grief, then anger overwhelmed him, until he had moved by rote, living each day because he had no other choice, because he had two children who looked to him for their survival. It had been the children who had kept him from the road to his own destruction, the anguished thought that they were all he had left of Ginny.