“I swear, I’m her,” the woman said, smiling.

If there hadn’t been a gate between them, he might have laughed in her face. “Ma’am, Nora Sutherlin is a dominatrix,” he said. “And a porno writer.”

“I know. I’m her, remember? Although technically it’s erotica, not porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn.”

“Right. Fine. I’ll leave you my card. If you see her, you can have her call me.”

“I can call you right now, but we’re already talking. Just picture me in a corset. And not splattered with paint.”

To humor the woman, he started to fish his phone out of his jacket when a little black girl wearing a pink ballet tutu came running out the front door, a large dog at her heels, and pink pigtail ribbons flying.

“Tata, I taught Gmork a new trick!” the girl yelled. She ran over to the paint-splattered woman.

“Show me, baby,” the woman said.

The girl faced the enormous black dog and pointed her finger at it. “Couche!”

The dog lay on the ground.

The woman applauded. “Very good,” she said. “But he already knows how to lay down.”

“I know,” the girl said. “But now he knows how to do it in French.”

“You’re teaching my German Shepherd French? You’re going to give him an identity crisis.”

Cyrus watched the whole show with a smile on his face. In three or four years, he and Paulina might have a little girl of their own running around in a pink tutu, a little girl who looked just like this one. And surely this lady was not a dominatrix. She was a nanny or an auntie.

“Princess?” A woman’s voice called to the girl. “You know you’re not supposed to interrupt grown-ups talking. Come back in the house.”

“Sorry, Maman.” The little girl ran to the woman standing at the top of the steps and wrapped her arms around the woman’s leg.

If he’d been wearing a hat, he would have taken it off out of sheer respect for the woman’s otherworldly beauty. Her elegant dark skin shimmered in the morning sun, and her black hair was braided into a crown—a fitting style for a woman so statuesque and regal. Her white dress stretched across a very pregnant stomach. She glowed like she’d swallowed the moon and carried it inside her.

The pregnant goddess said something to the woman he’d been talking to, the woman who Cyrus had briefly forgotten existed. She replied in French. This elicited a smirk from the goddess, who took her little girl back into the house.

“Mr. Tremont?” the woman who was not Nora Sutherlin said. “You dropped something.”

“I did?”

“Yes. Your jaw.”

He looked at her with pursed lips.

“Don’t sweat it,” the woman said. “Juliette’s the reason the phrase ‘jaw-dropping’ was coined.”

“That’s Edge’s missus?”

The woman nodded.

“My respect for the man has gone up a notch or two.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll go down again any minute.”

“You don’t like Mr. Edge?”