Kingsley made it to the house at last and carefully walked its perimeter, looking everywhere for Juliette. The house was open on every level—open doors, open windows. Anything to keep the air flowing and the heat at bay. Finally he saw her. She emerged from a set of open double doors at the back of the house and stood on the balcony looking out onto the garden. The sight of her alone swept the breath from his body. She wore a white dress, strapless with an ankle-length skirt that moved with the breeze. Every kiss of wind bared her long beautiful legs to her knees. He grew hard simply looking at her. He’d been joking with Calliope when he’d said he would have this woman or die trying. Now he made the vow to himself. Whatever it took, she would be his.

He started to step out from the shadows of the trees, but then a man appeared behind her. He was tall, gray-haired, handsome as Calliope had said. He dipped his head and kissed Juliette on the side of her neck.

It was nothing but a kiss, a gentle kiss between lovers. But the sight of Juliette’s passive resigned acceptance of the kiss sent possessive rage welling up within Kingsley. It took everything within him, all his sanity, all his willpower to not pull his gun right then and shoot Gérard between the eyes.

Gérard took her by the arm and together they walked along the balcony and disappeared through another door.

Without knowing why he did it, Kingsley walked up the steps. He took off his shoes and as silently as he could, followed them.

The door they’d passed through led to some kind of sitting room. He went through the room and out into the hall. Carefully as he could, he looked in every room he walked past. One room was well decorated with a woman’s taste—French novels on the shelves, a Bible by the bed and the scent of jasmine perfume in the air.

Juliette’s room.

Kingsley entered it, shut the door behind him. He opened the closet door and found her clothes hanging there. A few of the island print dresses still had tags on them. They were from the finest fashion houses, the most luxe designers. One dress cost more than one of Kingsley’s hand-tailored suits. He saw the canvas bag she’d carried on the floor of her closet. It still had the rocks in it. Why did she have a bag of heavy rocks? It made no sense. He closed the closet door and gazed around her bedroom. The bed was queen-size and the sheets were white, soft, and the bed looked inviting and luxurious. This was a room designed for seduction, for sex. It even had a slatted headboard and he noticed dings in the wood and faded areas. Someone had been cuffed and/or tied to this headboard on many occasions. His own bedposts bore the same marks. The candles on the bedside table no doubt served a dual purpose—ambience and sadism. He opened a drawer and found further evidence of this—lubricant, handcuffs, a small flogger. But he saw something else, too. A book. Kingsley fully expected it to be a book about sex, but it wasn’t. It was a biography of Virginia Woolf translated into French. He flipped through it and found where someone had left in a bookmark. It was on the page that detailed Woolf’s suicide.

Woolf filled the pockets of her coat with stones, waded into the river, and drowned herself.

Kingsley closed his eyes and felt the life go out of him. Juliette was planning to kill herself. That’s what the rocks in the bag were for, why she’d had rocks at the ready when the boys attacked the birds.

Sickened by his discovery he shut the book and shoved it back into the drawer.

He withdrew quickly from the room and walked down the hallway again. He had to see her if only to see that she was alive and well. Or at least alive. If she had a plan to kill herself, she certainly wasn’t well.

Kingsley found a room with a door that led to an interior garden. At the far end of that room was another door, a glass door standing open.

Quietly...so quietly he didn’t let himself breathe, Kingsley came to the glass door. He angled himself so that he could see out, but no one could see him inside.

They stood in the center of the garden, Gérard and Juliette. And now the kiss they shared was one of ardor, at least on Gérard’s part. Juliette stood before him, receiving the kiss and returning it, but without any of the passion Kingsley knew she had within her.

Gérard’s mouth moved from hers to her neck. He pulled her dress down and bared her breasts to him. He cupped the back of her neck, forced her to arch her back, and then kissed her breasts like a man possessed. Juliette put her hands on his shoulders to steady herself and she received his attentions without protest. Not only did she not protest, she seemed to enjoy it, him, all of it.

With a show of strength that Kingsley found in poor taste, Gérard lifted Juliette and carried her five steps to the chaise longue that sat under an umbrella by a clear blue swimming pool. He stripped naked in seconds and pushed the skirt of Juliette’s dress to her stomach. She had nothing on underneath and when he mounted her and entered her, she gave him no resistance at all. She simply opened her legs, received him into her and let him have his way with her body.

Gérard sucked hard on her nipples and she lay beneath him, running her hands through his short silver hair, whispering words that must have been encouragements, though Kingsley couldn’t hear them. He thrust hard into her body and she lifted her hips to take him. He gripped her shoulders as he bore into her with his most powerful thrusts. She should have just lain there. She should have hated it. She should have borne it in stoic silence, made a martyr of herself, or a corpse. Instead, as his hips pumped into hers and his hands grasped her breasts, pinched her nipples and rubbed her clitoris, she pumped back, moving with him, an equal partner in pleasure.