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"Excuse us," Etienne said. He had no choice short of publicly embarrassing his hostess by refusing, although he knew his leaving with Nadine would be disastrously misconstrued by Daisy. Hell and damnation, he heatedly thought, there were times when a lodge on the prairies held great appeal. How many times in his life had he been gracious under duress?

After Etienne left with Nadine, Daisy found herself wretchedly dispirited with all the subtle and not so subtle machinations surrounding the Duc. Wherever he went beyond the privacy of his home, women fawned over him, made demands of him, wanted him to entertain them in a thousand individual ways. She was weary of the competition—Isabelle a serious contender, in a class by herself—and she could no longer deal with the universal ardor. She was no better, she realistically admitted, her behavior tonight in his bedchamber as eagerly passionate. "I'm tired," she said, her voice suddenly curt. "Excuse me, but I'm leaving."

So sharply uttered was her declaration and so obvious her dejection, Blaze instantly suggested accompanying her. "I've had quite a long-enough day; it must be after midnight."

"Twelve-thirty," Empress offered, checking the small diamond brooch-watch on her bodice. "I'm tired too." Empress preferred rising in the morning with her children, although they had nannies enough.

"I'm going to stay for a short time more," Hazard gruffly stated, intensely aware of his daughter's unhappiness. "No need to send the carriage back, I'll walk."

"Since I generally sleep until afternoon," Kit said with an amiable smile, "the evening's just beginning for me. Do you want to dance, Valerie?" Half drunk and cheerful, his life held nothing more urgent than an occasional junket off to some distant corner of the globe when the mood struck him and the winds were favorable.

Valerie had even less to concern her; she didn't sail, her junkets pertaining to pleasure of another kind—less lengthy and of the boudoir variety. She was amenable.

Jolie and Henri had excused themselves when the Duc left to dance with Nadine, so after the ladies had their wraps brought to them, Hazard and Trey escorted their wives and Daisy to their carriage.

"Are you sure you're going to be all right?" Blaze asked Daisy as the horses drew away from the brightly lit entrance portico. She was pale beneath the golden bronze of her skin.

"You miss him, don't you?" Empress sympathetically declared, the visible evidence before her eyes conclusive.

"No," Daisy harshly replied, "not with Nadine hanging all over him."

"She
can
be a problem." Blaze sighed. "Although he doesn't seem smitten," she kindly added.

Daisy snorted in derision. "Etienne's never smitten. It would take too much emotion. It's so much easier to casually play the game—an effortless endeavor for him after all his years of practice," she tersely concluded.

"You're too hard on him," Empress rejoined. "He obviously was only being polite to Nadine."

"And he certainly knows how to be… polite, doesn't he?" Daisy's elaborate sweetness cut like a knife.

"Oh, dear," Blaze murmured, concerned with Daisy's unhappiness. "Can we do anything, darling?" she softly inquired.

"No, nothing really, I'm fine. Absolutely fine," she declared, fixing her gaze on the fog outside. She wasn't though, she was miserable, desperately, unbelievably miserable. During the months away from Etienne, she'd conditioned herself to a measure of equanimity and peace. And in only a few brief moments, he'd completely destroyed all her hard-won tranquility.

"I'll be in the billiard room," Hazard was saying to Trey at the same time Daisy was grieving the loss of her carefully wrought serenity. "When de Vec's finished dancing with Oliver's wife, would you ask him to join me?"

From the tone of his father's voice, Trey understood one dance would be the limit of Hazard's patience. "Are we concerned with Nadine's wishes?"

Hazard's dark brows rose in ironic response. "She can have him back when I'm finished with him."

"He doesn't threaten." Trey recalled his last meeting with the Duc in Empress's Paris home two years ago. When he'd threatened to kill him, the Duc de Vec had only quietly said, "You can try."

"I've no intention of threatening him. I'm simply going to ask him a few pertinent questions concerning his intentions in regard to your sister."

"Daisy won't like you asking."

Hazard glanced at his son as they stood in the loggia near the billiard room, the sound, of the waves breaking on the shore out-side the arched windows distinct, the wind off the sea pelting the dark gleaming glass with spray. "Daisy won't know."

"He might tell her."

"I'll see that he doesn't." In that precise tone, Hazard had told the chiefs of his enemy, the Lakota, years ago, that he'd come for his son.

A short time later, the Duc de Vec walked into the billiard room, stood for a brief moment surveying the large chamber, and on seeing Hazard seated near the fireplace, proceeded toward him. Since the French team was lodged at Nadine's, several of the men at the billiard tables were friends and teammates, occasioning an interrupted progress across the room.

"Hell of a game, Etienne."

"Great lift on your backhanders, de Vec."

"That last shot was a ball-breaker."

He acknowledged their remarks with only a smile or a nod or a brief thank you. Intent on presenting himself to Daisy's father, he didn't wish to be waylaid.

"Are you up to Nadine, de Vec, with your bruised body?"

He silently groaned. The masculine ribbing was expected with Nadine's attention so obvious, but the timing could have been better. He was about to face a wrathful father.

"With Oliver getting up so early in the morning," another man said, sportively, looking at the case clock in the corner, "you'll have to give Nadine an abbreviated version of your skills, de Vec. It's almost one o'clock."

"I'm not interested, Charles," Etienne disavowed, skirting a British player making a bridge shot. "I'm here to play polo."

"Maybe you haven't made that perfectly clear to Nadine," a young man lounging against the table bumper said, his smile wide. "She looks as though she's taken a sincere interest in you."

"Feel free, Abercrombie," the Duc offered. "She's all yours."

Hazard was standing when the Duc reached him, his expression grim, and Etienne felt he should apologize somehow for the comments about Nadine. It wasn't a propitious beginning to what was probably going to be—at best—a difficult conversation.

But he only said, "You wished to see me?" because it was impossible to say he was sorry about Nadine with any simplicity.

Hazard didn't immediately answer, gazing at the Duc in silence for a long moment, as if judging him against some internal assessment scale, before finally saying, "The smoking room will be less busy." Turning, he touched a hidden panel at the side of the fireplace, opening a door concealed in the paneling.

"Oliver has his eccentricities," Hazard explained, shutting the hidden door once they were in the smoking room. "This leads outside past that alcove."

For a fleeting moment Etienne wondered if he was going to conveniently disappear through that outside doorway until he noticed two men seated in the room smoking and enjoying a brandy.

"Could we have some privacy?" Hazard quietly said to the two men comfortably disposed in plush armchairs, and despite the softly spoken request, there was no mistaking Hazard's voice of command. The sight of Hazard's stern expression augmented his dictatorial tone; both men immediately scrambled up, stammered their excuses, and exited through the outside terrace.

"Excuse the excess," Hazard apologized, his voice serene, as though men jumping up and going out into the damp night to accommodate him was normal. "Oliver had this room reproduced from the Alhambra, which isn't the problem so much as the decorator from New York who 'improved' on the original."

The proportions of the room duplicated royal magnificence, the vaulted ceiling rising more than forty feet, its moorish arches and supporting walls covered with exact reproductions of the rare mosaics in the Alhambra. A magnificent glass chandelier hung from the elegant dome, illuminating furniture upholstered in red velvet or tiger skins, glistening above elaborately carved tables, enhancing the subtle lustre of four Yamoud Bokhara carpets specially ordered from Turkestan. As added decor, enough potted palms to shade an oasis punctuated the enormous chamber, lending a shadowy quality of exotic locales.

"This could almost cause one to stop smoking," the Duc said, casting a sardonic eye about the room, his attitude as calm as Hazard's. Too long a de Vec to be intimidated, he only questioned what position Hazard would take.

"A foul habit anyway. Sit down."

For a man who had ordered the world to his perfection for decades and was comfortable with authority, the Duc experienced an odd deference. Hazard Black manifested a quiet unusual strength beyond the physical; a mystical power reminding him potently of the shaman magic he'd seen in his travels with Georges. An intense and capable force Etienne couldn't help but admire.

"Would you like a drink?" Hazard asked, moving toward an ornately carved ivory table holding various bottles. At the Duc's affirmative, he poured them both a bourbon neat. "Some of Oliver's private stock from his Tennessee farm," he added, handing the Duc his drink. "And smoother than most." Lifting his glass, Hazard smiled for the first time. "So you've become friends with my Daisy."

Etienne choked marginally on his swallow of liquor at Hazard's politic word for the flame-hot passion between himself and his daughter.

"Don't drink it too fast," Hazard cautioned with a grin as he seated himself across from Etienne on one of Oliver's tiger-skin club chairs. "It has more bite than brandy."

Under the charming influence of Hazard's casual grin, the Duc recognized a portion of Daisy's appeal was inherited from her father. He had an astonishing warmth, charismatic and unaffected. And his dramatic physical presence in the overdecorated, flamboyant room brought with it a clean, fresh sense of majestic nature. Maybe his exotic long black hair or the small painted shell-earring hanging from his right earlobe contributed to the image of open-sky wilderness, or perhaps the fine lines evident near his eyes, brought on by years of gazing over the open plains, bespoke a man of the outdoors. He embodied an unmistakable spirit of nature, a tangible essence of forest and mountain and freedom, despite his stylish evening clothes and urbane manners.

"Daisy doesn't like Parisian society," the Duc said, as though the revelation of that fact was suddenly clear after meeting her father.

"She never has." Hazard held his glass lightly between his palms, his slender fingers dark against the sparkling crystal. A gold charm dangled from a delicate gold chain circling his wrist, and Etienne recognized the same cougar design Daisy wore as a locket at times. It was an amulet, she'd told him, crafted from the gold of her father's first mine, an insignia of his Absarokee name and his protective vision. "I think it has something to do with her rearing. In her early years, our tribe still followed the buffalo. It was a time of plenty, our land stretched across hundreds of miles of mountain and prairie. They were good years… when the land was still ours." In a voice betraying none of his poignant memories, Hazard succinctly added, "Paris is an anomaly to her."

Intellectually, Etienne understood the nomadic way of life for he'd lived with many of the Asiatic tribes during the years he traveled with Georges. But coming from his background of aristocratic privilege, he couldn't fully perceive of a childhood entirely related to nature. Or understand completely the dichotomy now between her past and the sophisticated woman she'd become. "Daisy takes strongest issue with the idleness… the frivolity," he said.

"She was always quieter and more serious than most children," Hazard replied, "and after her mother and stepfather were killed—well… she's never been open about her feelings." His voice was hushed suddenly, the old memories vivid and fresh. Daisy's mother had been his companion the last summer he was home with his tribe before the Civil War, in those happy days when the Absarokee were still in possession of the best hunting grounds on the northern plains and the spirits were still looking down on their people with benevolence. Daisy had been born after he'd gone back to Harvard. Then the war had intervened, and he hadn't seen her until she was almost four. He'd always felt guilty about missing that portion of her childhood. But Dawn Light had fallen in love with Seven Arrows by the time he'd returned from the war and in the way of their tribe, Daisy had been raised with her mother and Seven Arrows.

In some ways he felt more responsible for Daisy because of his absence in her first years of life, feeling that perhaps he'd contributed in some way to her reserved nature. Clearing his throat, he leaned forward, his expression grave. "I might as well get right to the point," he said, his dark eyes fixed on the Duc. "I was wondering—if you don't mind the fatherly term—exactly what your intentions are toward my daughter." Hazard wasn't prudish; he understood passion and need. But he'd seen Nadine tonight and knew the Duc's reputation.

"I asked Daisy to marry me."

Etienne's statement elicited a skeptically raised eyebrow.

"After my divorce is finalized."