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Their kiss was hasty and insufficient, touched with the gloom of their coming battles. At the door, the Duc turned back for a last look at the woman he loved, then changing his mind, strode swiftly back to Daisy, and lifting her in his arms, held her close for a moment more. Placing her back on her feet, he touched her lips gently. "I'm not looking back this time," he murmured, his breath warm on her lips, a faint wry smile curling his mouth. "Because I'm facing ruin in Paris and wondering if I even care." He grinned. "Is love this kind of insanity for everyone?" He'd never understood before—never. His form of love was only passion and amour, silky smooth pleasure, an intensity that flared and burned away. The kind one remembered fondly but not often.

"You're asking the wrong person," Daisy softly said. "You've changed every thought and vision and precept I've ever known. You've destroyed my serenity and reason."

"I love you too," the Duc said, his smile lush.

"We're moon-mad."

"And miserable." He was smiling, though, when he said it.

With tears brimming over, Daisy held his face in the palms of her hands. "Don't forget me," she whispered, her heart in her eyes. She was afraid, suddenly, despite his teasing, afraid that he'd leave and Isabelle would claim him somehow. Not for herself. She knew better. But claim his soul, somehow, in this black and wretched scheme of hers and make it impossible for… their love to survive.

In his six-day journey across the Atlantic, the Duc had considerable time to determine his course of action, and immediately upon stepping ashore at Le Havre, he contacted Bourges. From subsequent telegrams received aboard his yacht, he understood Isabelle had contracted as a public trader
(marchande publique)
for the purposes of trade. It allowed her to enter into contracts concerning their community property without his consent.

His fortune was in enormous danger.

Bourges was waiting for him at his apartment in Paris when he arrived three hours later, several files spread out on the desk in Etienne's study.

"Thank you for coming," the Duc said, striding across the paneled room. "This attack was unexpected… even from Isabelle."

"Your crossing was—"

"—swift." He took Bourges's outstretched hand, his smile pleasant. "Now then, tell me about your detectives."

For the next half hour the men went over the extent of the damage possible if Isabelle exercised her option with their estate as a public trader, the directives necessary for those men being put on Isabelle's trail, which markers the Duc should call in from those of his friends placed on the various boards of directors where he had investments she might attempt to sell.

"I'll be closing out my bank accounts in the next few days and transferring the money either to London or Amsterdam for safekeeping," Etienne said when they'd decided on their immediate plan of action with Isabelle. "I'll transfer those of my stocks other than the railroad capital to a trust independent from our community property. My estates are separate from our common property in our marriage settlement, as are hers, so they're protected. Are you willing to involve yourself with the rest of my legal staff on this and the railroad takeover too? Everything has to be taken care of quickly. I don't know how much she has plans to sell… other than the railroad stock."

"Would Charles have been the one to advise her to contract as a public trader?"

"I don't know. Does it matter?"

"It could. If this ends up in court in a lawsuit. The magistrates have wide discretionary powers."

"By tomorrow I want everything I own transferred out of the country or out of Isabelle's reach. Discreetly. Then we can concentrate on the fight for my railroads. I don't intend to go to court. I haven't the time."

"And the divorce?"

"Find something on her… then we'll turn the screws. I should have taken your advice about the detectives a long time ago."

"It's rare to find a completely virtuous woman," Bourges calmly said.

"Well, Isabelle sure as hell wasn't sleeping with me. Although coming from her pious family, and convent-bred background, together with her propensity to socialize with priests, it's probable her vices are confined to other mortal sins."

"Perhaps." Having seen so much of aristocrats' private lives, Bourges was more cynical than most. Priests, he thought. Interesting. "How old are these priests?" he asked, a casual remark uttered without expression.

"I don't know. They all look the same to me." Etienne was busy signing several of the papers Bourges had prepared in his absence, routine briefs required by law for the ongoing appeals in his divorce. Looking up suddenly, the Duc cast a look of query at Bourges as the implication of his barrister's question registered.

"Really? Priests? And Isabelle?" He shook his head in the next second of contemplation. "You don't know Isabelle." Had he been a less courteous man he could have said Isabelle was the only women he knew, and he was speaking from vast knowledge, who was actually tight-lipped while engaged in intercourse. With Isabelle one didn't contemplate using the words, making love, to describe the experience. An experience that had caused his youthful ego some small amount of anxiety at the time. "Although it's certainly an interesting speculation." The Duc was infinitely less naive than he'd been all those years ago and no longer apt to discount any aberration purely out of hand.

"We'll find out soon enough," Bourges said with a degree of conviction based on his previous successes. "I'm pleased you decided to…" he paused, knowing the Duc was still inclined to be private about his marriage.

"—Take off the kid gloves?" Etienne finished for him.

"Sometimes it's necessary. Often, it is," Bourges added.

"I suppose when one's wife tries to reduce one to penury, it's time to discard courtesy." Etienne's smile was tight. "Can you join my legal staff after lunch? We're going to discuss all the ramifications of this bid to take them over."

Bourges's agreement brought a genuine smile to Etienne's face.

But when Bourges left a few moments later, Etienne sat at his desk, slumped low, his head thrown back, his arms lying slack on the deep green leather arms of his chair. He was tired. Physically fatigued after a rough sea-crossing, weary of the fight with Isabelle. Feeling a solitary desolation. Feeling alone. He was taking on the entire fabric of the small, insulated world he lived in, the world his parents and ancestors for a millennium had claimed as theirs. By seeking his own individual happiness, he'd alienated his wife, the Church, the aristocratic society in which the hypocrisy of separate lives passed for the union of marriage, and many of those people he'd previously called friends.

Enormous changes had occurred in his complaisant life since he'd met Daisy. And while he never regretted loving her, there were moments, like now… when he was overwhelmed by the extent of those forces aligned against him.

He supposed he should eat something before his phalanx of barristers arrived to help devise their campaign. He had every intention of winning—an inherent courage was well-grounded in his soul, but it took a certain girding of his motive power at times to vitalize his energy. He smiled suddenly. Maybe Daisy was right. Maybe his life had been too easy.

But if it had been, he was paying for it now.

Sitting up abruptly, he reached for the bell-pull.

Lunch. And then the ruination of his two partners and Isabelle for dessert. At least there was pleasure in the prospect of dessert.

Etienne and his attorneys spent the next three weeks contacting every stockholder of consequence, explaining the situation, offering to buy their stock for more than Verlaine and Marveil. It was time-consuming drudgery and, of course, ultimately expensive to outbid his partners. He owed enormous favors on the
Bourse
before he was finished because Isabelle was claiming the stock as hers. The concept of public trader for a female may have been a legal principle in France at the time, but the men sitting on the board at the
Bourse
, preferred the traditional language of French law in which the husband had sole control of property. And there at least, Charles and his magistrates had no power. So his railroads were salvaged, bought at the inflated bidding price by a Monaco-based holding company which the Duc owned through an intricate and concealed layering of corporations. Isabelle no longer was a threat to his income. But the price was steep.

To realize his vengeance on Verlaine and Marveil required a more complex scheme. The Duc wanted his money back from the sale of their magnified stock to his Monaco firm, so he made arrangements with friends in Amsterdam to interest his two ex-partners in a diamond mine in South Africa. Like setting up an elaborate ballet of deceit and potential profit, his Dutch allies, for a suitable price, slowly drew Verlaine and Marveil into the intrigue. With the lure of enormous profit temptingly seductive, his two ex-partners were currently traveling to Amsterdam to see gems extracted from the "mine"—which existed on paper alone.

In the meantime, to the Duc's impatient inquiries about Isabelle and the detectives, Bourges had pointed out: "These things take time to check out. We're gathering information. Soon we'll have something substantial, but we need reliable witnesses to go to court."

Almost a month had passed since the Duc had left Newport, and in that time he'd accepted no invitations, gone nowhere other than those places required to save his railroads and his property. Valentin had come often to visit; he'd also been helpful at the
Bourse
since his father sat on the board; he'd stayed for dinner occasionally and was a frequent companion at night over drinks.

Fall had touched the leaves, the evenings were cooler, the last summer roses bloomed sporadically in the garden where the Duc and Daisy had lain in the sun short months ago. Etienne was waiting now to hear if Verlaine and Marveil had taken the bait, but he found himself less concerned with his revenge as the days passed and more concerned with seeing that Isabelle was disengaged from his life.

His feelings were less pragmatic than emotional, based on his longing to have a child with Daisy. While Daisy declared the divorce irrelevant to her, he wished for his child to be legitimate, an heir to his titles as well as his fortune. He understood her rearing discounted the relevancy of nobility, but de Vecs had been a power in France too long, his family descended from the early kings, his family's courage and honor sustenance to France in its battles for supremacy and empire, their bloodlines represented in all the princely families of the Almanach de Gotha. He wished that heritage passed on to his children.

He'd give Bourges two more weeks, he decided, in the hope some progress could be made in the divorce process; he'd delay his return to Daisy for that further period. His railroads were preserved, his income secure; only the divorce eluded him.

That evening, after days of coaxing from Valentin, the Duc decided to accompany him and Adelaide to a showing of prints and paintings by a young artist who'd become a celebrity since his brilliant poster for France-Champagne had appeared on the streets of Paris in March. An exhibition of Pierre Bonnard's posters, music illustrations, and color lithographs were being shown at the gallery Le Bare de Boutteville. The critic Felix Fen-eon in the avant garde magazine
Le Chat Noir
had been quick to recognize the sensual edge implicit in the France-Champagne poster and welcomed the appearance of Bonnard's "serpentine and cruel eroticism" on the streets of Paris, voicing in symbolist terms what was perhaps the vast appeal of the poster to the lay public.