“I never fuck,” Constance said into the microphone. “I just watch.” She snicked the tapedeck off with one thumb.

Nicked her clit with the other.

Constance lay nude to the face of the sun.

Buns creamed in cocoa butter.

She felt her asshole flutter.

Her snatch water.

She sensed the movement of the shadows cast by the flock of sandpipers chattering in flight above her. Craned her neck up toward the birds. Lord, how they bored her.

She tossed down her cigarette.

Lit up another.

Constance Charity Eastwick-Westbrook, or Lady Farnsworth if you insist-who had been formerly, allegedly, by right of marriage, the Infanta Bourbon of the pretending faction to the Spanish crown, and who was presently, under the guise of Jasmine Hyacinthe and to the horror of her family, ghostwriter of sensual romantic crime novels of some renown, pushed down her foot and crushed the burning cigarette into the wooden deck. She dusted the ash from the pad of her bare foot, smirked.

Of course it hurt.

But the trick in this instance was in not minding that it did hurt.

Inhaling the smooth tobacco smoke, Constance passed her eyes quickly over the surrounding greenery of the small island constructed in the center of the tiny manmade lake that abutted the miniature chateau Constance called her seaside home. She preferred to take the sun here on that fanciful islet for its seclusion-the privacy it afforded her mind, rather than any reticence about bathing more publicly in the buff.

Her private domain within her private realm.

Constance focused her eyes on the minichateau’s tallest tower, where she observed the sunlight slant into the open French doors of one of the house’s guest suites.