Then Mike put his thumb on my lip. “Hey,” he said softly. “If I promise to get you the Jessamine to shame all other Jessamines, will you kiss me already?”

I leaned into him and tried to gauge the look in his eyes. He looked totally earnest. I wondered if that would change if I clued him in on a few unsavory details about J.B. That would involve divulging some information about my past that I’d banished to the recesses of my mind, but you know what they say about desperate times.

“Come on,” he coaxed again. “Kiss me.”

I pulled Mike to me so that our lips just barely brushed when I spoke. “If I kiss you, will you promise to keep your costume plans a secret from J.B. until Saturday night?”

Mike’s brow furrowed the way it did when he couldn’t quite keep up with my logic but trusted me enough not to question it. His strong hands folded around me, and he pressed his lips to mine. His tongue parted my mouth, and when I opened up to him, I could feel a new kind of power moving in.

When you’re dating southern royalty, always pack a change of clothes.

There’s the daytime getup (string bikini and gauzy black cover-up) that you bring to your boyfriend’s bayside villa for the after-dinner jaunt on his state-of-the-art cigarette boat. . and then there’s the lavender-jersey tennis dress and impeccably white cardigan that you threw in your bag in case his blue-blood parents pop by the house unexpectedly for dinner. . again.

“Look who’s in the neighborhood!” Diana King trilled as she stepped into the foyer of the King family’s weekend house. I listened for the thwunk of her alligator-skin duffel landing on the Persian rug in the middle of the massive foyer. Then I heard the rapid-fire clicking of her stilettos on the opalescent marble as she beelined up the stairs toward her youngest son’s boudoir door, on which she patently refused to knock.