He wore a purple velvet smoking jacket as casually as another man would have worn a sweatshirt. A pair of black silk drawstring pajama bottoms completed his outfit, along with slippers that had scarlet Chinese symbols across the toes. His clothing had been perfectly tailored to fit his exceptionally tall, wide-shouldered body, but his big workman’s hands-broad across the palm and thick fingered-served notice that everything about Colin Byrne might not be exactly as it seemed.

As he stood at the window watching the lights go on in the carriage house, the line of his already stern mouth grew even harder. So… The rumors were true. Sugar Beth Carey had returned.

Fifteen years had passed since he’d last seen her. He’d been little more than a boy then. Twenty-two, full of himself, an exotic foreign bird who’d landed in a small Southern town to write his first novel and-ah, yes-teach school in his spare time. There was something satisfying about letting a grudge ferment for so long. Like a great French wine, it grew in complexity, developing subtleties and nuances that a speedier resolution wouldn’t have allowed.

The corner of his mouth lifted in anticipation. Fifteen years ago he’d been powerless against her. Now he wasn’t.

He’d arrived in Parrish from England to teach at the local high school, although he’d had no passion for the profession and even less talent for it. But Parrish, like other small Mississippi towns, had desperately needed teachers. With a view toward exposing their youth to a larger world, a committee of the state’s leading citizens had contacted universities in the U.K., offering jobs complete with work visas to exceptional graduates.

Colin, who’d long been fascinated with the writers of the American South, had jumped at the chance. What better place to write his own great novel than in the fertile literary landscape of Mississippi, home of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright? He’d dashed off an eloquent essay that vastly exaggerated his interest in teaching, gathered up glowing references from several of his professors, and attached the first twenty pages of the novel he’d barely started, figuring-rightly so, as it turned out-that a state with such an impressive literary heritage would favor a writer.