Acknowledgements With grateful thanks to the three least-appreciated and hardest-working proselytizers of the written word: independent bookstores, librarians, and teachers.

And I find perfect beauty excessively boring, don't you?

Alphas simply did not grovel; arrogance was part of the job description.

They decided the mummy would be unwrapped, for the titillation of the ladies, just after dinner.

Later on Lady Maccon was to describe that particular day as the worst of her life. She had neither the soul nor the romanticism to consider childbirth magical or emotionally transporting. So far as she could gather it mostly involved pain indignity and mess. There was nothing engaging or appealing about the process. And as she told her husband firmly she intended never to go through it again.

It'll all end in tears and oil.

His eyes were jet-colored circles of perpetual disapproval.