Camilla Don Francisco reviewed the form before she went to retrieve her next client from the lounge: Another doctor. Hopefully, this one wouldn’t suggest they play doctor in lieu of the therapeutic massage he’d scheduled. Working on the Love Boat, as the crew referred to it, had high points and low points, none of which involved wave height.

Paris Daniels lay absolutely still.

She refused to open her eyes against the light streaming through the window, ignored the itch dancing across the tip of her nose. She was convinced any movement would kill the lingering buzz flowing. She’d never experienced a dream like this before. It’d felt so real.

Who was she kidding? Reality had never felt this good. And if she could produce fantasies this potent, who needed reality? If she didn’t know better, she’d swear she had a love hangover. Diana Ross was right—if there was a cure for this, she definitely didn’t want it.

Hey, if yours was just late, be honest and wait till next week to try again

“My winter of discontent,” the Southern soldier in Union blue muttered, shivering in the brutal cold as he rode through the winding hills of Western Kentucky. Covered in December’s sleep, the brush and trees of his land bestowed a blanketed homecoming of welcoming white.

But in reality, the glistening paradise was a frozen hell…like the winters at Camp Douglas, he thought.

Hunger. Desperation. Survival. Betrayal.

Hal Combs had finally come home to what was left of his life—a crazed father, a mortgage on his land, a dead wife, and a black child that bore his name, but wasn’t his.

“What does one call a male whore?” Cain Overley muttered as he counted the thick stack of pound notes on the dressing table.

“Cain?” A somnolent whisper offered from the gauze-draped monstrosity of a bed behind him.

Out of the mouths of sleeping viragos. He chuckled softly. God certainly had a sense of humor. Cain glanced around the plum silk and chintz nightmare his lover called a bedchamber. From the dainty lace-trimmed furniture to the profusion of porcelain shepherdesses dotted atop every flat surface, the room screamed suffocating femininity. And here he stood trapped in the middle of it.