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away,” he replied fiercely. “You’re going to fight.” His voice quieted and he pressed his forehead to hers for one brief moment, the sounds of the jungle surrounding them. “You can’t die on me, Finn. I won’t allow it.”
    “I hate you, you know that, don’t you?” she bit out, but the need to drift away had been pushed back.
    Matthew only smiled. “Yes, I know that. Now help me.”
    She had cried desperately when she boarded the ship for Boston, determined never to see him again—as if suddenly withdrawing from a potent drug.
    But she was better now. Or so she had thought until she found him unexpectedly sitting across from her, his deep blue eyes taking her in, as if looking for scraps of a woman whose shape and texture he would recognize beneath the unfamiliar velvet gown and elaborate curls of her red hair.
    Over the months she had begun to discount the effect he’d had on her. But she knew now she had been wrong. It was hard to understand the impact of this man unless a person saw him for herself. The startling perfection of his face—until he turned. The scar slicing through such beauty, as if the gods had been jealous of what they’d created and wanted to even the score.
    She closed her eyes, attempting to close out that day and the long night that had followed. But she couldn’t forget his face any more than she could forget how he had held her close, touching her.
    “Finnea, don’t hide from me.”
    His voice so caring. His hands gently capturing hers when she tried to cover herself as he pulled the blood-soaked material away from her skin.
    She had turned her head away sharply, staring into the thick vines, feeling his hands.
    “I’m so glad you could join us, Miss Winslet.”
    Finnea blinked Africa away, then looked up and found Mrs. Bradford Hawthorne smiling at her. Matthew’s mother.
    Not knowing that Matthew was from Boston, Finnea hadn’t put them together until he had showed up at dinner, stilling her heart in her chest. Making her want to reach out to him, despite her need to forget she had ever seen him before.
    Emmaline Hawthorne was a lovely woman, one of the few women Finnea had met in the short time she had been in America. Her husband, Bradford Hawthorne, was dark and forbidding. He reminded her of an African, a warrior—bold and direct, fierce. Not a man to cross lightly.
    They lived in a spectacular house on Beacon Street in the part of town known as Beacon Hill, one of the oldest and finest addresses in all of Boston. With meandering streets lined with neat brick walkways that matched the redbrick facades of the prestigious row houses, Beacon Hill was very different from the newer section only blocks away where her mother lived. The Back Bay was made up of an orderly grid of streets where town houses were generally larger and didn’t conform to the redbrick sameness of Beacon Hill.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Hawthorne,” Finnea replied. “You are kind to invite me.”
    She glanced across the table, candlelight reflecting in the long, flat knife blades of European silver. She looked at the woman who sat before her. Her own mother. A woman who seemed more distant to her now than she had when time and an ocean separated them. Finnea was mesmerized by skin as white as a fragile bowl of cream, fascinated by the ways of a woman that were so foreign to her.
    Leticia Winslet chatted amiably, a winsome smile animating her face. She wore a shimmery gray satin gown, with a single strand of pearls around her neck. Elegant but understated, her grandmother had pointed out. Never screaming to be noticed, rather drawing people in with her whispered beauty.
    Finnea glanced down at the fine-jeweled bracelet her mother had insisted she wear that evening.
    “Your father gave this to me,” Leticia had said as she gracefully fixed the bracelet on Finnea’s wrist. “And tonight for your first evening out, I want you to wear it.”
    The gold was cool against her skin, warming to her touch. But a