"To my enemies, or potential enemies, I deliver demands. To those loyal to me, I issue orders.

"You are neither, Nadine. Do as you wish."

Nadine's freckles disappeared as her cheeks mantled.

Richard lifted his sword a few inches and let it drop back, unconsciously checking that the blade was clear in its scabbard. "Berdine, Ulic, get your things and meet me out at the stables."

Richard scooped up Kahlan's hand and pulled her toward the door. "I need to talk to the Mother Confessor. Alone."

Richard took Kahlan down the passageway crowded with muscular D'Haran guards wearing dark leather and chain mail and bristling weapons to an empty side hall. He pulled her around the corner, into the shadow beneath a silver lamp, and backed her up against a wall paneled in age-mellowed cherry.

With a finger, he gently squashed the end of her nose. "I couldn't leave without kissing you good-bye."

Kahlan grinned. "Didn't want to kiss me in front of an old girlfriend?"

"You're the only one I love. The only one I've ever loved." Richard's features distorted in chagrin. "You can understand how it would be if one of your old boyfriends showed up."

"No, I can't."

His face went blank for just an instant and then went crimson. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking."

Confessors had no boyfriends as they grew up.

The deliberate touch of a Confessor destroyed a person's mind, and in its place left only mindless devotion to the Confessor who had touched him with her power. A Confessor always had to restrain her grip on her power, lest it be accidentally released. It generally wasn't difficult; her power grew as she did and, being born with the power, the ability to restrain it came as naturally as breathing.

But in the throes of passion, an experience she hadn't grown up with, it was impossible for a Confessor to maintain that restraint. A lover's mind would unintentionally be destroyed in the distracted, unrestrained apex of a Confessor's passion.

Confessors, even if they wished it, had no friends save other Confessors. People feared them, feared their power. Men, especially, feared Confessors. No man wanted to get within striking distance of a Confessor. Confessors didn't have lovers.

A Confessor chose her mate for qualities desirable in her daughter, for the father he could be. A Confessor never chose for love, because the act of loving would destroy the person she loved. No one willingly wed a Confessor; a Confessor chose her mate, and took him with her magic before they were wedded. Men feared a Confessor who had yet to choose a mate. She was a destroyer among them, a predator, and men her potential prey.

Only Richard had defeated that magic. His unequivocal love for her had transcended her power. Kahlan was the only Confessor she had ever heard of who had the love of a man, and could reciprocate that love. In her whole life, she had never imagined she would fulfill that most exalted of human desires: love.

She had heard it said that there was only one true love in a person's life. With Richard, that was more than a saying::it was the dead cold truth.

More than any of it, though, she simply loved him, helplessly and completely. That he loved her, and they could be together, sometimes left her numb with disbelief.

She dragged her finger down his leather baldric. "So, you never think about her? You never wonder. .?

"No. Look, I've known Nadine since I was little. Her father, Cecil Brighton, sells herbs and remedies. I'd bring him rare plants now and again. He'd let me know if there was something he wanted but couldn't find. When I went out to guide people. I'd keep an eye out for what he needed.

"Nadine always wanted to be like her father, to learn what herbs helped people and to work in his shop. She'd go with me sometimes, to learn how to find certain plants."

"She only went with you to look for plants?"

"Well, no. There was a little more: to it than that. I-well-sometimes I'd go visit her and her parents. I'd go for walks with her, even if her father hadn't asked me to find some herb. I danced with her at the midsummer festival, last summer, before you came to Hartland. I liked her. But I never led her to think I wanted to marry her."

Kahlan smiled and decided to end his twisting in the wind. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. She wondered briefly at something he had said to Nadine, at what more there had been, but then her mind was spinning from the feel of his powerful arms around her, and his soft lips against hers. His tongue glided across the inside of her front teeth, and she sucked it in. A big hand slid down her back and pulled her hard against him.

Then she pushed him away. "Richard," she said breathlessly, "what about Shota? What if she causes trouble?"

Richard biinked, trying to banish the lust from his eyes. "To the underworld with Shota."

"But in the past, as much trouble as