Which was why he reflexively turned when a flash of iridescence caught his eye. His first thought was: Morpho rhetenor Helena. The extraordinary tropical butterfly with wings of shifting colors: blues, lavenders, greens.<br />It proved to be a woman’s skirt.<br />The color was blue, but by the light of the legion of overhead candles, he saw purples and even greens shivering in its weave. A bracelet of pale stones winked around one wrist, a circlet banded her dark head. The chandelier struck little beams from that, too.<br />She’s altogether too shiny for a woman, he decided, and began to turn away.<br />Which was when she tipped her face up into the light.<br />Everything stopped. The beat of his heart, the pump of his lungs, the march of time.<br />Seconds later, thankfully, it all resumed. Much more violently than previously.<br />And then absurd notions roman-candled in his mind.<br />His palms ached to cradle her face—it was a kitten’s face, broad and fair at the brow, stubborn at the chin. She had kitten’s eyes, too: large and a bit tilted and surely they weren’t actually the azure of calm southern seas? Surely he, Miles Redmond, hadn’t entertained such a florid thought? Her eyebrows were wicked: fine, slanted, very dark. Her hair was probably brown, but it was as though he’d never learned the word “brown.”<br />Burnished. Silk. Copper. Azure. Delicate. Angel. Hallelujah. Suddenly these were the only words he knew.