Some of my other writer friends are posting snippets of works in progress, so here's the first two paragraphs of a short story I wrote a couple weeks ago. It concerns an ambitious noblewoman and her liaison with a certain field marshal...

"The Baroness Petara loved a good party. She loved the wine,

the music, the blur of faces. The gaudy splendor of gilded furniture, hundreds

of candelabras, and the endless halls of Skyline palace opened to the entire

nobility of Adro. She loved to take on an air of distracted boredom and watch

the flock of young men around her fall over themselves to entertain her.

She loved

that the rest of the women in the hall knew just exactly what she was about and

were helpless to stop her, even when it was their own husbands who threw

themselves gallantly at Petara like she was some damsel in distress."