Play with fire, pay the price. Leila's years on the carnie circuit were certainly an education. What she didn't learn: how to be a vampire, or how to be married to the most famous vampire of them all. Adjusting to both has Leila teetering on a knife edge between passion and peril, and now the real danger is about to begin...

Vlad must battle with a centuries-old enemy whose reach stretches across continents and whose strength equals his own. It isn't like Vlad to feel fear, but he does... for Leila, because his enemy knows she is Vlad's greatest weakness. As friend and foe alike align against him—and his overprotectiveness drives Leila away—Vlad's love for his new bride could be the very thing that dooms them both...

It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes—a gambler notorious for never winning—dies during Carnival. His long-suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry.

She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding, she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening, Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.