Politics makes for strange bedfellows, especially when you're a Princess, where bedding some strange fellow may be your duty to your country. Which is how Nike, fourth Princess of the Rain Dukedom, finds herself being shipped off to marry the King of the Sun Kingdom after losing a game of chance with her older sisters.

Set in San Francisco's Chinatown in the late 1950's. Pretty Mei Li has stowed away on a Chinese steamer with her professor father to become a mail-order bride for nightclub owner Sammy Fong. Sammy, however, is completely infatuated with saucy showgirl Linda Low, who is intent on making him jealous enough to propose to her. As Sammy sets out to assign his marriage contract (and Mei Li) to Wang Ta, a handsome college student living in Chinatown, complications,...

France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse first moments of freedom. Héloïse portrait soon becomes a collaborative...