“He didn’t do that to you?”
“I learned to tell him to stop it.”
“What did you mean when you said you’d been married in your dress?” She nodded toward the gown hanging on the closet door.
Toby might tell about her and Graydon, but there was no way she was going to reveal what had happened with Tabitha and Garrett. “It was just pretend,” she said, then was silent as Millie worked with her hair.
“If I’m understanding you correctly, the brother is now engaged to the woman Prince Graydon was to marry. Doesn’t that leave him free to marry you?”
Toby took a moment before answering. “If we did, his family would hate me. He has a mother who …” She took a breath. “I spoke to her once, or rather, listened to her. I felt sorry for Graydon. His childhood must have been very lonely with her for a mother. Ow!”
“Sorry,” Millie said. “Your hair twisted around the comb. Couldn’t you work out something so you two could marry?”
“That’s what Graydon wants. He wanted us to go to the courthouse and get married today, but I said no. Can you imagine the two of us going to Lanconia and how he’d tell his ferocious mother that he’d married some American nobody? I’d spend my life being snubbed by her.”
“Your comfort is more important than marrying the man you love?”
“No,” Toby said. “The problem is that Graydon would be torn in half. How could he focus on helping his country if he were caught in a war between women? And if Lady Danna’s father moves his business out of the country because of me, Lanconians would protest. Graydon couldn’t do his best job under that kind of stress.”
“How very noble of you,” Millie said.
Whether it was the words or the way Millie said them, the tears began to come. Millie sat down on the ottoman beside Toby and put her arms around her.
“I’m not noble. I’d like to spit in the eye of all of them! I’d like to elope with Graydon then stand before that mother of his and dare her to say even one nasty thing to me. But I can’t hurt Graydon. I love him too much to do that to him.”
Millie held Toby away from her to look into her eyes. “All right! That’s all the time we have for wallowing in self-pity. We need to get your face made up, put your dress on, and hurry to the chapel. Otherwise, we’ll miss Victoria and Caleb’s wedding.”
“I don’t think I can—”
Millie stood up, her shoulders back, and she looked down her nose at Toby. “You want the man you love to be a king, so you need to act like a queen. Queens do not allow others to see what they feel inside.”
“Maybe in Lanconia they don’t—”
“Carpathia!” Millie said in a tone that made Toby stand up.
“Okay, Your Majesty. My inner queen will now emerge.”
Millie didn’t smile, but put her hands on Toby’s shoulders and looked her in the eyes.
“Your prince will probably be there tonight. He’ll have on an eighteenth-century costume and look so handsome you’ll swoon on your feet. If he again asks you to run away with him, will you?”
“Probably.”
Millie glared at her.
“Okay. No to running away, no to a quickie marriage, but yes to a bedtime romp.”
Millie frowned.
“That’s the best you’re gonna get.”
“All right, then,” Millie said. “Just let me know and I’ll stay at Jilly and Ken’s house tonight.”
Toby grimaced. “With my luck with men, Graydon will have found another girlfriend by now.”
“Not with all that blonde hair of yours. If he steps away, just lasso him with it and he’ll come back.”
Toby laughed. “How do you know about Graydon and my hair?”
“You told me, remember? Now let’s see how fast we can get you made up.”
Roger Plymouth’s big, glass-fronted house was on the water at the south of the island. It was the kind of house that appeared in Architectural Digest. Inside, the furniture was all perfectly placed and everything was white and blue, the colors of the water and the clear air.
Lexie hated the look of the interior. People who lived on Nantucket wondered why the expensive off-island decorators could think of nothing except white furniture with blue pillows. The walls were artistically covered with cute reproductions of whales, with an anchor here and there. There wasn’t a breath of creativity in the whole house.
Lexie had already told Roger that after they were married she wanted to redecorate the entire house. His reply was “Tear the place down and get your cousin Jared to build a new one if you want.” Lexie’s reply had been a lecture on useless extravagance. It had taken four hours in bed together to make up after that argument.
Right now Lexie was sitting on the white couch across from the identical white couch Graydon was sitting on. They were both in eighteenth-century costume and ready to go to the chapel for the wedding ceremony. She knew that he’d spent most of the day on the phone talking to people in Lanconia. It looked like it hadn’t gone well because right now Graydon was slumped down, not sitting with his usual upright bearing. It was almost impossible to believe that he was descended from kings.
Last night Graydon had shown up late, one suitcase in his hand. When Roger opened the door to him, Graydon had asked for a place to stay, and Roger had sleepily pointed him toward a bedroom. When he got back into bed with Lexie he hadn’t bothered to tell her who was at the door. She’d assumed it was one of his racing buddies and gone back to sleep.
Early the next morning she’d gone downstairs to see a morose Prince Graydon leaning over a bowl of cereal.
It took only moments of conversation to figure out that they were both going to drop bombshells on Toby during the wedding. Not only had Lexie returned early, but she was going to tell her friend that she was engaged to marry her boss. As for Graydon, his unexpected presence was going to be more than enough to shock Toby.
“Roger bought this for me in Paris,” Lexie said of her pink dress with the white embroidery overlay.
“It’s very pretty. Nice ring too.”
Lexie held up her left hand and looked at the five carat engagement ring Roger had given her. “I would have said I’d never like a ring like this. It’s too gaudy, too flashy, but …”
“But it’s like Roger?”
“Yes,” Lexie said. “I seem to be wearing him on my finger.” When she looked at Graydon, there was a small frown on her face.
“Are you concerned about telling Toby of your engagement?” he asked.
“No, not really. I think she’ll say she knew it was going to happen.”
“Probably,” Graydon said. “She is a very perceptive person.”
Lexie couldn’t bear to see his misery and she had an idea of how to help him. She had a feeling Roger could help. She stood up. “I better go. You’ll be all right here alone?”
“Perfectly,” Graydon said, then reached out and took Lexie’s hand in his and kissed the back of it. “Toby will be very happy for you.”
“I wish you two could—” She broke off, gave Graydon a smile, then left the big living room.
Upstairs, she told Roger that he needed to talk to Graydon. “Those two have serious problems.”
“Not like us, you mean?” Roger asked, grinning. “It took a while but I grew on you.”
“Like a fungus,” Lexie said and moved away from his grasp. “Just be nice to him, that’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m very nice all the time.”
“If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t send you downstairs to help the guy.”
“So what am I supposed to say to him?”
“I don’t know. Boy things. But be gentle. The poor man is in pain.”
Downstairs, Roger looked at Graydon. They were alone in the living room, both of them wearing tan breeches and short coats. Graydon had on slippers that his ancestor had worn while Roger had on tall boots. Roger offered Graydon a drink, but when it was refused, he couldn’t help thinking how differen
t the brothers were. Rory always had a laugh, but Graydon could depress a clown. So how did you talk to a future king?
“Oh, the hell with it,” he said and sat down across from Graydon, drink in hand. “Lexie wants me to baby you but I can’t take your gloom anymore. You can’t give up. Do you hear me? You can’t. Just look at what I did. I wore Lexie down. It took me years but I did it. This whole trip that she thinks just happened took a lot of work on my part. I got my little sister to lie for me so Lexie would go to France with her. Then she had to be so boring that Lexie was ready to jump off a building.” Roger took a drink. “To get my sister to help, I had to promise the kid that Bobby Flay would cook at her next party. Anyway, I showed up in France wearing a cast when there was nothing wrong with my arm and I got Lex to go on a driving trip with me.” He leaned forward to look hard at Graydon. “You know what I did? I let Lexie drive. You know it’s True Love when you hear the grind of the gears of a V12 overhead cam engine and you don’t say a word about it.” He paused to let the horror of that image sink in. “If you give up just because a woman says she won’t marry you, you lose the right to call yourself a man.”
Graydon gave Roger a look of great patience. “In this instance, there are extenuating circumstances involved.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Roger said. “You’re going to be crowned king. So what? We all have handicaps. Mine is that girls think I’m useless. They think I’m pretty and rich but of no real value. Part of why I like Lexie is because she makes me do things. So what’s this Toby girl do for you?”
“She keeps me from believing that I actually am a prince.”
“And you’re going to give that up because …? Why are you giving her up?”
“For a country?” Graydon’s voice was sarcastic.
Roger gave a scoffing laugh. “I don’t know a lot about history but I think miserably unhappy men don’t make good kings. You think about it. Are you a man first or a king first?” He drained his glass, set it down, and left the room.
Graydon got up and went outside to look at the water and think.
By the time Millie and Toby got to the chapel, it was already filling with guests. About half of them were in costume and as Victoria had predicted, they’d worked hard to outdo each other. Silks and satins, ribbons and gems adorned the women. One famous author said she was honoring Jane Austen, not Victoria.
“Glad that was cleared up,” Millie said so sarcastically that Toby laughed.
It was evening and the two women were standing side by side at the open door of the chapel and handing out programs that announced the order of the ceremony: music (Verdi), a poem (read by Victoria’s beloved editor), the vows (from the bride and groom). Jared’s cousins were escorting people down the aisle.
“Now you know everything about me but I know nothing about you,” Toby said to Millie as she handed a brochure to a woman whose books rarely left the New York Times list. “Are you married?”
“Yes. To a lovely man. You might like to know that I wasn’t born in this country and my marriage was arranged.”
“You’re kidding!” Toby almost didn’t let go of the paper she was holding out, but a male true-crime writer pried it from her hand. “Oh! Sorry.” She looked back at Millie.
“Not at all. It was put together by our parents, but what they didn’t know was that my husband-to-be and I had a clandestine meeting before the marriage. He arranged it.” Millie’s eyes took on a faraway look. “It was at midnight and involved a horse and moonlight. I sneaked out a window and we rode bareback through a forest to where champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries were waiting for us.” She paused to give out three more programs. “He and I stayed together until nearly sunrise, then we rode home.” Millie seemed to come back to the present. “After that I would have followed him anywhere. He is the love of my life.”
Toby sighed. “That’s the most romantic story I’ve ever heard.”
“No more than yours, dear. Didn’t you have champagne and strawberries when you met your prince? Wasn’t he so in love with you that he finagled a way to move in with you?”
“Yes to the move, but it wasn’t because of love.” She picked up another stack of programs.
“Then what was it? As far as I can see, the two of you were inseparable from the moment you met. You worked together, solved problems together. I just can’t figure out how you left out the physical aspects of love. You’ve missed a lot by denying yourself some good ol’ fashioned bed romping.”
“We didn’t,” Toby said. “I mean, we did but we didn’t. Graydon is a wonderful lover and I got pregnant on our wedding night, but—”
Millie was looking at her with wide eyes.
“I’ve said too much. I’d better go check on our seats to make sure no one has taken them.”
Millie caught her arm. “It’s none of my business, but sometimes problems can’t be solved by logic or even common sense. Sometimes you just have to believe and to trust. If you give up love for fear of hatred, doesn’t that make love the loser?”
“I don’t know,” Toby said. The music that began the ceremony started to play, and she pulled away from Millie to go to her seat. Ribbons had been strung across the two chairs that were reserved for both her and Millie. She untied the ribbons and sat down.
Minutes later, Caleb and Ken came through the side door to stand at the front. Toby knew that in the back Alix and Jilly were assisting Victoria as she awaited her moment to walk down the aisle on Jared’s arm.
When she realized that Millie hadn’t followed her and taken her seat, Toby looked back, but her new friend was nowhere to be seen. Instead, coming toward her was Graydon in his Regency-era suit—and Toby’s heart seemed to leap into her throat.
When he sat down beside her, she knew she should tell him that was Millie’s seat, but she didn’t. Graydon took her hand, kissed the back of it, and tucked it into his arm. The little seats kept them pressed together.
The music changed, and Jilly, in pale pink with cream embroidery, came down the narrow aisle on the white carpet that was strewn with red rose petals. Alix was next, her dress the color of ripe apricots. Both women were carrying bouquets of white roses and tiny blue flowers.
As the wedding march began, everyone stood. Graydon whispered, “Where did the blue flowers come from?”
“New York. Millie got them,” she whispered back.
“Who is Millie?”
“My assistant. You haven’t met her.”
Victoria, on the arm of Jared, who looked very handsome in his tan trousers and black coat, came last. In addition to Victoria’s white dress, draped across her arms was a paisley shawl in hundreds of shades of green. Her emerald eyes picked up the colors and sparkled. In her hands was a small bouquet of white orchids surrounded by the little blue blossoms that Graydon had asked about.
Toby hadn’t thought about it before but it was odd that she, who’d dealt with so many flowers in the last years, had never before seen those.
When everyone was at the front, the guests sat down and the ceremony began. There were the traditional words, but at the end, Caleb spoke. He said he would love Victoria “through the centuries, past turmoil and tears, past pain and joy, through loss and triumphs. I will love you forever.”
By the time he finished, Graydon was holding Toby’s hand so hard her fingers might break, but she wished he were clasping her entire body that tightly.
“Don’t leave me to do everything alone,” he said softly as the pastor pronounced Victoria and Caleb husband and wife. “Here or there, it no longer matters to me where I am. Just please be with me.” When he looked at her, Toby saw the tears in his eyes.
She gave him one quick nod, then looked back at the kissing couple.
Graydon lifted her hand to kiss the back of it, then everyone started clapping and cheering and the bridal couple ran down the aisle.
“Now we can eat,” said a man behind them and everyone laughed as they began to leave.
Toby l
ooked up at Graydon. “I have things I have to do,” she said.
“Can I help?” he asked.
She wanted to stay with him and talk, but she knew Millie couldn’t handle the chaos of dinner by herself. “Yes,” she said, walking backward from him. “Stack some of these opera chairs along the wall so there’s room for people to sit in here. I’ll send Wes in to help. Then please find Millie”—Toby was at the door—“and she’ll tell you what else needs doing. I …” She hesitated.
“I know,” Graydon said, smiling. “By the way, Lexie is here and she has a surprise for you.”
“Let me guess. It’s Roger. Are they married or engaged?”
Graydon laughed. “Engaged. She wants you to plan her wedding.”
“Oh, Lord! How did I get this job?” With one last look at Graydon, she ran from the chapel to the tent, but she paused outside. She didn’t know what she’d just agreed to or what was going to happen. All she knew for sure was that she was very glad Graydon was here. For the first time since he’d left the island, she didn’t feel as though a big part of her was missing.
The first person she saw inside was Millie. “You missed the ceremony.”
“No, I saw it.” Millie’s usually smiling face was stern. “I saw you and your prince and you two looked very serious. Where is he now?”
“I asked him to stack the opera chairs in the chapel.”
“You called them that?” When Toby nodded, Millie said, “And you gave that job to a prince?”
Toby laughed. “Graydon can do anything! He can cook, clean, organize—”
“Run a country?”
“Yes, that too,” Toby said, then lowered her voice. “I don’t know for sure, but I may have just agreed to marry him.”
“How do you not know for certain?” Millie asked but when she saw that Toby was shaking, she led her out of the tent and helped her sit down in one of the chairs that had been placed outside.
“I’m scared,” Toby said. “Really, really afraid. It’s one thing for us to live here in my world, but …” She looked at Millie, the fear in her eyes. “He’s a prince and someday he’ll be king. He has a country to take care of. He has a mother.”