Carolina Isle

  She kept Ariel in her head as she walked into Dr. Peterson’s classroom. And because she was Princess Ariel, she didn’t knock. Sara gave a wildly exaggerated performance, a caricature actually, of Ariel. The truth was that Sara created a character who looked like Ariel but who acted like the people her father had described. She felt a little bad doing it, but when she saw the eyes of her audience, she knew she had them. At one point, Sara haughtily asked Dr. Peterson if he was gay since everyone knew that only gay men were on the stage. Dr. Peterson was a notorious womanizer, so that got a lot of repressed snickers from the class. Sara kept it up for about ten minutes, then pretended that she was in the wrong classroom and had actually wanted fourth-year calculus. Once outside, she leaned back against the cool concrete-block walls and breathed again. Her heart was pounding. All her life she’d tried to take the attention away from herself; she’d never wanted anyone to know how bad it was at home for fear that she’d be put somewhere worse. But today Sara’d made a true spectacle of herself—and found that she’d enjoyed herself.

  When Dr. Peterson opened the classroom door, Sara stood upright. He looked her up and down and she could tell that he didn’t like what he saw. Now that Sara was herself again, she felt overweight and timid. “You’re in,” he said, but he was shaking his head as though he couldn’t figure out how she’d been able to transform her dirty self into a princess for even ten minutes.

  So it turned out that meeting Ariel changed Sara’s life. That summer she started in the drama department, and since she was a whole year behind the other kids, she had to take more hours. She never got a summer vacation, but Sara loved every minute of it. When she graduated, she went to New York with a nearly empty bank account, but with the conviction that she was going to set Broadway on fire.

  Two years later, she was broke and had to get a job as an undersecretary in a big office. Sara could act, but she couldn’t sing or dance, and in New York she was competing against people who were great at all three. She would have gone to L.A. to try her luck, but she’d been brainwashed that the only real theater was in New York. And she always felt that she was right on the edge of making it big.

  Through all those years, Sara exchanged letters with Ariel. No e-mail, no faxes, nothing new or modern, just old-fashioned letters. Ariel wrote three or more letters to each of Sara’s because Ariel had more time. With each of the letters Sara came to enjoy them more. I can’t wait to tell Ariel! became a constant thought. When Sara went to New York, where she knew no one, and where she failed at one audition after another, it was Ariel’s ever-cheerful letters that kept her going. Ariel was Sara’s anchor, the one who was always there, the one person in the world who knew where Sara was and what she was doing.

  Then, when Sara turned twenty-three and was beginning to realize that she just might never make it on the New York stage, she had another one of those life-changing events. The CEO of the company Sara worked for, R. J. Brompton, pointed at her and said, “That one. I want her.” That’s all he had to say. He was so revered, and his word was such law, that Sara could believe that she’d been chosen to test out a new guillotine.

  It was worse. He’d chosen her to be his personal assistant. Not his secretary—he had two of those. His PA. Sara soon learned what the duties of a personal assistant were. She did anything her boss asked of her. She was a wife without the sex—not that Sara wanted the sex or that R. J. Brompton had a wife. No, she thought, humans have wives and families. And after eighteen months of working for R.J., Sara was sure he wasn’t human. No human could work as much as he did. He was a robot who gave her more money every time she told him she wanted a life and that she was leaving his employment.

  By the time Ariel’s letter saying she wanted to exchange lives reached her, Sara knew exactly how she felt. She hated herself for having no spine and not being able to tell R.J. what he could do with his job. She hated herself for not having enough talent to make it on Broadway. She had come to hate everything about her life, and more than anything, Sara wanted to do something besides work for R. J. Brompton.

  It was because Sara was so tired and so fed up with R.J.’s 3:00 A.M. phone calls that she was going to agree to try Ariel’s impossible scheme.

  The idea of having Ariel’s life of leisure, with nothing to deal with but a mother who sounded rather lonely, was the best idea she’d heard in years. Of course the idea of exchanging lives would never work, but it sounded nice. Three sirens went by and Sara thought of the quiet of a small Southern town. She had to haul a big basket of laundry down to the basement tonight and she dreamed of dropping her dirties in a hamper and having them reappear, clean and pressed.

  She grabbed a Post-it note, wrote “Love to!,” then put it in an envelope and addressed it. She’d mail it on the way to the laundry.

  “Leave everything to me,” Ariel wrote back, and Sara did. But then, she was too tired to do anything else.

  Chapter Three

  ARIEL FELT BAD THAT SHE’D LIED TO her cousin, but she knew it was necessary. If she’d told Sara the truth, she would never have considered exchanging places. And wasn’t it true that all was fair in love and war? Ariel just hoped that her cousin would forgive her when she found out that she had done everything for love.

  It had started over a year ago when Ariel was in New York with her mother on one of their twice-yearly clothes-buying trips. Ariel had to attend some boring fund-raiser with her mother and a lot of other old people who wanted to show off how much money they had.

  For the first hour Ariel made small talk and listened to people tell her how quaint they found Arundel. Their tone said that they couldn’t imagine living in a place that had no food delivery, but still, it was an adorable little town. “So clean,” they said.

  When her mother’s eagle eye was turned away, Ariel tipped a waiter a twenty to replace her mother-approved ginger ale with champagne. It was while she was slowly sipping her champagne (to make it last) that she saw him. Him. For Ariel, it was one of those moments when the earth stood still. Maybe the other party guests kept moving and talking, but for her, the world stopped revolving. When she saw the man walk into the room, she knew she was seeing her future. She was seeing the only man she would ever love.

  R. J. Brompton. Of course she knew who he was. Sara had sent photos and newspaper clippings. But photos didn’t show what he was really like. You could feel him. Sense him. He had a presence about him, an aura, a charisma such as Ariel had never experienced. In all her trips with her mother, she had never seen anyone like R. J. Brompton.

  Sara had described him in only bad terms. She said he worked her half to death, and that he had no idea that she should have a life of her own. He called her during the night and asked her where the papers on a land sale were. She would tell him she had put them in his briefcase, then he’d ask where his briefcase was. More than once, she’d had to pull on jeans and a T-shirt and go to his apartment in the middle of the night to find something or to write a letter for him. She said that as far as she could tell, he never slept.

  As Ariel stood there watching him shake hands with people, now and then glancing at the blonde on his arm, she knew that someday he’d be hers. She came out of her trance to look into the eyes of the woman with him. She was glaring at Ariel in a way meant to tell her to back off, that R.J. belonged to her. Ariel just smiled. She knew from Sara that R.J. changed women more often than she changed shoes. Next week there would be another mindless blonde—or a redhead, whatever—looking up at him with adoring eyes.

  For the whole party, Ariel stayed within viewing distance of R.J. Each time he glanced in her direction, she turned away, as though she’d been looking at someone behind him. But he wasn’t fooled. After an hour, he walked toward her. And though she pretended she didn’t see him, her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid it would leap out of her chest. If she hadn’t had so much inside information from Sara, she would have turned and smiled at R.J. But she knew he was used to that. Sara said that she couldn’
t see R.J.’s attraction to women, but it was there. She’d told many stories about women making fools of themselves over him. Sara said she’d had to usher each of them out, some of them crying, and later, she always sent them flowers and a nice note that essentially said thanks but no thanks.

  Ariel knew better than to rush forward and introduce herself. Instead, she ignored him completely. Sort of. If a person can stalk someone through a three-hour party and still ignore him, that’s what Ariel did. She chatted happily with a bunch of old, rich men who kept trying to look down the front of her dress, while she kept an eye on R.J. The second he moved away from whomever he was talking to, she moved away from him. They were playing cat and mouse—and liking it. Toward the end of the party she felt him bearing down on her and she knew she wouldn’t be able to escape. She also knew that she’d have only one chance to make a first impression. But she didn’t know what he liked. Sweet and simpering? Or cool but smoldering, like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief? For him, Ariel would be whatever he wanted. But first she had to find out what would make him want her for more than his usual two weeks.

  As he bore down on Ariel, she knew she had to stop him. But how? He was known in the business world as a man who got what he wanted. He’d been called ruthless by more than one source.

  Frantically, Ariel looked about the party. Should she go to the ladies’ room? But she knew he’d be there when she got out, then that first moment would take place whether she was ready or not. When she saw her mother, she smiled. Ruthless was too mild a word to describe her mother. Knowing that R.J. was watching her, Ariel glided across the room in a manner she hoped was part beauty queen, part seductress, and all cool beauty. When she reached her mother, all she had to do was whisper a few words and she knew that her mother would keep R.J. away from her better than a pack of wolves could.

  Ariel was right.

  Just as she entered the ladies’ room, she glanced back to see her mother confronting Mr. R. J. Brompton. R.J. looked confused, so Ariel knew she’d won. When she left the restroom fifteen minutes later, R.J. had left the party. Had she missed her one and only chance? No, she had more confidence in herself than that. Ariel smiled the rest of the evening because she had found what she wanted to do with her life: She wanted to marry and raise a family with her cousin’s boss.

  Life changed after that night as Ariel began planning how to go about getting what she wanted most in the world. First, she had to know her subject, so she went to the library and started researching, spending months reading, cutting out articles, memorizing, and writing her cousin hundreds of letters. The more she wrote, the more Sara wrote back, and Ariel encouraged her cousin to talk about her job and her boss. Ariel would have e-mailed her cousin daily except that her mother didn’t believe in the Internet. Ariel thought that her mother feared that her daughter would find out that men and women got naked and had sex and enjoyed it. She was determined to keep Ariel a virgin in both mind and body in anticipation of her wedding night with David—a night Ariel’s mother and David’s mother had been planning since the babies were born two weeks apart.

  As for David, as always, he was Ariel’s beast of burden. Since he had contact with the outside world, she had him look up R.J. on the Internet and give her the hundred and fifty pages he printed out. He had daily news flashes about R.J. e-mailed to him, and he gave Ariel copies.

  “The media is more interested in his women than they are in what he does for a living,” David said, looking at a photo of R.J. “You wouldn’t think that a man that old and ugly would be able to get all those babes.”

  Ariel snatched the photo out of his hand. “He’s only forty-two and he is far from ugly,” she said, glaring at David.

  “Forty-two is old enough to be our father, so—”

  “For your information, you and I do not have a joint parent. Anyway, he would have had to be a teenager when he conceived two twenty-four-year-olds like us.”

  “Conceived,” David said, smiling. “What a nice word.” He was lounging on her bed, twirling her stuffed duck-billed platypus around his finger. She took it away from him. He’d been back in Arundel since graduating from college two years ago, but he didn’t seem in any danger of getting a job. Against his mother’s protests, he’d studied horticulture. His mother had spent days with Ariel’s mother drinking endless cups of tea while she cried that her beloved son was learning to be a farmer. “Why couldn’t he be a doctor or a lawyer? Why a farmer?” she whined. Ariel’s opinion was that, with David’s money, what did it matter what he studied?

  “Don’t you have something to do?” she asked, but she knew their mothers had set an obligatory time that they had to spend together. If they missed it, their lives would be made miserable. David and she had made a silent agreement to give them what they wanted, which is why he was now lounging on her bed and nearly tearing the ear off her toy armadillo.

  “We could go skinny-dipping in the creek,” he said.

  “Didn’t I hear that you did that two weeks ago with one of the girls who lives by the mill?” The old cotton processing plant hadn’t been used in forty years, but it still marked the different parts of town. The tiny houses that had been built for the millworkers were now protected by historical covenants, but that didn’t change the fact of where they were.

  “Jealous?”

  “Of what?” she said as she read through the latest news on R.J. Ariel looked at David. He was stretched across her bed, all long, lean, masculine energy, and she thought that Sara would probably like him. For all of Sara’s sarcasm and acting as though she was a tough girl, Ariel thought she was pretty soft. Yes, she thought, Sara and David might get along splendidly.

  “Mom wants me to ask you to the dance next Saturday. Shall we do the usual?”

  The “usual” was that he’d ask some other girl and Ariel would be his cover. Actually, for the past six months David had been dating just one girl and Ariel was beginning to think he was serious about her. Her name was Britney and she was from the worst side of town that anyone could be from. Her father drove a truck around the U.S. and her mother cleaned people’s houses. If David’s mother found out about her, she’d probably put herself in the hospital with a panic attack—and stay there until David agreed to give up the girl. He hadn’t said so, but Ariel was beginning to think that the real reason David was still in town and hadn’t taken a job in another state was because of Britney.

  He rolled onto his stomach and looked at her. “So what is it with you and this guy Brompton?”

  “I’m going to marry him.” David and she had few secrets from each other. They were in prison together, so why shouldn’t they be friends?

  “Great!” he said. “Told your mother yet?”

  “No. I’m going to let you tell your mother, then she can tell mine.”

  David rolled onto his back and tossed her kangaroo in the air. “How about if you and I get married, move to another state, then get a divorce? If, after living with me, you want a divorce, that is.”

  Picking up her scrapbook, Ariel sat on the bed beside him. “I know you think I’m joking, but I like this man. Yes, he’s older, but he’s not too old. The best thing is that he’s powerful and rich, so maybe he’ll please my mother. If not, he can support me when she disowns me.”

  “You could get a job, you know.”

  “What can I do? Clean houses like Britney’s mother?”

  David gave her a look that let her know she’d crossed the boundary.

  “Okay, I apologize. I’m sure Britney is a very nice person, and that you like her for something other than her impressive bra size.”

  “You can be a nasty little bitch, you know that?”

  “Tell your mother that you can’t marry someone like me.”

  Sighing, David turned onto his side and took the scrapbook from her hands to look at pictures of R.J. “You’ll have ugly kids—if a man that old can still do it, that is.”

  “He seems to make women happy.”

  ?
??He buys them diamonds and they fake orgasms. Not that you would know anything about orgasms. Or do you?”

  When she didn’t make her usual comeback, he reached out and patted her on the shoulder. “Come on, Ariel, it’s not that bad. I’m not that bad. People in other countries often have arranged marriages. It won’t be so bad, I promise.”

  Ariel glared at him. “Being made to marry someone you don’t love is horrible. A lifetime of never hearing bells ring when you kiss! A whole life of never feeling little tingles in your scalp when he looks at you. Years of—”

  David yawned. “You’ve been reading paperbacks again, haven’t you? Listen, I’d better go.”

  “Britney calling you?” she said nastily. In a way, she was jealous. She was jealous that he had someone in his life, while all she had was a scrapbook.

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning in a lecherous way. “Britney.”

  Ariel looked away. She wished the man she loved was with her.

  David got off the bed and walked toward her. For a moment his arms hung at his side, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. “You hang in there, kid,” he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “Ariel,” he said softly. “I do understand. You may think I don’t, but I do. It’s not me who’s the problem, it’s that you want a choice. You want to choose who you marry.”

  “Choice,” she said. “A concept that is foreign to my existence.”

  “Maybe you and I could—” He broke off as he stared, wide-eyed, at her scrapbook. Picking it up, he walked to the window and looked closely at the grainy newspaper photo. “You know who this is, don’t you?”

  “Who is what?” she asked.

  He pointed to a woman standing near R.J. She knew the man beside him. He was Charley Dunkirk, an old, rich man who had given R.J. his start in business and was still his best friend. “That’s Susie Edwards,” David said.

  “And just who is Susie Edwards?”