“You do realize that’s the de Piaget crest,” she said, on the off chance he didn’t.
The ghost looked at what he’d recently stopped shaking, then looked back at her. He blinked in surprise that wasn’t at all innocent. “Why, lass, I believe it is.”
“Why did you pick that one?” she demanded.
He shifted nervously. “Weel, ye see, lass, with ye being as yet unwed …” He peered at her from under bushy red eyebrows. “Do ye see?”
Peaches felt her mouth fall open. “Are you matchmaking?” she asked in astonishment.
“Shhh,” he hissed frantically, doffing his cap and clutching it with his free hand. “What would the other shades think if they knew?”
“They would think I was the most sensible mortal they’d ever encountered because I’d told you I wouldn’t be interested in anyone from that family if he were the last eligible bachelor on the planet.”
The ghost blinked. “Are ye meaning young Stephen de Piaget?”
“That’s the one,” she said grimly. “I have no doubt that women all over the island are sighing in relief that he doesn’t have a twin.”
“To vex them with his handsomeness?” the ghost ventured.
Peaches suppressed a snort. “It isn’t exactly his handsomeness he would be vexing them with, but maybe we should just not speculate on what that certain something might be.”
The ghost wore a perplexed frown and his mouth worked silently, as if he repeated her words to attempt to unravel their meaning. Peaches would have given him a hand by enumerating for him the future Earl of Artane’s numerous flaws, but she was interrupted by the sound of the door opening behind her. She turned and found her sister standing just inside the door, looking hesitant.
At least she wasn’t looking terrified. Peaches glanced over her shoulder and saw the reason why. The ghost had disappeared, no doubt to spare his proprietress any undue distress. Peaches was happy to see him go, especially if it meant she didn’t have to discuss the last de Piaget bachelor again. She walked over to her sister and realized with a start that Tess’s face had a rather green tinge to it. Peaches reached out and put her hand on her sister’s arm.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in surprise. “Did something happen to you?”
Tess took a deep breath. “Unfortunately—but no, not to me or John.”
Peaches frowned. She had just seen a ghost in a kilt. How much worse could it get than that? “I’m sure it can’t be all that bad,” she said easily.
“Oh, it could,” Tess said. She took a deep breath. “I have a confession to make.”
Peaches smiled. “What terrible thing did you do?”
Tess sat down on the trunk. She didn’t seem to notice she had sat down on that rather thick stack of faxes. “It’s a long story with an interesting ending.”
“I can hardly wait to hear it.”
“Well, it starts with you forgetting your cell phone when you went to France.”
Peaches shrugged. “I left it behind on purpose.” She had left her phone behind because when one was having a time-out from life, it was best to do it unplugged. Tess had had the holiday rental office’s number for emergencies, which had seemed like more than enough accessibility.
Tess shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I didn’t think your phone should go unanswered.” She paused. “So I answered it.”
Peaches resisted the urge to scratch her head. She knew her sister was gearing up to tell her something she obviously considered important, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what that something might be. She didn’t have a boyfriend to dump, or a landlord to appease, or rational clients to deal with. All she had was a collection of loonies who had apparently decided to jettison her en masse via the aforementioned faxes. None of that explained what had left Tess looking so green. She studied her sister for another moment or two, then frowned again. “Did you say something to a client?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Tess said quickly. Then she paused. “Well, I tried not to say anything.”
Peaches sat down abruptly on the trunk, crunching the parts of the faxes her sister hadn’t already done damage to. Things were getting clearer, but not more pleasant. “Who did you not say anything to?”
“Whom,” Tess said miserably.
Peaches found it in her to glare. “Whom did you not say anything to?”
“Brandalyse Stevens.”
Peaches felt the room begin to spin. She suddenly found herself with her head between her knees. That didn’t help any, and it was exacerbated by Tess’s unwillingness to let her up.
“I tried my best,” Tess said, sounding rather faint herself, “I really did. But when she started in on your coming back to England and not being there to help her sort her thongs … well, I had to say something.” Tess paused. “I suppose I probably shouldn’t have started off by telling her she had a stupid name.”
“Probably not,” Peaches wheezed. So much for hoping all the communiqués she was sitting on were just a bad joke. “And?”
“I told her it was probably about time she learned to sort her own damn thongs.” Tess began to pat her absently on the back. “And really, Peach, once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.”
Peaches fumbled behind her for her sister’s hand only because Tess was getting a little too enthusiastic in her patting. She thought she might have bruises soon. She sat up, waited until the stars cleared, then leaned her head carefully back against the stone and looked at her sister. It was difficult to believe that Tess had been the catalyst for the utter ruination of a very large part of her life, but it was very hard to deny.
“You couldn’t stop yourself?”
Tess shook her head slowly.
“What else did you say?” she managed.
“I’m afraid I might have expressed an opinion or two on how many great guys Brandalyse has stolen from me—er, you, rather, because I was pretending to be you. That took a while.”
Peaches closed her eyes briefly. “Great.”
“I also might have insulted her blog.”
“Did you criticize font or content?”
“I told her that her font was ugly and the pictures of all the interiors she’d designed were Photoshopped.” Tess swallowed convulsively. “She asked me if that was it.”
“And you told her no, that wasn’t it, because she had the single worst highlight job you’d ever seen and that it really showed up on camera during every morning show she did.” Peaches looked at her sister. “Is that about right?”
Tess’s eyes widened. “How’d you know?”
Peaches pulled the stack of papers from beneath herself and her sister, then handed the top one to Tess. On it was scrawled, My roots don’t show on camera, you stupid—
Tess frowned. “Her language is rather salty.”
“You should see the others.”
“I’m not sure I want to.” She looked at Peaches. “I’m so desperately sorry.”
“So am I,” Peaches said. “That I didn’t get to hear it.”
“I recorded it.”
“Then what’s there to complain about?” She thought about tossing all the faxes into the air in a defiant gesture of freedom, then thought better of it because the only thing that would accomplish would be leaving her a mess to clean up.
Tess took the faxes from her, then flipped through them. That took quite a while, but that was because Peaches had quite a long client list.
Had had, rather.
She leaned back against the cold stone wall of her sister’s guardroom and contemplated her life. There were several truths to examine at present, and since she had quite a bit of time on her hands—that stack of faxes was rather thick, after all—she thought she would take advantage of it.
The thing was, she needed a change. She’d known for quite some time that she’d needed a change. She just hadn’t expected that she would get the particular level of help she was getting at the moment to make that change.
T
ess looked up. “Peach, these are all your clients—”
“I’ll find new ones,” Peaches said with a casualness she didn’t feel. “No problem.”
“I don’t want to pry,” Tess began slowly, “but—”
“I have plenty of money,” Peaches said, hoping to cut Tess off before she asked for any details. Unfortunately, her sister was who she was and details were her specialty.
“How much is plenty?”
Peaches took a deep breath. “Almost three thousand dollars.”
Tess blinked. “You mean almost thirty thousand.”
“No,” Peaches said, trying to sound cheerful but failing. “You know how I always tell people, Never do business with friends? Well, apparently there really is something to that.”
“Peaches,” Tess said, aghast. “What happened?”
“Oh, this and that,” Peaches said. “A few bad investments in start-ups. The occasional dip into retirement funds to help out a friend in need.” Giving my PIN to a trusted guy friend who wasn’t a husband. “The usual.”
Tess bowed her head for a moment or two, then looked at Peaches. “You’ll stay here until you decide what to do, for as long as it takes.”
“I can’t,” Peaches said miserably. “I thought my visa was a done deal, but I got a letter yesterday—”
“John knows a guy who knows some guys,” Tess interrupted her. “They’ll take care of it.”
Peaches imagined they would. John did, after all, have some particular immigration issues that would have definitely required the services of a guy.
“I’m going back to the house now,” Tess said, sounding suddenly very far away. “I’ll go stir up some powdered grass drink for you.”
Peaches looked at her sister. She was standing within reach, but somehow she sounded like she was in another world. She nodded, because she knew that was what she was supposed to do. What she wanted to do was burst into tears, but she knew that wouldn’t accomplish anything. And she wasn’t a crier; she was a gulper. If she had a nickel for every time she’d gulped, put her shoulders back, and soldiered on, she wouldn’t have minded at all that she was holding on to a stack of faxes that spelled the end of her comfortable, balanced life in the States. The only client she had left was Roger Peabody, who only hired her to come clean out his office so she would be forced to look at the illustrated charts hanging on his walls detailing the benefits of her becoming his wife.
She looked again to find Tess gone. She wasn’t sure when that had happened, which probably should have worried her. She couldn’t even bring herself to look through the stack of faxes again. Anyone who believed Brandalyse Stevens probably wasn’t really the client for her.
And perhaps, in the end, Fate was shoving her in the right direction.
She pushed herself to her feet, ignored the final twitch of hanger, then walked toward the door. It was open from where Tess had gone through it, which struck her as spooky for some reason. She would have paused to analyze why, but decided it was a bad idea. Maybe later, when she had gone at least twelve hours without seeing any sort of paranormal activity.
She walked through the barbican tunnel and stopped on the edge of Tess’s courtyard. It was nothing out of the ordinary, that stopping. She had stopped either in the same place or near to it dozens of times before and spent an equal number of times looking at the courtyard in front of her.
Only during none of those dozens of times had she ever had the feeling of destiny come over her as it was coming over her now.
What if … what if she had the courage to acknowledge what it was she really wanted?
Audentes Fortuna Juvat.
The thought of it almost stole her breath. She stood on the edge of her sister’s medieval courtyard, struggling to breathe normally, and realized that the time had come for her to make a decision.
Her dream, or more of her life spent putting that dream off.
It wasn’t what she should have been thinking about given the fact that her life was lying in ruins around her. She should have been coming up with a life plan, not thinking about the residual effects left in her heart from too many of Aunt Edna’s Barbara Cartland romances hidden behind dust jackets of Dostoyevsky and Voltaire. Of course she’d taken none of it truly seriously—
Not until one particular evening in spring when she’d been studying for the last finals of her undergrad career.
It had been a lovely night and she’d taken her notes out onto a bench near the quad in front of the library. A couple had been standing there in the middle of that space, bickering lightly about something, when the girl had turned and walked away. Peaches hadn’t wanted to eavesdrop, but if they were willing to carry on their affairs in public, she hadn’t supposed they cared who watched them.
The guy had run after the girl and caught her by the hand.
And time had slowed to a crawl.
Peaches had watched as he’d gone down on one knee. She had no idea what he’d said, but she’d watched him pull something out of his pocket and slip it on his girlfriend’s finger. The girl had started to cry. And then her newly minted fiancé had taken her by the hand, pulled her into his arms, and begun to dance with her.
As if by magic, a violinist had appeared on the edge of that very pedestrian quad and begun to play a waltz.
The magic in the air had been palpable. Peaches had forgotten about her notes and simply stared, openmouthed, at the most romantic thing she had ever witnessed in the entirety of her life—in and out of a book.
The girl had looked around her in wonderment, then stared up at her fiancé with the same expression. “Why?” she had asked.
He had only shrugged with a slight smile. “It’s all for you,” he had said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
And Peaches had known then exactly what she had wanted: a man who would look at her, love her in spite of her flaws, then sink to one knee and ask her to spend the rest of her life with him.
The violin was, of course, optional.
She looked up into a rare clear winter sky and sighed. That sort of fairy tale had happened for her twin sister, who had walked away with a great guy and a castle. It had happened for her younger sister, who’d had a bit of dancing, a great guy, and a slightly older castle.
But it hadn’t happened for her.
She wanted it to. And while she was wishing for the impossible, she decided she wanted the entire fairy tale. She wanted a guy to fall instantly in love with her, then cross through a sea of ultra-gorgeous would-be girlfriends and ask her to dance. And then after they’d danced, she wanted a wedding with a foofy cake and lots of food that probably couldn’t be classified as healthy, an orchestra for their first dance, and then a carriage to climb into and ride off in with her prince to a fairy-tale castle that boasted running water and an Aga in the kitchen.
Peaches had to admit she wondered if she were crazy. Worse still, she didn’t dare bounce the idea off Tess on the off chance that she was really losing it and Tess felt compelled—as she apparently had with Brandalyse Stevens—to tell her so.
“Excuse me, miss—”
Peaches whirled around to find a liveried servant standing there.
She felt her mouth fall open. All right, so he was just a delivery guy. He had on a tie and a cap and looked fairly official. She put her hand on the stone of Tess’s castle wall to steady herself. It was obviously just something for Tess, but that didn’t make her knees any less weak.
“Yes?”
“A delivery for Miss Peaches Alexander, care of the Lady of Sedgwick, Sedgwick Castle.”
Peaches looked at the large white envelope he held out and felt something shudder to a halt. It might have been her heart, but she could still hear that pounding in her ears. It might have been a sonic boom above her head. It might have been Fate standing behind her shoving her really hard in the small of the back to get her to step forward.
She reached out with a shaking hand and took the envelope. As an afterthought, she patted herself fo
r something to give the messenger, but found only a pair of breath mints and her cell phone. The younger man shook his head with a smile.
“I’ve been well paid, thanks.”
She nodded and watched him walk away. She looked at the envelope, then flipped it over to look at the seal. It was tempting to hurry inside and dig out that book on English genealogy she’d put in her suitcase on a whim and see to whom the seal belonged. She decided that maybe the insides would reveal the same, so she very carefully lifted the wax up and opened the envelope. She pulled out a gilt-edged invitation and read.
Miss Peaches Alexander, you are hereby invited to a ball…
Peaches read the rest, realizing with a start that it was from David, the Duke of Kenneworth. The gorgeous, perfect, eminently available Duke of Kenneworth. She had just begun to hyperventilate when her phone rang. It continued to ring as she struggled to get it out of her pocket. She dropped it twice before she managed to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Peaches, it’s Andrea.”
Peaches blinked, trying to clear the fog from her brain. “Um—”
“Andrea Preston? David’s cousin? Remember, we met at that house party at Payneswick earlier this month?”
“Oh, Andrea,” Peaches managed faintly. “Of course.”
“Did you get the invitation from David? I told you I was sure he would send it, judging by how he couldn’t keep his eyes off you.” She paused. “You remember, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Peaches managed, but at the moment she could hardly remember who Andrea was.
Actually, that wasn’t true. She remembered Andrea and she most definitely remembered her cousin David. She might have remembered more, but she’d spent that Regency house party avoiding Stephen de Piaget and worrying that Tess was going to get herself killed before the weekend was over. She remembered sending Tess off back to Sedgwick and going to London with a trio of interior designers who had dragged her to a week’s worth of parties with other designer types, which had convinced her that design was not her thing.
“He thought you were gorgeous, of course,” Andrea said without a hint of envy. “That’s why he wanted your address from me, so he could invite you to the house party next weekend. It’s a silly Cinderella sort of thing, but I’m definitely going. The number of rich men who’ll be there is vast, of course. Having David’s sister there is a bit pants, but what can you do?”