by Lynn Kurland
He pushed away from his car and walked across the courtyard, then jogged up the steps to the front door. He steeled himself for comments from his parents over the condition of his shirt and where he’d been over the weekend. Perhaps he would tell them he’d been playing an especially vigorous game of cricket. He opened the door and found his mother standing in front of the fire.
“Stephen, darling, what’s happened to the front of your shirt?”
Stephen sighed and shut the front door behind him.
Dinner had been held for him along with the after-dinner conversation. After he’d made his way through both and assured his parents he had been behaving in a manner above reproach all weekend long, he gathered his gear from his car and took himself off to his bedroom. He set everything down, then noticed the envelope on the dresser. He flipped it over, then cursed at the sight of the seal on the back. Kenneworth, unfortunately, no doubt extending an invitation he knew already he would absolutely refuse for a variety of reasons he didn’t care to examine at present.
He did unbend far enough, however, to allow himself to enjoy thoughts of David Preston enduring a few hours on Scottish soil, having the arrogance beaten out of him. He was rich, not overly ugly, and had a penchant for collecting gorgeous women and then tossing them aside when he was finished with them. If Stephen had had a sister, he wouldn’t have allowed her within ten miles of the blighter. Why others in England didn’t follow that same sensible plan, he didn’t know.
He was tempted to just chuck the invite in the rubbish bin, but his curiosity got the better of him. He popped the seal and pulled the invitation out to read it. A house party, fancy ball dress, shooting, drinking, eating: the usual fare. Should he accept, it would require a tuxedo on his part. He wasn’t sure why Kenneworth had included him, given the animosity that existed between their families. He wasn’t even sure he could be trusted in a shooting party not to shoot his host when his host was David Preston.
And the thought of an entire weekend spent watching the man chasing some poor girl who hadn’t the sense to see through his ploys was simply more than Stephen could take.
No, he wouldn’t do it.
He leaned against the dresser and checked the texts he’d ignored earlier on his phone, then he sighed again. Messages from not one but all three of the women he was currently dating, telling him each assumed he would be accepting Kenneworth’s invitation. The only positive thing about that was at least they knew he wasn’t seeing any of them exclusively, which simplified things. They were also only interested in his title, which simplified things even more. His current income was more than sufficient for his own needs but not enough to keep any of the three in the style they would have liked to have become accustomed to. Why they continued to date him, he couldn’t have said.
He tossed the invitation onto the dresser and went to put himself to bed. He knew he should have accepted the invitation, to put foolish rumors about family feuds to rest if nothing else, but he would be damned if he would. It would be easy enough to plead a deadline, go back to his office, and bury himself in as much medievalism as he could.
He looked up at the wooden canopy above his head for a moment with his hand on the lamp and frowned thoughtfully. His father, an unusually robust and hearty man, hadn’t looked particularly well that evening, but perhaps that was from stress. He would have to quiz his mother at breakfast and see if there was something amiss. He had been coming home once a fortnight to see to things his father didn’t want to give up but didn’t have the energy to attend to properly, but perhaps it was time he increased his visits. After all, whilst Artane’s library wasn’t Cambridge’s, it was extensive. And he wasn’t past handing over a few tutoring duties if necessary.
Yes, he would forgo the delights of Kenneworth House and spend the following weekend at home.
It was the very least he could do.
Chapter 3
Peaches stood just outside the small train station near Sedgwick and took several deep, cleansing breaths. She reached for the first mantra that came to hand—which at the moment was I will not kill my sister—and wondered why it was that she just couldn’t seem to say no to people she loved.
“It’ll be okay,” Tess said soothingly.
“Then you go do it!”
“I can’t,” Tess said, sounding far too reasonable for the current situation. “Terry Holmes is driving all the way down from Chevington to save me a trip there. And you know I can’t be here and at Cambridge at the same time.”
“Which is why you should have rescheduled the meeting that contained fewer people,” Peaches said briskly, “which would have been, sister dear, the meeting with your Mr. Holmes.”
Tess gave her a look that in another might have been called pleading. “This is really important to me,” she said earnestly. “And I promise if you do this for me, I’ll pay you back. Double.”
“I’m not sure you can possibly pay me back for talking me into going to a stupid afternoon tea,” Peaches groused. She shot Tess a look. “With academics, no less!”
“You’ll be fine—”
“I vowed I would never do this again, if you remember.”
“The details escape me,” Tess said, frowning thoughtfully. “Are you sure you’re not imagining things?”
“I am not,” Peaches said. “The debacle happened during my junior year of high school, high school being a place you abandoned me to without a backward glance as you graduated early. You were at Aunt Edna’s on break and promised both Bobby Rutledge and Gary Peters that you would go first to dinner, then to a stupid football game. Bobby offered Italian but you wanted French, so Gary won. I ended up wearing tomato sauce on my shirt all evening thanks to nerves over the possibility of running into you in the stands.” She gritted her teeth. “I’ve never forgiven you for it.”
“You shouldn’t be holding on to these negative feelings,” Tess said, one eyebrow raised. “I don’t think it’s healthy for you—”
“Shut up.”
“And you didn’t have to go, you know.”
“I was hungry and Aunt Edna was making tongue sandwiches,” Peaches muttered. “It had seemed at the time like the lesser of two evils.”
“That’s probably what turned you into a vegetarian.”
“Aunt Edna is responsible, yes, and you’re trying to distract me. Tell me again why it won’t get out that you were happily lunching at home in your bunny slippers while being at Cambridge at the same time, wearing itchy nylons?”
“Nylons don’t itch, which you would know if you wore them more often, and these are two entirely separate groups of people. They’ll never cross paths.”
Peaches suppressed the urge to swear at her.
“Why would I stake my entire academic reputation on you if this thing with Terry wasn’t time critical?” Tess asked reasonably.
“You’re a nut?”
Tess only laughed at her. “Go hop on that train. They’re talking all about the psychology of medieval lords and ladies this afternoon. You can fake that.”
Peaches glared at her. “You should be going not me—actually, your husband should be going. What do I know about the medieval mind-set?”
Tess looked at John. “Any advice for her? How do medieval men think?”
Peaches turned to look at John, who had come no doubt to help Tess in her nefarious goal of shoving an innocent unemployed former life coach in a direction she didn’t want to go.
John shrugged. “Find the enemy, kill him, hurry home while the wine is still cold and the bread not burned.”
Peaches scowled at him. “That’s not useful.”
“But it is accurate,” he said with a smile. “And having seen both times myself, I’d say not much has changed. My task now is to protect my family, see them fed and clothed, and carve out a bit of time for the beauty of music and art. The only difference eight hundred years ago was that I didn’t have a family and I was carrying a sword. I still grumbled about practicing the lute, still ha
ted the itchy good clothes my mother put me in when I was a lad, and still happily put my feet up after a hard morning in the lists. Not much has changed but the amenities.”
Peaches heaved a heavy sigh, then looked at her sister. “They’ll still know I’m not you.”
“Did you bring pantyhose?”
“Yes.”
“Then they won’t have a clue.” Tess kissed her on the cheek. “Holly already has her couch made up for you.”
Peaches might have protested a bit longer, but Tess had given her a good shove toward the train and the momentum wouldn’t let her stop. She frowned at her sister over her shoulder, but found she couldn’t keep it up for very long. The frowning, not the looking over her shoulder.
The truth was, Tess and John just looked so perfectly happy and perfectly normal, she never would have guessed when John had been born or how long and vociferously Tess had shunned all sorts of fairy tales. And there Tess now was, countess of her own castle, married to an earl of his own castle who happened to be a medieval knight who could hoist a sword in her defense if necessary or just punch someone in the nose if blades would have been considered impolite.
Tess was safe.
Peaches found herself swept up by such a wave of envy, she stumbled. Tess started forward, but Peaches shook her head quickly, smiled, then hoisted her bag and tromped off to look for the appropriate train track. Since there was only one, it was an easy find.
She didn’t want John. She wasn’t even sure she wanted a guy with a castle and a sword.
She just wanted her dream.
But if that guy, castle, and sword came with some sort of fairy-tale prelude, she supposed she wouldn’t argue.
She got on her train, found a seat, and settled back for a long ride nor’nor’east. She’d had several decent nights’ sleep with the invitation to the ball under her pillow and had fully resigned herself to the foolishness of pinning too many hopes on a single weekend. There was absolutely no way she would find anything special at Kenneworth House.
Her heart whispered differently.
She looked out the window to distract herself but found that watching the scenery go by was all too conducive to contemplating things she hadn’t allowed herself to before.
Perhaps, in the end, it wasn’t unhealthy to dream. Hadn’t she just begun over the past few months to tell her clients—when she’d had clients, of course—to make a list of their most impossible, most cherished dreams because sometimes just the act of making that list was enough to change the direction of a life?
She was beginning to wonder if Fate was trying to tell her to change hers.
She sighed deeply, finding herself left with no choice but to examine that load of bricks that had been dumped on the other side of the scale. She did need a change. She’d been in the organizing business for seven years, since she graduated from college, and she had to admit that she’d almost had enough of people who couldn’t limit themselves to touching a piece of paper only once.
And the thought of that terrified her.
It was the same sort of terror she’d felt at twenty when she’d been reaching for her bachelor of science diploma and accepted what she’d realized on the night she’d seen that couple waltzing around the quad, namely that she really didn’t want to spend her life in a research lab. She’d faced the fact that while she had been content with the idea of helping people have a better life through the judicious use of pharmaceuticals, she had mostly just gone into science because it had been the hardest major she could see herself pursuing.
Funny how Aunt Edna had only remained silent after she had, still clutching her diploma, blurted out the truth.
A celebratory luncheon had been Aunt Edna’s only comment. Her graduation gifts had been Peaches’s acceptance letter into the Daughters of the American Revolution and an enormous book about the genealogies of Britain’s most famous families.
Peaches had known there was a deeper meaning behind both gifts, but she’d had the distinct feeling that discovering that meaning would spell trouble for her. So she’d expressed the acceptable level of gratitude—it had been Aunt Edna, after all, who wasn’t really her aunt but her great-aunt whose age one simply didn’t discuss—then taken the first job she’d been able to find, which had been making smoothies in a little shop at Pike Place Market. She’d already been a vegetarian, which had helped, but she’d been convinced it was her patchouli-scented parents staggering accidentally into her interview that had gotten her the gig.
One of her regular clients had been, as it happened, Brandalyse Stevens. She’d first accepted a job as Brandi’s raw-food chef, then found herself over the course of the ensuing six months not only uncooking but decluttering and organizing all of Brandi’s closets and then the closets of Brandi’s closest friends. That had blossomed into a business that while never enormous had at least given her the flexibility and cash to fly to England a couple of times a year and mooch off Tess.
She leaned her head back against the seat and sighed deeply. She supposed she could go on with her life as discoverer of intentions, dispenser of feng shui–ish advice, and all-around balancer of other people’s lives, though heading back to Seattle to do that might be a little more difficult than it looked at first glance. She didn’t have to dig through her backpack to find the fax that had been waiting for her that morning, the one from Roger Peabody telling her that her landlord had decided that since she hadn’t been willing to sign another lease—why would she have when she hadn’t been sure what Tess was doing?—he was going to re-rent her apartment. And that Roger had done her the favor of taking her meager belongings and storing them at his place.
The thought of his riffling through any of her things gave her the willies. In fact, it was enough to leave her thinking that everything she really needed, she had brought in her suitcase to England. The odds of her going back to Seattle were very slim, indeed.
Which left her where she was: homeless, fairly broke, and wishing something magical would happen.
She couldn’t bring herself to hope that something might be found at David of Kenneworth’s fancy dress ball.
It was four o’clock on the dot when she presented herself at the door of a surprisingly spacious semidetached house within walking distance of where she’d crashed with a friend of Tess’s. She suppressed the urge to adjust her sensible business skirt—well, Tess’s sensible business skirt, actually—and put on what she hoped was a respectable PhD’s sort of smile when the door opened.
“Ah, Dr. Alexander,” an older gentleman said, extending his hand. “So pleased you could come.”
“Dr. Trotter-Smythe,” Peaches said, almost without twitching. She had to bite her tongue to keep from saying, I presume. Because she was presuming. Tess had told her who was hosting, but the bulk of the guest list was peopled by academics Tess didn’t know. Fortunately.
Dr. Trotter-Smythe beamed, then welcomed her into his salon that simply reeked of old money and pipe smoke.
Peaches ungritted her teeth. This was the very last time she did anything this stupid. If she hadn’t felt so guilty about crashing Tess’s first month as a newlywed …
She took a deep, steadying breath. Last time. Really.
“Let me introduce you to our guest of honor,” Dr. Trotter-Smythe said, nodding in the direction of a tiny little woman who looked as if she’d been alive since the Middle Ages. “Dr. Plantagenet, and yes, the name is truly hers.”
Peaches didn’t doubt it. She approached Dame Medieval with the same enthusiasm she would have an audience with Bad King John and wondered if the woman would be surprised if she came down with a sudden attack of laryngitis.
Introductions were made, and Dr. Plantagenet looked at her assessingly.
“I’ve heard many good things about you, my dear,” she said in a voice that sounded a bit like ancient rustling parchment. It matched the paper-thin state of her skin.
“How kind,” Peaches managed. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you as
well.” And killing my sister as soon as possible afterward.
Watery blue eyes assessed her a bit more. “Hmmm” was apparently the pithiest thing Dr. Plantagenet could manage at the moment. “Dr. Trotter-Smythe wants me to do a little presentation, but we’ll have time I’m sure for a robust discussion afterward. I’ll be interested in your thoughts on medieval mores.”
Peaches imagined she would. And she imagined she herself would be suffering from a sudden onset of something more dire than laryngitis, which would require her to remove herself from the premises as quickly as possible.
So she could, as she had contemplated earlier, kill her sister.
She supposed people would notice if she rolled up her sleeves and took notes on her arms for future reference while Granny was talking, so she simply sat in a hard-backed chair and tried not to squirm. There was an enormous grandfather clock in the hall that made her jump every time it boomed out the quarter hour. She was beginning to feel like what she imagined a prisoner of the Tower must have felt each time he heard something heavy fall. Like a footstep outside his cell door. Or an axe on the green chopping the head off another miscreant.
Only her final meeting wasn’t going to be with an axe, it was going to be with Dr. Plantagenet who would be quizzing her about her medieval opinions and finding she only had one, which was that she imagined that during medieval times the only ones going in for wheatgrass were the horses. What she wouldn’t have given for a double shot of the same to see her through the rest of the afternoon.
Unfortunately, all she had to buoy up her courage was a plate of ladyfingers and some artificially sweetened lemonade. Her hands were shaking so badly, she was afraid she would spill her snack all over the faded but obviously expensive Aubusson carpet. She looked up to find Dr. Plantagenet starting across the room toward her, her eyes zeroing in on what Peaches could only hope was her sandwiches and not her, and knew there was nowhere to run. Tess’s reputation was going to be ruined, she herself was probably going to be drawn and quartered, and then her opportunity to find her fairy tale at the Duke of Kenneworth’s glittering ballroom was going to be ruin—