If the Shoe Fits

by Megan Mulry

  Sarah suddenly realized that it wasn’t just her clothes that were littering the floor. “Oh my God! Dad! What are you doing in here?! I thought you were room service! Don’t you knock?!”

  “Of course I knocked!” He was making his way backward, comically, out of the room, when the previously immobile lump of sheets and blankets piled on the bed began to shift and groan.

  “Dad! Get out!” She reached to quickly open the door before Devon revealed himself. For some lucky reason, he had burrowed under the whole pile of linens. Then Sarah remembered the reason Devon was cocooned under all the bedding and flushed anew, right up to her hair follicles. “Go! Now!”

  “I’m going, I’m going!” Her father was out the door in seconds, muttering inanities about British weddings having the strangest effect on young people.

  Sarah shut the door behind him and moaned with embarrassment.

  Devon started rustling around and Sarah walked back to the bed, sitting at the edge as she waited for him to emerge. He pulled her back into his arms and slowly undid the belt of the robe. He smiled and said nothing as he reached his arms behind her and hugged her to him, ultimately settling his lips on her neck, then making his way lower still. She made a futile attempt to swat him away.

  “Do you have no shame?” she scolded.

  “Of course I have shame, but thanks to your fierce protection of my anonymity, I don’t have any shame as far as your father is concerned.” His voice was a muffled caricature of itself. His kisses resumed along the ridge of her breast, then lower toward her navel.

  “Cut that out!” Sarah half laughed, half reprimanded. “You are relentless.”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  She turned and sat upright, pushing some pillows behind her and tucking the robe firmly back across her chest. He lifted his head on one elbow and looked up at her expectantly, his face boyishly framed under the bedding.

  “Devon…”

  “Sarah…” he said, mocking her serious-Sarah voice.

  “Well, I mean, I’d rather not get embroiled in some family conflagration with my father and my stepmother and you all having some meet-and-greet in the lobby. Let’s just call it a night, or a day, or whatever, shall we?”

  “It’s a bit early to call it a day… it’s just starting.”

  “Don’t you have to be somewhere?” Sarah sounded like she was talking to a stray dog.

  He looked almost crestfallen, then smiled.

  “I get it. Over and out. Roger that. Pizza and a six-pack and all that. I’m not complaining!” Before she knew what he was doing, he was up and out of the bed, strolling stark naked around the chamber, looking through the shotgun spray of clothes and undergarments that littered the floor and furniture.

  When he came upon her microscopic white lace underwear, he held them up with his curved pinky and asked, “Are these yours or mine?”

  Sarah pulled the sheets up over her head and squirmed. “I am so mortified!” she squeaked from under the covers, then peeked one eye out to see him.

  “I suspect they are yours.” He rubbed the fabric between his fingers, as if assessing the quality, then nodded his approval and tossed them onto the bed. He continued his naked parade around the room looking for his own kit, Sarah’s gaze following him with what could only be described as raw lust. His body was insane, the hard planes of his stomach, the sinewy pull of his shoulders. Every muscle screamed, “I’m alive!” His arms. His back. His legs. Sarah sighed and let herself enjoy the view.

  “Enjoying the show, are you?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she answered.

  After a few minutes, he was more or less dressed and came to the edge of the bed to say good-bye. She loved the pressure and warmth of his body as he sat on the mattress next to her. All of a sudden, he tugged the sheet down until he had a full view of her flushed, beatific face, rather than that single roving eye. Her hair was a wild mass of mussed gold, honey, and barely brown loose curls, framing her cheekbones and jawline. Her eyes were… going to be the death of him. Cornflower. Aquamarine. Rimmed in a dark, mischievous cobalt. Devon let the back of his fingers trail down her cheek and neck, then came in for a farewell kiss.

  “My breath!” Sarah squawked, pulling the sheet up to her nose.

  Devon laughed, yanking the sheet down to her waist and pulling open her robe. Her hands flew up to her breasts.

  “Didn’t you know lovers never have morning breath?” he whispered as he let his right hand rest warmly on her rapidly fluttering lower belly, his mouth taking hers for a deep, passionate kiss that felt more like the beginning of another seduction, rather than the good-bye it was clearly meant to be. Sarah went limp with renewed pleasure and he chuckled and pulled away.

  “This is not over. By the way.” He got up from the bed and walked over to the window seat to put his shoes and socks on.

  Sarah pulled the sheets back up to cover herself and he smiled and shook his head. His dress shirt was open at the collar and his tie was shoved halfway into the side pocket of his dinner jacket.

  He looked delicious and he seemed to be enjoying Sarah’s endless gawking, a small half-smile playing across his lips. The shadow of his morning beard, the mussed hair falling into his face as he bent to tie his other shoe, the sparkle in his gray-blue eyes when he stood up.

  Sarah sighed again.

  “So, I’ll see you at the altar, then,” he crowed with a wicked smile and headed out the door, taking a moment to look right and left out into the hallway before he departed. “The coast is clear!” he called in a loud stage whisper, one hand forming the metaphorical megaphone on the side of his mouth. Then he blew her a kiss and whispered a soft, endearing, “Bye, lovely.”

  And then he was gone.

  Sarah was not usually one for kicking and screaming, but she couldn’t resist the urge to turn her face into the huge down pillow and squeal with adolescent delight. She pounded her legs and arms in a little horizontal victory dance. She had done it. It was done! She was officially not a virgin anymore.

  The world seemed a lighter place, somehow.

  Her father’s punctual arrogance aside, it was well after nine and she had ordered her breakfast to be delivered to her room at eight thirty. She reached over to the hotel phone on the far bedside table, getting a wonderful whiff of Devon as she made her way past his side of the huge bed. After being patched through to the kitchen via the main switchboard, the housekeeping staff apologized for the delay and said her breakfast would be up in about fifteen minutes. She didn’t want to antagonize her father endlessly so she called his room next to see if he wanted to go ahead without her.

  “Hi, Dad, it’s Sarah.”

  “Hello, Sarah.”

  “Hi, Dad. Probably best if we begin the day anew, don’t you think?”

  He grunted his reluctant agreement.

  “So… Hi, Dad! The breakfast order I placed last night went astray so I’ll be ready and down in the lobby around ten. If you and Jane want to head into the little town now, I can catch up with you a bit later on…”

  They went through the motions of a perfectly courteous conversation and Sarah almost laughed at how hard it was for her father to refrain from making some comment or inquiry about her… overnight visitor.

  “All right, then. Sounds great,” she continued in her best deadpan business voice. “I’ll see you two in the lobby in half an hour.”

  With that done, she slid down off the high bed and walked into the bathroom to shower and get ready for a few hours of sightseeing and antiquing with her stepmother and father before she headed over to Dunlear to be with Bronte before the ceremony. Sarah noticed several used condom wrappers in the bathroom trash bin and thanked her stars that one of them had been the responsible adult last night (and in the middle of the night and earlier this morning), and she chided herself for being so flighty.

  Now that she was a promiscuous adult, she needed to get with the program.

  She felt tender everywhere when she stepped i
nto the scalding shower. She cleaned herself from head to toe with meticulous care, realizing that her skin was still responding with a heightened sense of tactile awareness: the water was particularly silky as it sluiced down her back; the washcloth was thick and rough as she dragged it across her stomach and under her breasts; the muscles of her inner thighs and backside were sore in a way that somehow served as a wonderful reminder of their unaccustomed use.

  Sarah felt her insides start to ramp up, her nipples were taut, and a slight throbbing tension was beginning to build between her legs. Her eyes began to close and then she shook herself briskly.

  “Get ahold of yourself,” she said aloud, with the disciplinary tone of an impatient schoolteacher.

  She turned the shower temperature as low as it would go and realized she had always been under the sexist misapprehension that only men used cold showers to stifle those tawdry urges. She turned off the water, toweled herself with brutal efficiency, brushed her hair as if it needed punishing, and whipped on her clothes as quickly as possible. The housekeeper knocked a few seconds later and came in with a steaming, glittering, sterling silver breakfast tray.

  Sarah fought the impulse to treat every sip of coffee as if it were the most delicious sip of coffee she had ever tasted, nor would she allow herself to dwell on the fact that the croissant was, quite certainly, the best, flakiest, buttery-est croissant in the history of pastries. She forced herself to shove the food into her mouth as matter-of-factly as possible, then wiped at her mouth with the soft, linen napkin. She gave in to the harmless desire to rub the edge of the napkin across her lower lip, just once or twice.

  Or so.

  So what if it vaguely reminded her of someone’s cool thumb trailing across her lips? And so what if her jeans were starting to feel a little warm in the crotch?

  For God’s sake! she scolded herself impatiently, and threw the napkin (now a crumpled ball) on top of the decimated breakfast tray. She grabbed her purse, put on her long camel hair coat, tied a deliciously soft, hand-knit rabbit fur scarf around her neck (Ugh!), and tried to get on with her day without finding sexual overtones in every object she happened upon.

  That proved impossible.

  After an hour of sightseeing—a country antique barn where the wide-plank wall boards were worn yet coarse as she let her fingertips trail along and the autumn air was brisk, moist, and alive in her nostrils and then a local artisanal wool factory where the pervasive, bittersweet odor of lanolin conjured up the sensory memory of Devon’s Barbour waxed-cotton coat… he had been wearing it on the way to the hotel last night… where was it?—Sarah finally admitted defeat.

  More or less disgusted with herself, Sarah begged off lunch and headed back to her hotel room to rest. The car and driver her father had hired brought her back to Amberley with instructions to return in two hours’ time to fetch Nelson and Jane from the charming town nearby. Sarah was completely exhausted and didn’t think Bronte would appreciate a wobbling maid of honor, teetering and worn out (from sleeplessness and naughtiness) by her side at the altar. She stopped by the front desk to schedule a wake-up call for two that afternoon, and made her way with heavy, methodical steps up the luxurious, red-carpeted, medieval stone staircase.

  She opened her hotel room and was assaulted by a wave of ethereal spring scents—peonies, roses, lilac, gardenia, sweet pea, and ranunculus. An enormous bouquet of outrageously expensive flowers sat regally atop the round drum table under the bay window at the far end of the room. Sarah walked slowly toward the arrangement, bending down to unzip her short boots and remove them on the way. Her stomach began to patter… she had skipped lunch, she reminded herself, trying to remain rational.

  The heavy-stock ivory Smythson envelope tucked into the decadent arrangement simply read, “Miss James,” penned in a heavy, blue fountain ink. She reached for the card and refused to give in to the insane yearning to smell the envelope before opening it. She slid her index finger under the crisp edge where he had licked it and slowly opened the stiff flap. She pulled out the rigid card and smiled at the simple message.

  “Sincerely hope primary definition of ‘weekend’ includes Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Yrs, DH”

  Or she thought it said DH; it was more like a few rapid circles of ink with a quick slash right across the middle of the whole mess. She put the note on the table, letting the corner release from her finger with a firm snap onto the mahogany surface. She stood there for a while just staring at the blooms, each one looking as though it had been chosen specifically to provoke: languorous, lush, bursting. Then she thought, unbidden and sarcastically, that Devon Heyworth was probably one of the most beloved customers known to British florists.

  She pulled one flopping peony the size of a large grapefruit from the arrangement and brought it to her bedside table. Pouring a small amount of water out of the carafe and into the delicate drinking glass, she trimmed the stem of the peony with her thumbnail so the entire fragrant bloom rested easily on the rim of the small glass. Sarah stared at the pale pinks and delicate whites of the flower and thought of her mother. What would it be like to have a mother on a day like this? Someone to maybe smile and hug and confide in.

  After her mother died, Sarah spent years getting straight As and doing everything in her power to impress her father with her youthful, ambitious summer internships at the Simpson-James department store. She worked in the corporate offices and followed her father’s assistant, Wendy Walton, around with slavish devotion. On her sixteenth birthday, Sarah realized that no amount of “best behavior” was going to wrest her father out of his widower’s desolation. So, on a rebellious morning in June, one of those spectacular, breathtakingly clear, early summer days on Lake Michigan, Sarah packed a large backpack and informed her father that she was flying to France to stay with her grandmother.

  “I’m going to live with Letitia,” Sarah stated with mock self-assurance, referring to her mother’s mother. The older woman had always demanded Sarah call her by her first name—Letitia proclaimed that she was “simply too young to be a grandmother.”

  At the time, Nelson James sat behind his enormous mahogany desk, the desk he had used as a barrier to the rest of the world for the past four years. The nine-foot tall windows in the mansion’s library refracted the pure morning light of the lake over his shoulder and into Sarah’s eyes. Nelson found it nigh on impossible to look at his blond, willful, gorgeous daughter. The curve of her hair over her left ear, the sweep of her stubborn, honeyed eyebrows, her cornflower eyes that darkened to near-black sapphire at the edges: they were Elizabeth’s eyes and Elizabeth’s obstinate mouth and Elizabeth’s golden, thick, wavy hair.

  “You should,” he agreed simply. “That’s a good idea. Just leave the details with Wendy so I know where to reach you.” Then he returned to the spreadsheet he was ostensibly working on and held his pencil aloft as if to begin again where he’d left off before the interruption.

  Sarah wasn’t angling for a fight necessarily, but she certainly didn’t think her father would let his sixteen-year-old daughter walk out the door unaccompanied without a discussion at the very least. She felt the unfought fight drain out of her, double-checked that she had her well-thumbed paperback, The Razor’s Edge, in her messenger bag, turned on her heel, and left. Unbeknownst to her, it was the last time she would live in that house.

  Leaving that day ten years ago felt a lot like starting her own business. Come to that, it also felt a lot like meeting Devon Heyworth. Promising. Terrifying. Liberating.

  ***

  Devon never thought he would be grateful for the to-do list of tedious, filial obligations that kept him busy from the moment he returned to Dunlear until the moment he was standing at the head of the aisle of Fitzwilliam Chapel, having successfully ushered his mother to her seat in the front row.

  So far, so good.

  He patted his pocket for the fourteen thousandth time to make sure the ceremonial rings were still there, and walked slowly across the apse to stan
d at the right side of the altar, next to his fidgeting brother. The rustle of fabric and papers and shoes against the hard stone floor came to an abrupt halt as the single trumpet began Jeremiah Clarke’s Voluntary.

  Everyone in the chapel rose and Devon watched as his brother’s attention was drawn to the entrance of the nave. The large mahogany doors were drawn back and held open by two royal guards in full court dress.

  Bronte looked lovely in, well, enough lace to cover a polo field, her train trailing endlessly behind her.

  Since her father had passed away many years before, she had opted to walk down the aisle on her own. Getting Bronte to do the whole church business had been a sticking point at one stage of their courtship, then she had done a complete about-face and was now willing to do the whole church, reception, white dress extravaganza.

  Devon’s eyes wandered beyond Bronte’s shoulder and his heart started to slam in a hard, throbbing rhythm.

  Sarah James was leaning over the last edge of Bronte’s train, attempting to put the massive yardage in proper order before Bronte continued up the aisle. The first glimpse he had was of the top of Sarah’s head, where masses of loose golden curls were invisibly held together in a colossal, complicated pile. Devon had to quickly repress the desire to run the length of the church and catch her hair before it all fell down. Then Sarah looked up and winked to let Bronte know all was well with the train, and Bronte began to walk down the aisle. Sarah adjusted one stray blond curl, moving it out of her own line of vision with the very tip of a single finger encased in full-length white gloves.

  Devon tore his gaze away, quickly realizing that if he looked at Sarah for even a moment longer, he would be standing in front of three hundred people in a house of God with the evidence of his lust in full view. It took all his willpower to keep his eyes on the vicar and his ears alert for the cue: somewhere in that sea of monotonous syllables, he was going to be depended upon to produce those rings. Bronte arrived at the altar. She leaned forward slightly and caught Devon’s gaze.