by Ally Blake
But what to say? I’m sorry? I’m safe? I screwed up? I would give my right leg to make sure they do not take this out on you?
Her mother had been a maid at the palace since before Sadie was born. It had been her home too for nearly thirty years. If they fired her mother because of what Sadie had done...
Lava-hot fear swarmed through Sadie’s insides until she imagined Hugo’s response to such a suggestion. No. No matter how hard he might find it to forgive her for what she’d done to him today, he’d never take it out on her mother. He was that good a man. The best man she’d ever known.
Maman
Good start.
By now you know that I’m not at the chapel.
Another deep breath.
I couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t right. Not for me and certainly not for Hugo. If you see Hugo...
She paused, deleted the last line. Whatever needed to be said to Hugo, she would say herself.
I’m so terribly, desperately sorry for all the confusion and complications that will come of this and I promise I will make everything right. But today, right now, I have to lick my wounds, clear my head and prepare. Know that until then that I’m whole and I’m safe. xXx
Before she could change her mind, she pressed “send”. Only remembering belatedly that her mother wouldn’t recognise the strange phone number.
In fact...
She found the camera app, held up the phone and said, “Smile!” Her benefactor turned and she took a photo.
She quickly started a new message. Added the picture.
I’ve borrowed this phone from the gentleman in this picture, so do not message back. I’ll call when I can. Love you.
The picture slid up the screen as the message was sent. The top of his head was missing, and an ear, but it was still him in all his grumpy glory. His hand was at his tie, giving it a tormented tug. His dark eyes bored into the lens. He wasn’t smiling but there was something about the shape of his mouth, a curving at the corners, the barest hint of what might—under just the right circumstances—become a dimple.
Her thumb hovered over the screen as she thought about sending a text to Hugo too. What if the poor lady-in-waiting she’d sent off into the palace with the note to Hugo clutched in her white-knuckled grip hadn’t managed to get through to him? Even if she had, Sadie still needed to tell him...to explain...
What? That she was nothing but a scaredy-cat?
She slid her thumbs away from the screen.
“Done?” the phone owner asked.
Sadie deleted the conversation. She hoped her mother would heed her warning or her cover as a possible axe murderess would be blown.
She solemnly gave him back his phone. “And now I’ll go in your car with you.”
“You’re a brave woman.”
“You have no idea.”
His mouthed twitched and...there. Dimple. Heaven help the women of the world who got to see that thing in full flight.
Not her though.
If her mother had taught her anything it was to beware instant appeal; it had everything to do with genetic luck and nothing to do with character. A handsome smile could be fleeting, and could be used to hide all manner of sins.
With that in mind, it had taken her twenty-nine years to agree to marry Hugo and he’d been her best friend since birth. And still, when it had come to the crunch, she’d run. Something she’d learned from her father.
Sadie felt the backs of her eyes begin to burn as the home truths settled in. But she was done crying. She mentally forced the tears away.
She’d made a choice today. One that had sent her down this road alone. And alone she had to remain if she was to get her head on straight and figure out what the heck she was going to do with the rest of her life. But Grouchy Dimples wasn’t going to leave her alone unless she let him do his knight-in-shining-armour bit and get her safely out of sight.
So Sadie picked her way back through the rivulets of rock and dirt and mud.
The stranger moved around to the passenger side of the car, opened the door, bowed slightly and said, “My lady.”
Sadie’s entire body froze. Only her eyes moved to collide with his.
She looked for a gleam of knowledge, a sign that he knew exactly who she was. But the only sign she got was the return of the tic in his jaw. He couldn’t wait to get rid of her either.
“Sadie,” she said before she even felt the word forming. “My name, it’s...just Sadie.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Just Sadie. I’m Will.”
He held out a hand. She took it. He felt warm where she was cool. Strong where she was soft. His big hand enveloped hers completely, and for the first time in as long as she could remember she found herself hit with the profound sense that everything was going to be okay.
The sensation was so strong, so unexpected, so unsought, she whipped her hand away.
Will held the door for her once more. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Taking a deep breath, Sadie gathered up as much of her skirt as she could, tucking and folding and looping the fabric under her arms. Then she squeezed backside-first into the bucket seat.
After Will closed the door with a soft snick, Sadie let the fabric go. It sprung away, filling the space right up to her chin. Relief at not being on her feet, on the run, in the open, rolling over her like a wave of bliss.
Will slid into the driver’s seat and curled long fingers over the leather steering wheel. He surreptitiously checked his watch again. He still thought he had a wedding to attend, Sadie realised, and for a fraught second she thought he might simply drive that way.
“You mentioned a village,” Sadie said, pointing over her shoulder in the opposite direction to the palace.
“The village it is.” Will gunned the engine, carefully backed out of the muddy trench, executed a neat three-point turn and drove back the way he had come.
A minute later, Sadie glimpsed the palace through the trees. The afternoon sunlight had begun to cast the famous pink and gold highlights across the sandstone walls which had lent the small principality the beautiful, romantic, quixotic colours of its banners.
Home.
But after what she had done, could she ever go back there? Would they even let her through the door? And what would happen to her mother, a maid who had lived and worked under the palace roof for the last twenty-nine years?
Sadie put the flurry of unpleasant questions to one side and closed her eyes, letting the dappled sunlight wash across the backs of her eyelids. There was nothing she could do about all that right now.
Later. She’d figure it all out later.
* * *
Will leant his elbow against the window of the car, feigning a relaxedness he did not feel as he drove over the bridge he’d navigated not long before. Back in the village, banners still flew. Music poured out into the streets. The roads were now bare, since everyone had moved inside to be in front of their TVs in order to see the bride make her first appearance. Little did they know they were looking the wrong way.
If Hugo hadn’t yet discovered his bride was missing, he soon would. Search plans would be afoot. Containment plans.
Will was forced to admit that his immediate plans would need to become fluid for the moment as well. But first...
As the engine’s throaty growl gave him away, Sadie sat upright. “What are you doing? Why are you slowing?”
“We need petrol,” he said as he pulled off the road and up to a tank wrapped in rose-gold tinsel that flapped in the light breeze.
He used the collective noun very much on purpose. He’d read enough books to know that, in hostage negotiations, making the hostage-taker feel they were on the same side was paramount. Though which one of them was the hostage here was debatable.
He pulled over and jumped from the car. But not befo
re surreptitiously sliding his phone into his pocket.
Meanwhile, Sadie had slunk down so far in the seat she was practically in the footwell. All he could see was acres of crinkled pink and a few auburn curls.
“Can you breathe down there?”
A muffled voice professed, “Most of the dress is organically grown Australian cotton. Very breathable.”
“And yet I’m not sure it was intended to be worn over the face.”
Two hands curled around the fabric and a small face poked out. “Point made.”
She blinked at him through huge red-rimmed eyes above a pink-tipped nose. Her full lower lip was shiny from nibbling. When she wasn’t acting so bolshie and stubborn she was rather pretty.
Will pushed the thought away. He turned his back and splashed a nominal amount of petrol into the tank before heading for the shop. Inside, he gave the guy behind the counter a wave. Then, finding a private corner, he made the call, using a phone number he could only hope still worked.
It answered on the second ring.
“Yes?” came the voice from Will’s past. The voice of the Prince.
Will leaned against a shelf. “Hey, mate, how’s things?”
A beat. “Darcy? Look, I can’t—”
“You can’t talk because you’re meant to be getting married but your bride seems to have gone missing.”
The silence was deafening. Then footsteps echoed through the phone as Hugo obviously set to finding himself a private corner of his own.
“How the hell can you possibly—?”
“She’s with me.”
Will gave a very quick rundown of the events. Leading to his decision to keep her close.
Hugo’s voice was uncommonly hoarse, even a little cracked, as he said, “I was given a note just before you rang by a maid refusing to leave my doorway. Written in lipstick, on the torn-out page of a hymnal no less, telling me she couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t believe it until just now. Yet at the same time it felt like I’d been waiting for that note all my life. I—Dammit. Excuse me a moment.”
Hugo’s voice was muffled. Will imagined him covering the mouthpiece of the phone. His tension was palpable in his short, sharp responses to whomever had disrupted their conversation.
It had been years since he’d seen Hugo in person. Even as a teenager there’d been gravitas about the Prince, the weight of the world sitting easily on his shoulders. Until his own father had died in a car crash and that world had collapsed.
Will had born Hugo through that horrendous time. Hugo had tried to return the favour after Clair’s death only a few months later, putting aside his own grief, but Will had rejected Hugo’s counsel out of hand.
Will had been mistaken then. He would not turn his back on the Prince now.
Will waited, glancing around the petrol station. Pink and gold streamers hung limply from the ceiling to the cash register. The guy behind the counter hunched over a small TV while sipping pink milk through a straw. The vision showed a variety of invited guests smiling and waving as they walked up the gravel path to the palace gates.
A frisson of tension pulled tight across Will’s shoulders. Everything had happened so fast—the near crash, the rescue, the discovery, the uncommon decision to get involved—the repercussions that went far beyond his inconvenience didn’t hit him until that moment.
An entire country held its breath in anticipation, clueless as to the axe that had already begun to swing, while Hugo sat somewhere in the palace, looking into the face of an emotional ruination that he did not deserve. Again.
“Apologies,” said Hugo as he came back on the line.
“Mate,” said Will, his own voice a little rough. “What the hell happened?”
The silence was thick. Distant. Elongating the miles and years between them.
Hugo’s voice was cool as he asked, “Is she injured? Is she distressed?”
“She’s shaky but unhurt.”
“I’d very much like to talk to her.”
Will thought he’d very much like to kick her out of his rental car, and dump her on the side of the road; force her to face the bedlam she had unleashed. But it was clear Hugo was not of the same mind.
If Will’s intention in coming to Vallemont had truly been to put things to rights with his oldest friend, then it seemed he’d been gifted the opportunity to do just that. The fact it would not be easy was ironically just.
“In full disclosure, she doesn’t know I’m talking to you. In fact, she doesn’t know that I’m aware of who she is at all. I believe that’s the only reason she agreed to let me give her a lift.”
He let that sit. When Hugo made no demur, Will went on.
“I can give her the phone or I can keep her with me until you send someone to collect her. Unless, of course, you want me to bring her back right now so you can work your magic and marry the girl.”
He half hoped Hugo would say Bring back my girl—then Will could deliver her and tell himself he’d achieved what he’d come to Vallemont to do.
“If you could stay with her I would very much appreciate it,” was Hugo’s eventual response. “I’ll send for her when I can. Till then, keep her safe.”
Will nodded before saying, “Of course. And you? Where do you go from here?”
“That, my friend, would be the question of the hour.”
“As opposed to, Do you take this woman?” Will imagined a wry smile filling the silence. And suddenly the miles and years contracted to nothing.
“Yes,” was Hugo’s dry response. “As opposed to that.”
The Prince rang off first. No doubt plenty on his to-do list.
It left Will to stare at the picture he’d linked to Hugo’s private line; the two of them at seventeen in climbing gear, grins wide, arms slung around one another’s shoulders, mountains at their backs. Clair had taken that picture the day before Will had broken his leg.
By the end of that summer Clair had been taken ill. A week later she’d been diagnosed with an incurable brain disease. Mere months after she’d taken that photo she’d left them for ever.
Will slid his phone into his pocket. He tucked the memories away too before they started to feed on him rather than the other way around.
Hugo wasn’t the only one with things to do.
Only, while Hugo would no doubt be fending off a buffet of advisors as he determined the best way forward, Will had to go it alone.
It was a concept that didn’t come easily to a twin, a concept that had haunted him for a long time after his sister was gone. Until one day, while hiding from his economics professor at Cambridge, he’d slipped into a random lecture hall. Taken a seat at the back. Discovered it was Stars and the Cosmic Cycle. And found himself skewered to the seat.
For Clair’s last gift to him, one she’d planned to give to him on what would have been their eighteenth birthday, one he’d only found in her bedroom after she’d died, was a telescope.
As a man who’d never believed in signs, he’d gone with it. As the lecturer had talked of the universe as unmapped, unchartered and mostly incalculable, many in the lecture hall had twittered and shifted on their seats, finding the concept overwhelming.
For Will it had changed the concept of being “alone” for him completely. And it was that ability to dissociate from the everyday, to enjoy a high level of dedicated solitude, that had paved the way for his being the pre-eminent voice in modern astronomy.
Will paid for the petrol, steadfastly refusing to look at the pre-wedding coverage on the monitor. He was halfway to the car when he remembered.
He wasn’t alone.
He had Sadie.
She peered up at him from the mound of wriggling pink as he slid back into the car, her curls flopping onto her pale shoulders, her big eyes filled with pandemonium. This woman was chaos incarnate, and she was leaving a wide
ning swathe of trouble in her wake.
“Everything okay?” she asked. “You were gone for a while.”
“Was I?” Will started the car with more gusto than required.
He’d come to this country, pained at the thought of having to watch Hugo marry someone who wasn’t Clair, quietly wondering if the invitation was his penance for having laid the blame for what had happened at Hugo’s guiltless feet for all these years.
Now he realised he’d miscalculated. She was his penance. Mercedes “Sadie” Gray Leonine. Looking after her on Hugo’s behalf, keeping her out of sight until he could send word to Hugo where he could find her would go some way to ameliorating past wrongs.
And when it was done, he might even be able to get an earlier flight out. It was meant to be an unusually clear night, a rare opportunity to spend some time with London’s night sky.
Feeling better about the world, Will shot Sadie a smile, which faded a tad at the way her eyes widened as he did so.
“The tank is full, the sky is blue.” Will tapped the car’s GPS. “North? South? East? West? Coast? Mountains? Moon? Where are we going?”
CHAPTER THREE
SADIE NIBBLED SO hard on the tip of a pale pink acrylic nail, the thing snapped right off, so she carefully hid it in the door pocket and racked her brain for an answer.
Where are we going? Will had asked. As if she were following some kind of plan.
Her only goal had been to get as far from the palace as possible without being seen. Her luck would not hold out for much longer. Her best bet now was to hole up, get in touch with Hugo somehow. Apologise, grovel, make him see that while her timing had been terrible it had been the right decision, for both of them.
“A room,” she said. “To stay for a night. That’s what I’d like.”
“Excellent. Do you have a place in mind?”
“Not exactly. Some place...quiet would be fine.” Discreet. Not one of Hugo’s palatial resorts, for example. “Where are those dodgy motels you see in American cop shows when you need them?”
“I’m sorry?”
Sadie glanced at her companion, thankful to find he was back to looking at her as if he was barely containing his impatience. That momentary flash of perfect white teeth as he’d smiled had been disconcerting to say the least.