All for You (3 page)

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.

Tess 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 for 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?”

Peaches agreed there was really nothing to be done about the absolute pantsitude of having David’s sister there—a woman she most definitely couldn’t remember—listened to Andrea continue to be excited for a moment or two, then managed to get off the phone with a promise to call back when the second communiqué arrived with all the details about the weekend itself.

Peaches carefully put her phone in her pocket, then looked out over the grassy courtyard and tried to identify the sensation she was experiencing.

It was a fluttering.

In the vicinity of her heart.

She was tempted to immediately list all the reasons it was ridiculous and then make another list of things she could do to bring herself back to reality, but for the first time in seven years, she took her sensible mental shoes and chucked them out the window. She would wear dangerously high heels, blow some money on a decent dress, and indulge herself in the fairy tale. Just for the weekend.

What could it hurt?

She held out her arms and spun, just twice, in the middle of the courtyard. She would have spun around more than that, but spinning made her dizzy so she thought it might be prudent to stop while she was still functional. She opened her eyes in unfortunately the exact spot where that Scottish ghost was loitering, just outside the prop room door. She quickly gathered her dignity, made him a brief wave, then turned and walked to the hall. She knew what sort of tabard he would be shaking at her and it wouldn’t be a Kenneworth-inspired one.

At least she could reasonably expect that Stephen de Piaget wouldn’t be at her fairy-tale weekend. She didn’t know much
about David Preston, but she had heard that he and Stephen weren’t exactly on friendly terms. And why, when Stephen was only interested in musty old medieval texts?

She studiously ignored the fact that her sister Tess was also interested in musty old medieval texts but managed to stay insanely gorgeous and sexy.

Stephen probably not only went to sleep soothed by Gregorian chant, he no doubt donned tweed pajamas before he did so. He was not gorgeous, not charming, and he absolutely did not pad across any floor that had to endure him like a jaguar stalking its prey.

And she was not and had never, ever been interested in having any of his attentions.

She flipped her hair over her shoulder because it was a very symbolic way of putting him and his unattractive self behind her so she could move on to greener and more handsome prince-ish sorts of pastures.