At the Billionaire’s Wedding (16 page)

He took the opportunity to scope out the house as he followed Mr. Delancey inside. Just as fancy on the inside as it was on the outside, with sleek marble floors and intricately carved woodwork around every doorway. The ceiling above put him in mind of a room in Buckingham Palace, which he’d seen on a tour a few years back. The stairs were wide and graceful, with a rich red runner up the middle and an ornate brass railing. They climbed two flights, then turned down a long corridor with doors on one side and tall narrow windows on the other.

“The property is still undergoing a bit of renovation,” said the manager as he unlocked—with a real key, not a card key—a door almost at the corner. “A few rooms aren’t quite ready, and Mr. Compton suggests you avoid them for your convenience. The library is the main one still in disarray, but if you find a door barred here or there, please don’t be alarmed. The builders will do their utmost to keep noise and dust to a minimum so you can enjoy your stay with us.”

“I’m sure it will be fine.” Archer went into the room at the manager’s silent invitation, and slung his laptop bag onto the desk chair. The room wasn’t a typical hotel room, but only for the better. The windows were the same tall, narrow ones as in the corridor, and the room was flooded with light. The desk was wide and the bed looked comfortable. He walked to the window and looked out on rolling hills, stately oaks, and part of a garden. It was beautiful and peaceful and screamed of money. Even way out in the country, this much land—and a house this old and tastefully renovated—must cost a fortune.

The porters brought in his luggage and arranged it neatly and quickly on luggage stands, then left. Archer turned around to find the manager still waiting by the door. “Have many other wedding guests arrived?”

“Only a few, Mr. Quinn, but that will soon change. Mr. Austen has reserved the entire house for the wedding party, and we’re expecting every room to be taken.” He smiled again. The man looked like he could be on a magazine cover, or maybe on one of the bride’s novel covers. “If you require anything at all, simply ask.”

“I will. Thanks very much.”

Mr. Delancey bowed his head and left. Archer exhaled and pulled out his phone, hoping its mute state was pure coincidence. Normally it buzzed with incoming messages or e-mail every minute or two, and it had been suspiciously silent since he left the train station. It was midafternoon now, which meant morning back at the firm’s offices in Boston. He began every day with dozens of messages and e-mails, and only got more every hour, so he wasn’t much surprised to see that the phone still had no signal. He dropped it on the bed and unpacked his bags, shaking his head as he hung his suits in the old-fashioned wardrobe in place of a closet.

The computer bag sat like an unexploded bomb on the desk. Archer considered ignoring it and stretching his legs with a walk through the garden, then reluctantly unzipped the bag and took out his laptop. Just a quick skim through messages, he told himself. As long as nothing was going horribly wrong with any clients, he would be justified in taking a day off. He’d left one of the firm’s best associates, Elle Williams, in charge of most of his current matters while he was gone, but he still felt the need to check over her shoulder.

He found the Internet cable and the handsomely printed card with instructions for connecting, but when he plugged in, nothing came up. The indicator just blinked. He double-checked all the connections, undid them and reconnected, and still got nothing.

“Perfect place for an Internet billionaire’s wedding,” he said under his breath before snatching the key and heading off to find the manager.

He went back down the stairs and located the main desk, tastefully and discreetly tucked at the back of the wide airy hall. “I can’t seem to get the Internet working in my room,” he told the same suave gentleman who had shown him in.

“Ah yes.” Mr. DeLancey assumed a face one might wear at a state funeral. “I’m afraid we’re having a technical problem with the cabling, sir.”

Archer’s bad feeling returned, worse than ever. “Have you tried rebooting the modem?”

“British Telecom will be arriving within a few days to repair it. I assure you we’re working as hard as we can to restore service.”

“Restore? You mean there’s
no Internet
?” He’d been right: it was going to be a nineteenth-century wedding all the way.

“I’m afraid not, at the moment.”

Archer just stood there. The concept of no Internet access left him speechless. Not at the moment? For how long, then—hours? Days? The whole week?

The manager was still talking. “I do apologize. Mr. Compton deeply regrets the inconvenience. If you require connectivity urgently, several shops and restaurants in town offer wireless, and of course one can purchase a mobile access plan—”

“I’d do that, but there seems to be a distinct lack of cell signal here.”

The man’s polished calm didn’t waver in the face of Archer’s dry tone. “Yes, unfortunately the house isn’t in line with the nearest towers. We’re down in a valley and I’m afraid there’s not much I can do. However, there are spots on the grounds with better reception. If you don’t mind a bit of a walk, the top of the hill directly behind the garden offers excellent reception. I’ve gone up there myself to test it.”

Archer sighed. “The top of the hill?” It was one thing to contemplate taking a walk to see some of the famous English landscape, and another to face a hike up a hill in order to check his e-mail. He began to feel the sleepless flight and jet lag weighing on him.

“Yes, sir, it is a lovely walk.” Mr. Delancey walked out from behind the counter and toward the back of the hall. Another pair of wide wooden doors stood open there, framing a postcard-perfect vista of green hills and graveled paths into a lush garden. “Follow the path to the left—I find it offers the best reception, and there is a very handsome and comfortable gazebo if you care to sit and take in the view.”

Archer summoned a grim smile. “Thanks.”

Phone in hand, he headed out. Wedding of the year. Yeah, right.

Natalie Corcoran stood in the open doorway of her borrowed cottage and watched yet another convoy of trucks roar and choke their way up the hill. That made eight today; yesterday it had been ten, one or two at a time, all straining and grinding their gears as they went up the road that led past the house. She caught a loud exclamation that could only be a curse word in some foreign language as the low-hanging branches scraped the top of one van. Saying a few bad words of her own, she snapped a photo of the traffic with her phone and texted it to her friend Pippa with the caption
Eighth one today
! She went inside and closed the door, not that it blocked the noise, and made a mental tally of all the lies her former college roommate and erstwhile friend had told her two months ago about this house.

First lie: that the cottage was quiet and isolated.

“It’s in this little town in the country called Melbury,” Pippa had said. “Actually not even in the town, it’s at least a mile or two from it. You’ll love it. Amaryllis goes there when she’s on a creative binge and doesn’t want to speak to anyone for weeks at a time.” Amaryllis was Pippa’s stepmother, moderately famous for her blown glass artwork and infamous in the British tabloids for her affairs with young footballers. Currently Amaryllis was in Albufeira, according to Pippa, soaking up sun and searching for inspiration.

“But I’m going to need access to a high quality market,” Natalie had reminded her. “I’m writing a cookbook.” Supposed to be, at any rate. Privately, she wasn’t sure anyone would want a cookbook by her, but she had needed a face-saving reason for her sudden and abrupt absence from her family’s restaurant. She could hardly tell her parents that she might kill her brother, or he might kill her, if she stayed; writing a cookbook had seemed like a brilliant excuse. Her mother, a chef, was delighted. Her father, a restaurateur recovering from a stroke, approved. And her brother Paul would just be happy she was out of his way so he could continue trying to ruin everything that made her parents’ pride and joy special—or, as he called it, expanding their brand.

“There’s a local market right in town,” Pippa promised. “Just walk down and get as many organic eggs and as much fresh bacon as you need.”

“Will it be filled with tourists?” Not that she had anything against tourists, but she was feeling a little antisocial and wanted peace. “Are there going to be people snapping pictures of the house from the road?”

Phillipa snorted. “No one ever finds that cottage. Melbury is perfectly ordinary, and it’s not close to anything especially historical or scenic. Honestly, I thought I would die of boredom when I crashed with Amaryllis for a few weeks. It’s the house that time forgot.”

“Whoa. I need a real kitchen, Pip.” Natalie had wondered if Pippa even knew what a real kitchen looked like. She’d certainly never needed to know; Pippa’s father had made a fortune in banking before driving his Ferrari into a brick wall. In college, Pippa was infamous for almost burning down their apartment building by microwaving soup that was still in the can. Natalie would have bet good money she had never cooked anything in her life.

“Of course it’s got a kitchen. Amaryllis thinks she can cook, so she put in everything state-of-the-art.” There was a pause. “I’m sure it all works.”

In fairness, Natalie had to admit Pippa had been right about the kitchen. Everything was absolutely up to date—although she was still puzzling out the idiosyncrasies of the massive AGA cooker—and it all worked splendidly. The icing on the cake was the walk-in wine cooler, which was mostly empty of wine at the moment and therefore a perfect giant refrigerator. Judging solely on the merits of the kitchen, Primrose Cottage was ideal.

But the second lie: no one would bother her.

“It’s honestly in the middle of nowhere,” Pippa had assured her. “There aren’t even neighbors. The only house within two miles is an old manor house, and I think it’s been condemned. No one lives there, the owners have moved to Bali. You can cook eighteen hours a day and never see a soul unless you go into town.”

That had tipped her over the brink. Natalie was not by nature a remote or shy person, but the last year had left some serious scars on her psyche. A year ago, everything had been great. Her parents had still been in charge of the family restaurant, Cuisine du Jude, her mother in the kitchen and her father in the front of the house. Natalie loved Cuisine du Jude, or just the Jude, as they called it. She’d grown up there, folding napkins when she was a kid, manning the soda fountain and busing tables when she was a teenager, then helping out in the kitchen during college under her mother’s expert instruction.

Judith Corcoran had been born to cook. There was no other explanation for her deft touch with flavors and textures, her eye for a beautifully arranged plate, her attention to the smallest influence on her diner’s happiness. Tom, Natalie’s dad, said he was the only struggling student who gained weight while putting himself through college on a shoestring budget, because his wife could make a four-star dinner out of a buck and a half’s worth of ingredients. A few years after he finished his degree in business, he’d borrowed money from every family member with a hundred dollars to spare and opened a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Judy cooked, Tom bused and managed. Soon they moved to a bigger spot, then to a nicer one with a patio on the river, and there they’d stayed, successful but more a local gem than anything, until three years ago when a renowned restaurant critic, in town for her son’s college graduation, ate at the Jude. A month later her raving review appeared in the
New York Times
, calling the Jude “the most perfect date night restaurant in the world.” The national morning TV shows called. Oprah visited. Judy Corcoran was invited on cooking shows left and right. And every table in the restaurant was booked up for eight months in advance.

Then it all went to pieces.

Tom had a stroke—thankfully not a debilitating one, but bad enough to shake everything up. The doctors decreed he should not work for at least six months; Judy declared she was taking a sabbatical to care for him and oversee his rehab. Natalie, who had been cooking alongside her mother since she was six, would take over the kitchen, and Paul, who had followed their father into the business side, would run the front of the house. That was fine with Natalie. The Jude had been her life, and she wanted to stay there forever, keeping up her parents’ tradition. If only Paul hadn’t gotten stars in his eyes from all the national press fawning over the Jude. All on his own, he decided that one location was not enough; they needed two or three or eight. And he’d gone and hired an architect to start planning these new locations.

The fight, when Natalie found out, was epic. Worse than when they were kids. Only this one hadn’t ended with a spanking or being grounded. Their mother had intervened, white-faced and furious. “Stop it,” she told them both. “You are too old for this. You owe your father better. Paul, there will be no expansion without your father’s approval, and he’s too weak to give it. If you ask him about it, I will disinherit you now,” she said as he’d opened his mouth to argue. “Natalie, things cannot stay the same forever and ever.” She’d looked between the two of them in the deeply disappointed way only a mother could manage. “You’re not to speak to each other for two weeks. Cool down and act like rational adults.”

“What about the Jude?” Natalie had protested. “We can’t run the restaurant without speaking.”

“Mick can mediate,” said her mother, naming the Jude’s sous chef.

Natalie tried, but within a week realized it wouldn’t work. It turned out she and her brother were totally capable of communicating without speaking a word, and most of their exchanged glances could be translated as
you are such an idiot
. The day Paul had the nerve to have his architect out to the restaurant for lunch, Natalie lost it and dumped a bowl of soup on her brother. Paul called her crazy. Natalie called him a lying snake. Mick called their mother.

Writing a cookbook had been the only straw Natalie could grasp to save face. Banished from the Jude, she had to get away, as far away as possible, from her brother’s subtle gloating. He wasn’t getting his way just yet, but she’d blown her cred as the sane, sensible child and they both knew it. Thank God for Pippa, who had volunteered this cottage—a cooking paradise far enough removed from Massachusetts that she wouldn’t be able to embarrass herself again. Even if Pippa had warned her it was next to a construction zone, she would have gone, but she’d gotten used to the relative quiet. The last week or so had made her feel like she was living in the middle of a highway.