If the Shoe Fits (5 page)

“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 into 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 stand 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.

Then winked.

What
a
saucy
wench
, Devon thought happily. Apparently, girls will kiss and tell, even to their friend on her wedding day. He kept his eyes on the enormous stained-glass window over the vicar’s head and tried even harder to concentrate. They had come to some order of events in the ceremony where the endless kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing portion of the program was upon them. Bronte turned to Sarah and handed her the bridal bouquet so she could join Max at the prie-dieu. Devon heard the two women whisper with what sounded like conspiratorial tones, then Devon saw Bronte exhale very slowly through her thin lips and kneel next to her future husband, in the eyes of God.

He doubted the rest of the wedding guests could see her barely concealed tremor of nerves.

Figuring all eyes would be on the bride and groom, Devon thought a quick glance in Sarah’s direction wouldn’t go amiss. The two of them were no more than five feet apart, standing to the side and slightly behind the kneeling couple.

He tried one of those aimless glances that suggests you are looking in a vague direction for no particular reason, then your gaze just happens to fall on something that also happens to be in that general vicinity. He started near the floor, acting as if he were engrossed in the backs of the bride and groom’s bent heads, when he caught the tip of Sarah’s suede shoe peeking out from the hem of her full-length, chocolate-brown velvet gown. He thought he was being quite blasé about the whole thing when he realized she was moving the very pointy tip of the very sexy stiletto in a quick right-left motion, then coughed to clear her throat. He looked up then, and her spectacular, twinkling blue eyes nailed him for the guilty perv he was. Her lips went up a fraction on the right side only, the tiniest mocking, yet complicit, hint of a smile.

She refocused her gaze toward the vicar and Devon noticed a tiny sprig of lily of the valley tucked behind her right ear. She must have known he was trapped there, staring, since she chose that very moment to adjust the flower with one of those demonically prim gloves, then let her fingertip trail near her nose so she could gently inhale the scent. She let her graceful hand fall, perfectly innocent, of course, across the satin skin of her chest, the warm brown velvet of her bodice, and back onto the wrapped stems of Bronte’s arrangement.