“It takes a while to get used to,” Opal whispered to her daughter. There was a feeling about the place that it wasn’t real, that it was out of a fairy tale and that it would disappear as quickly as it had appeared.
“Houston plans to live in this?” Blair whispered back.
“It does seem smaller when Kane is here,” Opal assured her. “I think we should go upstairs now. There’s no telling what Houston has planned for us.”
Blair followed her mother up the wide stairs, looking over her shoulder all the time to the floor below. Everywhere she looked, she saw exotic arrangements of flowers and greenery, and on the landing she paused to look out the window to the grounds below. They were beautiful, with a lush lawn and shrubberies.
Opal paused beside her. “That’s the service yard. You should see the garden.”
Blair didn’t say any more as she followed her mother up to the second floor and the private family rooms.
“Houston’s put you in here,” Opal said, opening the door to a tall-ceilinged room with a white marble fireplace that was carved with swags and flowers. The couches, chairs, and tables in the room should have been in museums.
“This is the sitting room and through here is the bedroom and that’s the bath. Each guest room has a sitting room and a bath all its own.”
Blair ran her hand along the marble basin in the bathroom and, although she’d never seen any before and couldn’t be sure, she thought the fixtures might be gold. “Brass?” she asked her mother.
“He wouldn’t have it in his house,” Opal said with some pride. “Now, I must go and see if Houston needs any help. You have hours before you need to be ready, so why don’t you take a nap?”
Blair started to protest that she couldn’t possibly sleep, but then she looked at the enormous marble tub and thought that she’d like to make use of it.
As soon as she was alone, she filled the tub with steamy hot water and climbed into it, the water relaxing her instantly. She stayed in there a long time, until her skin began to wrinkle, and then stepped out and dried with a towel so thick it could have been a pillow. She wrapped herself in a pink cashmere robe and went into the bedroom, where she promptly fell asleep on the big, soft bed.
When she woke, she felt rested and clear-headed, and she remembered her mother’s words of there being a garden in the back of the house. Quickly, she dressed in her usual simple skirt and blouse and left the room. Not wanting to use the main staircase, since she could hear muffled voices below, she went down a corridor past closed doors and eventually found a back staircase that led into a maze of kitchen and storage rooms on the first floor. Every inch of these rooms was filled with people scurrying back and forth and creating wonderful smells of food. Blair had a difficult time getting through the crowd. Several people saw her, but no one had time to comment on a bride being in the kitchen two hours before the wedding began. Blair was only concerned that Houston didn’t see her. No doubt Houston had a timetable and she would keep to it no matter what happened. Houston would never find time to slip away into the garden.
Behind the house was a lawn that was now covered with enormous tents, and tables with pink linen tablecloths, and hundreds of vases of flowers. Men and women in uniforms were hurrying in and out of the house to put food and condiments on the tables.
Blair hurried past these people, too, and went to what looked to be the garden below. When she first stepped into the edge of the garden, she was unprepared for what she saw. Before her rolled acres of winding paths, appearing and disappearing amid plants such as she’d never seen before. Tentatively, she began to follow a path.
The commotion of the wedding preparations disappeared behind her and, for the first time in days, she felt free to think.
This was her wedding day, but right now she couldn’t remember how she had got here. Three weeks ago, she was in Pennsylvania and she had her entire future mapped out. But how different everything had turned out! Alan had run away rather than marry her. Her sister had lost the man she loved and was now marrying one of the richest men in the country —without any love invol
ved.
And everything was Blair’s fault. She had come home to see her sister married and had instead managed to make her into a mercenary. Houston might as well have put herself on the auction block and taken the highest bidder.
As Blair strolled about the garden, frowning over her thoughts, she saw Taggert coming down the path. Before she thought about what she was doing, she turned abruptly and went the other way before he saw her. She’d gone no more than a few feet when she saw an extraordinarily tall woman, who looked vaguely familiar, hurrying along the same path as Taggert. Blair couldn’t remember where she’d seen her before.
She shrugged her shoulders, dismissing the woman, and kept walking.
Her thoughts were fully occupied with what was going to happen today, and she was trying to puzzle out exactly how it had come about, when she suddenly remembered who the tall woman was.
“That’s Pamela Fenton,” she said aloud. Houston and Blair had been at the Fenton house often when they were children, to ride Marc’s ponies or to attend one of his numerous parties, and his older sister Pam had been nearly grown then and they had been in awe of her. Then she’d left home suddenly, and there had been whispers about what had happened for years afterward.
So she’s come back after all these years, and she’ll be at the wedding, Blair thought with some pleasure. Idly, she wondered what Pamela had done so long ago to cause the town to gossip about her. There was something about a stableboy, wasn’t there?
Blair stopped where she was. The scandal had indeed been about a stableboy in her father’s stables. She’d fallen in love with him, and her father had sent her away as a result of that love affair.
And Kane Taggert was that stableboy!
Grabbing her skirts, Blair ran along the path toward where both Taggert and Pam had gone. She was several feet away when she halted.
She watched in disbelief as Kane Taggert took Pamela Fenton’s face in his hands and kissed her with a great deal of passion.
With quick, hot tears in her eyes, Blair fled down the paths toward the house. What had she done to her sister? Houston was going to marry this monstrous man who kissed a woman two hours before he was to marry another.
And it was because of Blair that this was happening.