“Now you’re fantasizing,” Robert said, still glaring at her, still holding Gloria protectively under his arm as though Dougless might attack the girl at any moment. “But since we are so displeasing to you, perhaps you’d rather do without our company.” Turning, Gloria huddled against his side, he started walking toward the car.
“I agree,” Dougless said. “I’m ready to go home.” Bending, she reached for her handbag where she’d set it down by a gravestone. But her bag wasn’t there. Quickly, she looked behind a few tombstones, but there was no sign of her bag. She looked up when she heard a car start.
At first she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Robert was driving away and leaving her!
Dougless ran toward the gate, but the car had already pulled onto the road. Then, to Dougless’s horror, she saw Gloria stick her arm out the window—and dangling from her fingertips was Dougless’s handbag.
In a futile attempt to reach them, Dougless ran after the car, but it was soon out of sight. Dazed, numb, disbelieving, she walked back to the church. She was in a foreign country with no money, no credit cards, no passport. But, worst of all, the man she loved had just walked out on her.
The heavy oak door of the church was standing open, so Dougless went inside. It was cool and damp and dim inside the church, and the tall stone walls made the place feel calm and reverent.
She had to think about her situation and make some plans about what she should do. But, then, surely, Robert would return for her. Maybe even now he was turning around and driving back to get her. Maybe any minute he’d come running into the church, pull Dougless into his arms, and tell her he was sorry and he hoped she could forgive him.
But, somehow, Dougless didn’t believe any of that was going to happen. No, Robert had been too angry—and Gloria was too much of a liar. Dougless was sure the girl would elaborate on how Dougless had injured her arm, and Robert’s anger would be refueled.
No, it would be better if Dougless made some plans about how to get herself out of this mess. She’d have to call her father, collect, and have him send her money. And again she would have to tell him that his youngest daughter had failed at something. She’d have to tell him that his daughter couldn’t so much as go on a holiday without getting herself into trouble.
Tears started in her eyes as she imagined hearing her oldest sister, Elizabeth, say, “What has our little scatterbrained Dougless done now?” Robert had been Dougless’s attempt at making her family proud of her. Rober
t wasn’t like the other stray-cat men Dougless had fallen for. Robert was so respectable, so very suitable, but she’d lost him. Maybe if she’d just held her temper with Gloria . . . Maybe . . .
Tears blurred Dougless’s eyes as she looked around the church. Sun was streaming through the old windows high above her head, and sharp, clear rays lit the white marble tomb in the archway to the left. Dougless walked forward. Lying on top of the tomb was a full-length, white marble sculpture of a man wearing the top half of a suit of armor and an odd-looking pair of shorts, his ankles crossed, a helmet tucked under his arm. “‘Nicholas Stafford,’” she read aloud, “‘Earl of Thornwyck.’”
Dougless was congratulating herself for holding up so well under her current circumstances when, suddenly, everything that had happened hit her, and her knees collapsed. She fell to the floor, her hands on the tomb, her forehead resting against the cold marble.
She began to cry in earnest, to cry deeply from far down inside herself. She felt as though she were a failure, a complete and absolute failure. Her tears were not just for today, but it seemed that everything she’d ever touched in her life had failed. Since she’d reached puberty, her father had had to bail her out of what had to be hundreds of scrapes.
There was the “boy” she’d fallen madly in love with when she was sixteen. She had defied her entire family because they hadn’t liked him. But her sister Elizabeth—wise, never-made-a-mistake-in-her-life Elizabeth—showed Dougless some papers. The boy she loved was twenty-five years old and had a prison record. Defiantly, Dougless declared that she loved him no matter what flaws he had. They broke up when he was arrested for grand theft.
Then there was the minister she’d fallen for when she was nineteen. A minister had seemed a safe person for her to love. She ended their relationship when his picture appeared on the front page of the newspapers. He was already married to three other women.
And then there was . . . Dougless was crying so hard that she couldn’t remember all the others. But she knew that the list was endless. Robert had seemed so different, so ordinary, so respectable—but she hadn’t been able to hold on to him.
“What is wrong with me?” she cried.
Through her tears, she looked at the marble face of the man on the tomb. In the Middle Ages they had arranged marriages. When she was twenty-two and had just found out that her latest love, a stockbroker, had been arrested for insider trading, she’d crawled onto her father’s lap and asked him if he’d choose a man for her.
Adam Montgomery had laughed. “Your problem, sweetheart, is that you fall in love with men who need you too much. You ought to find a man who doesn’t need you, but just wants you.”
Dougless had sniffed. “That’s exactly what I want: a Knight in Shining Armor to swoop down off his white horse and want me so much that he carries me back to his castle, where we live happily ever after.”
“Something like that,” her father had said, smiling. “Armor’s okay but, Dougless, sweetheart, if he gets mysterious phone calls in the night, then jumps on his Harley and doesn’t return for days at a time, get out, okay?”
Dougless cried harder as she remembered the many times she’d had to go to her family for help. And now she was going to have to ask for their help again. Once again she was going to have to admit that she’d made a fool of herself over a man. But this time was worse, because this man had been someone who had her family’s approval. But somehow Dougless had lost him.
“Help me,” she whispered, her hand on the marble hand of the sculpture. “Help me find my Knight in Shining Armor. Help me find a man who wants me.”
Sitting back on her heels, with her hands covering her face, Dougless began to cry harder.
After a long while, she slowly came to realize that someone was near her. When she turned her head, a stream of sunlight coming from a high window hit metal and so blinded her that she sat back on the stone floor with a thud. She put her hand up to shield her eyes.
Standing before her was a man, a man who appeared to be wearing. . . armor.
He was standing so still, and glaring down at Dougless so fiercely, that at first she thought he wasn’t real. She couldn’t help staring up at him in openmouthed astonishment. He was an extraordinarily good looking man, and he was wearing the most authentic-looking stage costume she’d ever seen. There was a small ruff about his neck, then armor to his waist. But what armor! The shiny metal looked almost as though it was silver. Down the front of the armor were many rows of etched flower designs, each design filled with a gold-colored metal. From his waist to mid-thigh he wore a type of shorts that ballooned out about his body. Below the shorts, his legs—his big, muscular legs—were clad in stockings that looked to be knitted of . . . there was only one fiber on earth that reflected light in just that way: silk. Tied above his left knee was a garter made of blue silk and beautifully embroidered. His feet sported odd, soft shoes that had little cut-outs across the toes.
“Well, witch,” the man said in a deep baritone, “you have conjured me, so what now do you ask of me?”
“Witch?” Dougless asked, sniffing and wiping away tears.