The Cinderella Rules Read online

  Shane leaned forward and rested his forehead on his steepled fingers. It was all up to him, huh? Dandy. Just dandy.

  “You know,” he said at length, “Alexandra was wrong. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.” He looked up. “I’ve been in the Morgan Industries offices all week, pulling eighteen-to-twenty-hour days.” He tried a wry smile, but only half-pulled it off. “Let’s just say, the call of industrial imperialism isn’t whispering my name.” He stood, then paced to the window. “Maybe that’s because I’m perfectly happy with my life the way it is. It may seem a bit bohemian to others, but it’s provided me with an enduring sense of joy and fulfillment that has lasted thirteen years.” He turned. “Not one day of which I’ve taken for granted. I’ve always felt that being a Morgan shouldn’t be synonymous with being miserable.” He looked to both men. “And I would be miserable trying to run all this. I know I was young when I made the decision to be true to myself rather than conform to the family mold, but I’m a man now, and my feelings on that haven’t changed. Why should I have to conform? For the sake of . . . what? Making my elders proud? Keeping the family account balance skyrocketing ever higher? Those are perfectly admirable goals for the person who wants them, the person who would gain some sense of accomplishment from achieving them. Alexandra was that person. My great-grandfather, his father before him, was that person.” He sighed and stopped pacing. “I’ve never been that person. I could spend years here, doing my best to save all this, and it still won’t make me that person.”

  The silence that met his declaration was palpable. Eventually Hal turned and slid a very thick file out of his briefcase. “Well,” he said carefully, lifting a gaze that was unreadable, but into which Shane imagined a whole range of emotions, from deep disappointment to barely controlled anger. When he thumped the file onto the table, Shane amended that last part to barely restrained fury. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your extended holiday with such crass matters as settling the legacy it’s taken a couple of centuries for your forebears to construct. But, like it or not, you’re back in it now, aren’t you?” He flipped open the top file as he withdrew spectacles from his vest pocket and jammed them on his nose. “We’ll see if we can’t hurry up and sell it all off, so you can get back to your South Seas clambake.”

  W hy didn’t you tell me?” Darby burst out when Pepper finally came on the line. Someone who spoke very little English had answered the phone, a maid or something, and she’d been kept waiting for what felt like an eternity. She supposed she should count herself lucky that her sister was still there at all. Seven days under the same roof was probably a world record. Call Guinness.

  “Darby? Is everything okay? Wait a minute, you’re calling me long distance? You never call long distance, even when I’m in the States.”

  “And why would I?” Darby responded, struggling to bank her temper. “So I could get caught up in more of your harebrained ideas?”

  “You sound upset. Wait a minute, what day is this?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Oh!” she squealed. “That means you’re all Cinderella’d up by now. Was it fabulous? Do you feel different? Oh, I wish I had one of those phone thingies with the monitor, because I am just dying to see how you look. And I know, I know, it all feels foreign to you, but trust me—”

  “The only thing that’s foreign is the Swede in Dad’s guest wing,” she broke in, talking with her jaw clenched. “Which is why I called.”

  There was a pause. “You’re calling about Mr. Bjornsen? Did something happen? Is he okay?” She drew in a sudden gasp. “Oh, no. Don’t tell me. He made a play and you decked him or something. And seeing as it’s you, probably something worse. God, Darby, is he okay? Is he in the hospital or anything? Does anybody know? Because if something like that got out—” She sucked in her breath, then whispered, “Shit, does Dad know?”

  “Actually,” Darby said, surprised her molars weren’t already ground to powder, “that’s exactly what I want to know. Does Dad know?”

  “What do you mean? How in the hell should I know if he— Oh. You don’t mean that, you mean, did I tell him . . .” she trailed off.

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. And I take it the answer is no.”

  “Darby, it was really for the best that he didn’t know, don’t you see? He’d have never gone for this plan, and then where would we be?”

  “Well, I know where I’d be. Anywhere the hell but here!”

  Pepper talked right over her. “And by the time Dad got there on Sunday and found out it was you all along and not me, the deal would be sealed, right? Or would have been if you hadn’t hurt Mr. Bjornsen—”

  “I didn’t hurt—” But she broke off on a long-suffering sigh as Pepper kept going. Once she was in a dither, there was no corking it until she was all dithered out.

  “I was hoping that if it all worked out and Dad got the deal, he’d see what an asset you can be and it might even help the two of you to reconcile—”

  “Reconcile?” She stifled the urge to scream. “You can’t even keep your life straight, so now you’re going to fuck up mine? I swear to God—”

  “I know, I know, but I was just trying to help. To do something right for a change.” She flipped the switch and the quavering kicked in, the sniffle of tears making her voice go all throaty. “I was only trying to reunite my family. You and Daddy are all I have in the world, and I—”

  “Don’t go there, Pepper. I’m not falling for the hurt tears.”

  “It’s not an act,” she wailed. “I really do think the reason I screw up so much is that—”

  “It’s because we let you get away with it! Or I do, anyway. And if Dad has a brain in his head, he’ll cane me for being stupid enough to fall for this goddamn lunatic scheme in the first place.”

  “You really have to watch your language,” she said in a small voice, with just a hint of the peeved, but poor, put-upon baby sister. “Things are bad enough without you making them worse by—”

  “Shut up, Pepper. Just. Shut. Up.”

  The phone went silent. And Darby drew in a deep, hopefully control-enhancing breath. When she thought she could speak without banging the phone repeatedly against the nearest hard surface, she continued. “You don’t have any idea what you’ve gotten me into,” she said quietly.

  Pepper wisely stayed silent.

  “I don’t know that I can pull this off. Mr. Bjornsen is not what you think he is. He’s—”

  “Is he okay?” she asked. “Because, and I know you know this, but DarDar, if he’s hurt, even if it was his fault—and I totally believe your side of the story—it’s probably going to screw the deal royally. And Daddy will never agree to—”

  “Are you even listening to me?” Darby shook her head, tempted to just throw the phone out the third-story window, then leap out after it. With an exaggerated calm she was well beyond at the moment, she said, “I realize this might come as a shock to you, but I’m not really worried about you at the moment.” Okay, so she might have shouted that last part.

  There was a short pause, then a very small, “I’m sorry. It’s just that—”

  “Pepper.”

  “Right. It’s your dime.”

  “Actually, it’s Dad’s dime.”

  “So you’re . . . home, then?” There was a quaver of uncertainty. Even she had to realize how difficult it was for Darby to be back in the house.

  “No, I’m in the emergency ward with Bjornsen.”

  “Oh, my God, I knew it!”

  It was probably small of her, but Darby enjoyed her sister’s moment of abject panic. “Please. You put me through Charm School Hell and I get no more credit than this?”

  She could hear her sister hyperventilating on the other end, seeing her entire trust fund, her entire future, coming to an end. Well, it was the least that she deserved. “Really, Darby, your sense of humor—”

  “Was all used up sometime last Tuesday. Somewhere between the bikini wax—a ritual of
the devil, by the way—and learning how to impress my peers by serving the right kind of mushroom torte.”

  “Ew. I’d never serve mushroom to—”

  “Pepper,” Darby warned.

  “Right. Sorry. So if Bjornsen isn’t in the hospital, then what’s the problem with him? Does he not speak English or something?”

  “No, he speaks just fine. He looks just fine, too. Really fine.”

  “What do you mean? He’s—” She broke off, then hooted. “Bjornsen’s a hottie?” Her laughter turned devilish. “All these years you’ve been giving me a hard time for the men I date being too old and—”

  “He’s not Dad’s age, Pepper. He’s my age. And he’s not merely attractive. He’s godlike. In a very disturbing kind of way.”

  “Godlike? Hmm.”

  Darby could hear the twinge of regret in her voice. “I thought Paolo was the one. How quickly they fade.”

  “Please . . . godlike? For that we make exceptions.” There was a pause, then, “I know how this sounds, coming from me and all, but you really shouldn’t, you know, pursue him. In that way. Things are complicated enough—”

  “I don’t plan to. It’s just that he’s—” She stopped, unsure how to describe him. A sharklike demeanor, offset by boyish dimples that did odd things to her pulse? No. And it didn’t help that she and her sister rarely shared this kind of conversation. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Pepper shared all the time. Darby listened.

  “Earth to Darby. Have you heard one thing I’ve said?” She sounded concerned. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you are thinking about him in exactly that way. Now I really wish I was able to fly in.”

  “No more than I, trust me.” She huffed out a sigh. “It’s just that he’s one of those bigger-than-life types; a guy who’s been used to getting his way for a very long time. Probably from the crib.”

  “Ah, so he’s too much like you, then.”

  Darby’s mouth dropped open in shock. “I beg your pardon? Princess Penelope?”

  “Ha. Do you think Dad would have let me run off with Granddaddy like he let you?”

  “You were barely in kindergarten!”

  “I can’t count the number of times you came in looking like the horse dragged you behind him. If I had so much as a curl out of place—”

  “Ho, now, wait just one second, Miss Priss. You were the one who wailed if your clothes weren’t just so, who had to have her shiny little patent leathers all buffed. So don’t go telling me you were the persecuted one. If you recall, I got one lecture after the other and—”

  “And he still let you go,” Pepper said quietly.

  The somberness in her tone made Darby pause. “He was probably happy to see me go,” she mumbled when the pause grew uncomfortable.

  “You know what I think?” Pepper asked, more serious than Darby had ever heard her. “I’m not sure he ever quite forgave Mom for dying on him. The great and powerful Paul Landon simply doesn’t lose things that mean so much to him. And you reminded him of what he’d lost. You’re just like her, Dar. You look like her; you have her love of animals. So maybe he was pushing you away because it was too painful for him to keep you close.”

  Stunned by Pepper’s insight—as much that she had insight as to the actual viewpoint itself—Darby wasn’t quite sure what to say. She knew what she should say. Something teasing, something that would firmly reestablish their proper roles. She was the one with the insight; Pepper was the one needing guidance. It went against the natural world order to switch things around like that. “You were so little when I left, I know this isn’t coming from you. Does Dad? . . . “ She couldn’t make herself finish the question. Not in a million years did she think she’d be having this conversation with her baby sister. It was only because she was standing in the very library where she’d received so many of those lectures. And where not one picture of her mother remained. “Never mind,” she said, her throat strangely tight.

  “Darby, I—” And then it was Pepper’s turn to fall silent. “I’m sorry that I put you in the middle of all this. I really thought—” She broke off, then said, “It doesn’t matter. I guess you’re right. If I stopped and thought things through, maybe I wouldn’t get into half the jams I do. I know you think I’m self-centered and vacuum-headed, but I do think about you. And Dad. And I—”

  “It’s okay, Pepper,” she broke in gently. “Just . . . it’s done, okay? I’m here, and for better or worse, you and Dad are stuck with me as ambassador arm candy until he can get here to close this big deal.”

  “You want me to fly home? Dad doesn’t ever have to know. I’ll make sure Bjornsen doesn’t say anything.” She laughed a little. “I took a self-defense class, so you never know, I could make you proud and whup his ass myself if he won’t toe the line.” She giggled then. “His godlike ass.”

  Darby snorted, wondering how it was that Pepper always ended up making her laugh. And for the first time, she realized that just maybe their roles weren’t so clearly defined as she’d always thought. “I’m here. I’ll see it through. But if and when this blows up in our faces, you’ll handle your share of the fallout from Dad.”

  “I have faith in you, Dar. I know you’ll be great. Just let Bjornsen continue to think he walks on water, pamper his inflated ego, and before you know it, he’ll be signing on the dotted line with Dad.”

  “Yeah. I’m so great at all that.”

  “You’re great at anything you do. You’re my hero.”

  Darby tried to laugh, but suddenly there were tears in her eyes. Pepper had been joking, of course, so it was silly, ridiculous even. “And you’re not empty-headed,” she said a bit roughly. “Anyone who’s aced Dinner Party Warfare 101 deserves some kind of honorary degree.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a master’s in Martha Stewart.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. Having been in the trenches, I think you’re shooting for a Ph.D.”

  “Oh, please. Then I’d be—”

  Darby groaned even as she laughed. At the same time, they said, “Dr. Pepper,” then burst out laughing.

  “I love you, Darby,” Pepper said as the laughter subsided.

  “Back at ya,” she said.

  “Listen, I have to dash. There’s a game this afternoon and I’ve been invited to sit in the W and G section.” Once again she was bubbly, excited.

  This was the sister Darby knew and tolerated. Hard as it was to admit, life was actually simpler when her sister was an airhead. “I know I shouldn’t, but what is the W and G section?”

  “Wives and girlfriends. I don’t think any of them speak English, mostly Portuguese. I’ll probably just smile and nod a lot.”

  “It’s gotten you this far,” Darby murmured, but with a grin.

  “I’ll try and check back in later tonight or sometime tomorrow. You can fill me in on what Bjornsen is doing. And I’ll tell you how best to handle him.” She giggled. “Now there’s something I could have a Ph.D. in.”

  “Behave. And play nice with the other girls.”

  “Yes, Mother. Oh, yeah, what did you think of the costumes?”

  “Costumes?”

  “For the Belmont party at Four Stones. I thought the whole turn-of-the-century theme was so clever. Leave it to Alexandra Morgan to go out with a bang, huh? I’ve gotta dash. If I leave this conditioner in my hair a minute longer, it will be so soft I won’t be able to do a thing with it. Ciao!”

  “Yeah, I hate it when my hair is too soft,” Darby said to the dial tone. She clicked the phone back on the receiver, not sure which bombshell to dwell on first. Not only was she expected to escort Sweden’s answer to internal combustion, but apparently she was to do it in costume. She looked down at the clothes she wore. She had on a black pantsuit that could only be termed slinky, but was better than the shoulder-baring dress Melanie had helped her select for tonight’s event. “Like this isn’t costume enough?” she muttered. But even more unnerving was the news that the weekend-long shindig was being
sponsored by Alexandra Morgan.

  What were the chances that she was Shane Morgan’s dear departed granny?

  Cinderella Rule #8

  Don’t lead with your mouth. Lead with your legs. Or whatever feature best represents you. Offer information sparingly. Mystery is alluring, darling. And playing your cards close to the vest also tends to ensure that you’re still in the game when the last card is played.

  —AURORA

  Chapter 8

  Want to take a hot dame out for a good time?”

  Shane relaxed at the sound of the familiar voice on his cell phone. He leaned back in his chair and grinned for the first time in hours. Days. Eons. “Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure I can keep up with a sexy young thing like you. Might wear me out.”

  “In your dreams, sugar,” Vivian said with a laugh. “But I’m propositioning you anyway.”

  “Please do. It will be the best offer I’ve heard all day. By far.”

  “I have two tickets to a charity function at the Kennedy Center tonight. I bought the tickets as a donation and hadn’t intended on going, as I had other plans. But those plans seem to have fallen through.”

  “Wore another guy out, did you?”

  Vivian sighed. “Yes, well, they just don’t make them like they used to, now, do they?”

  Shane chuckled. “You mean, they used to make a model that could keep up with you?”

  “God, we missed you around here,” Vivian responded. “I knew you’d pick my spirits up. Why don’t you go root through the closets in that old mausoleum, find a decent suit, and I’ll send a car for you.”

  “What makes you think I’m staying at Four Stones?”

  “Mercedes mentioned you were seeing Hal there, so I assumed . . .”

  “That he’d guilt-trip me into staying? Well, you and Mercedes get the gold star.” And all he would get were the nightmares.

  “You’ll have to forgive Hal, he’s really grieving, sweetie.”

  Shane sighed. “Yes, I know he is.”

  “If it helps, we don’t know what he saw in her, either, but love is nothing if not strange and unpredictable. I only regret that he mooned after her for so long and didn’t check out greener pastures. He was quite a catch. Still is, actually, now that I think about it.”