Lucky Stars
Kristen Ashley
Published by Kristen Ashley
Copyright 2012 Kristen Ashley
Discover other titles by Kristen Ashley:
Rock Chick Series:
Rock Chick
Rock Chick Rescue
Rock Chick Redemption
Rock Chick Renegade
Rock Chick Revenge
Rock Chick Reckoning
Rock Chick Regret
The ‘Burg Series:
For You
At Peace
Golden Trail
Games of the Heart
The Colorado Mountain Series:
The Gamble
Sweet Dreams
Lady Luck
Dream Man Series:
Mystery Man
Wild Man
Law Man
Motorcycle Man
The Fantasyland Series:
Wildest Dreams
The Golden Dynasty
Fantastical
The Three Series:
Until the Sun Falls from the Sky
The Unfinished Hero Series:
Knight
Other Titles by Kristen Ashley:
Fairytale Come Alive
Heaven and Hell
Lacybourne Manor
Mathilda, SuperWitch
Penmort Castle
Play It Safe
Sommersgate House
www.kristenashley.net
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*****
Acknowledgement
Chas… through a tough time, not feeling good.
You still had my back.
Dedication
To Baron and Gretl,
My family pets from childhood.
Yes, my pets.
Two German Shepherds.
Baron, so dignified, so dark, so beautiful.
Gretl, so energetic, so blonde, so smart.
Miss you, babies.
* * * * *
Chapter One
Expectations and Disaster
Belle
There came a knock at the door.
Belle Abbot jumped like a frightened cat and whirled away from her reflection in the mirror.
She knew who was there.
She stared at the door thinking not for the first time she did not have a good feeling about that night.
She felt both a strange, thrilling expectation and a not so strange fear of disaster.
This combination of feelings was very weird.
The former, she had no idea its cause.
The latter, she knew was Miles.
She should have never agreed to come there.
She knew it, she just knew it. She should have never let him talk her into it.
It was too soon.
They’d only been dating a month which was way too soon for her to meet his mother.
And it was definitely way too soon for her to spend the weekend at the family’s ancestral castle in order to attend his mother’s posh annual birthday bash which would be a veritable crush of the rich and famous.
Belle was not comfortable in a crush of people. She’d definitely not be comfortable in a crush of the rich and famous.
She walked on leaded feet across the huge expanse of her richly appointed bedroom to the door. She was forty-five minutes late to join the party downstairs and she wondered what Miles’s reaction would be to her tardiness.
She was late partially because it took her forever to do her hair.
She was also late because she was purposefully dillydallying in an effort to delay her arrival at the festivities and hysterically considering feigning a headache, or a fast-acting and incapacitating stomach flu.
She pulled open the heavy door.
She was right. There stood Miles Bennett.
He looked, she noticed instantly, very good in his formal attire.
This wasn’t the first time she realised how good he looked. Indeed, it wasn’t something you could miss.
However, she’d thought he’d looked good before she’d ever met him, considering he was famous because he and his family were extortionately wealthy.
She’d seen his pictures in magazines since she was a young, romantically-minded girl and he was a teen. She (and undoubtedly many other girls around the globe) watched him growing up tall, strong, lean and handsome, living a jet-set lifestyle. The kind of lifestyle that always captivated the press and young, romantically-minded girls. Therefore, the press covered his life regularly and with a great deal of devoted attention. The same devotion that young girls who grew to be young women who grew to be just women without the young attached followed it.
He was blond, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered and had a slim but muscled body that he held with an attractive ease.
Though there was something in his eyes that worried Belle. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something she didn’t think she liked.
Those eyes did a sweep of her and she watched as they grew hungry not in an entirely good way. In what Belle thought was a somewhat greedy way, a way that put her on edge.
Then he muttered, “Jesus.”
Belle wasn’t certain about his odd response.
She looked down at herself anxiously and asked, “Do I look okay?” before her eyes lifted back to his.
His gaze moved from her chest to her face and he grinned. That look that made her uncomfortable left his face. Another look, a look that made her think maybe she was being a bit crazy, a look filled with warmth and affection, replaced it.
His hand came out and he teasingly flicked the ruffle at her neck.
“Is it one of yours?” he asked.
He meant her dress and he didn’t mean to ask if she owned it because, obviously, she did.
She had a small shop in St. Ives which sold, almost exclusively, a line of clothing creations that she designed and made. She also sold a few friends’ jewellery collections and other bits and bobs when the mood struck her, which was often.
The shop had been somewhat hand-to-mouth until the recent extraordinary events that rocked her life. Now, she had to employ two seamstresses to help her keep on top of stock, and her used-to-be very unusual, personalised orders had quadrupled.
“Yes,” she replied to Miles.
Her dress was knee length and form-fitting. It was a beautiful crêpe de chine she’d found that she’d fallen in love with instantly and bought yards of it even though the cost was astronomical. It was the colour of blush, that was neither peach nor pink nor cream but an elegant mixture of the three. The back was high. It was sleeveless but there was a deep slash from the throat to the empire waist at her midriff. This was made demure by a delicate, two-inch, complementary blush-coloured chiffon ruffle running the length of the slash and around her neck. Nevertheless, it showed the skin of her chest provocatively. She’d paired it with high-heeled pumps that were about three shades darker than the dress (on the pink side). The shoes had peek-a-boo toes that had a small rosette which flattered the shoes and drew attention to her French-pedicured toenails.
“Gorgeous,” Miles murmured and Belle had to steel herself against that word which he used often in regards to her, even calling her that as an endearment.
She considered any endearments in a month long relationship way too early but she never said anything, but she had to admit
it kind of gave her the creeps.
It was a word her ex-husband, Calvin, had used to describe her and, just as Miles, Calvin had used it as a sweet nothing. Sometimes even saying it when he felt repentant, wiping away the blood from her lip, pressing the ice to her eye after he’d use his fists on her.
“We should join the party, Belle. Mum’s asking after you,” Miles told her, pulling her out of her thoughts and taking her elbow, forcing her forward, closing the door to her room behind them.
Belle had met Joy Bennett, Miles’s mother, that afternoon when they’d arrived at the family castle, called Chy An Als Point. An imposing, rambling, stone structure with an uneven roofline, some of it built hundreds upon hundreds of years before on a jagged Cornish cliff. The winds blew the waters of the sea so they smashed against the rocks at the castle’s base, giving the already daunting castle a strangely unsettling atmosphere.
You couldn’t say the castle was beautiful. The many different styles of its construction, as it was added onto century after century, clashed weirdly at the same time they managed to mingle.
You could say it was spectacular, almost like a living entity, powerful, magnificent and impenetrable, perched for centuries on its cliff.
Regardless of the fact that it was slightly spooky, Belle loved it.
Upon meeting Miles’s Mum, Joy, Belle liked her without reservation. She was a lovely woman, tall and svelte, sharing the colouring of Miles. She was open, friendly, welcoming and kind, if a bit dramatic but, considering Belle’s mother and grandmother, Belle was used to more than a bit of drama.
Joy was also, Belle found (to her surprise), wary of her son. This was something she tried to hide but Belle, her senses attuned to the strangeness she felt from Miles, read it and worried about it.
Then again, Belle worried about everything.
Belle was, unfortunately, a worrier.
Still, Joy loved him. That was obvious, and she was affectionate toward him. But when her eyes drifted between Miles and Belle, Belle saw the backs of them grow uneasy.
This did not aid in Belle’s indecision about how she felt about Miles Bennett.
Not one bit.
Belle walked beside Miles down the thick carpet runner that ran the length of the stone-floored hall. He’d tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow in a way she thought was a tad too possessive but also wondered if her caution had more to do with the lessons she’d learned from Calvin and less to do with the reality of Miles.
She’d only dated two men since divorcing Calvin. She found she couldn’t open up to either and realised she was not yet ready to move forward in life romantically.
She should, she knew, be more like her mother and grandmother. Both of them had been handed by God an overabundance of outspokenness, outgoingness and outrageousness. They also had the capacity to plunge themselves, both feet first, eyes open, into cold, shark-infested waters if there was even the slightest possibility that there might be something rich and rewarding to come of this endeavour.
Since she was a little girl, Belle had thought that God had been so generous to her grandmother and mother, He’d not had enough to hand out when Belle came along.
Therefore Belle Abbot had lost out on these qualities and all her life had been timid, apprehensive and never took an uncalculated risk.
Never.
It was safe to repeat that point… never.
“It’s too bad your brother couldn’t make it to your mother’s birthday party,” Belle remarked as they made it to the top of a carpet-runnered stone stairwell that she and Miles and four other people could easily walk down, side by side.
Miles’s brother, James Bennett was equally, if not more, famous as Miles.
He was also, in looks, the exact opposite.
Miles looked like his mother.
James Bennett looked like his now-deceased father.
Black-haired with startlingly green eyes rimmed with long, black lashes, James Bennett (if the pictures were true) was taller than Miles. He was also lean and broad-shouldered but his muscles were more powerful. And, if Miles held his body with a casual ease, James held his with a fierce command.
James, in the many photos Belle had seen of him (and there were many), was more intense, more masculine, his features bolder and stronger, while Miles’s still held a hint of boyishness.
James, being elder, (arguably) more attractive and standing to (and unfortunately, three years ago, upon his father’s untimely death, actually doing it) inherit the castle, had much more attention on him his whole life.
He, however, had not gone into the family banking business but instead started his own business. He did something complicated Belle didn’t understand and did it very, very well making him far, far richer and increasing the already oppressive attention he had from the media.
He had, however, also inherited the role of CEO of the vast banking conglomerate that extended throughout the European Union and the Americas that the Bennett family had owned for years.
Now he did both, reportedly with great success even if his attention to these two undertakings was rather shocking since only one would tax even the best of men.
This served only to increase public interest.
The fact that he and Miles routinely dated and often had rather public but usually short-lived (though frequently stormy), relationships with every glamorous, beautiful and available model, actress and debutante, squiring them to art openings, charity functions and exclusive restaurants, made it all the worse.
“Oh, he’s here,” Miles said and Belle nearly missed a step when Miles made this casual statement.
“He’s here?” Belle breathed, unhappy about this news.
Miles had told her James couldn’t attend because of some business in Slovakia or Bosnia or some country ending in “ia”.
She was already incredibly nervous about the evening. She didn’t need another reason to be nervous. And James Bennett was the kind of man who could make even the most beautiful, sophisticated, accomplished, confident person nervous.
And Belle was none of those.
“Oh yes, he’s here. Arrived as a surprise for Mum a little over an hour ago.” Miles looked down at her and smiled. This smile, Belle saw, was not warm and affectionate.
It was strangely…
She stared up at him…
Triumphant.
As if someone had called Miles and told him that he’d won the Nobel Prize for simply existing.
This was so weird it also didn’t make Belle happy.
In fact, it kind of freaked her out.
They made it to the bottom of the stairs and before Belle could process her emotion she heard her name cried.
And it was cried loudly.
She took her eyes from Miles and looked across him to see Joy heading, or more accurately described as charging their way.
She was wearing a deep burgundy dress with long sleeves and gathered cross-draping. To Belle’s experienced eye, the dress was complicated and stunning.
“I love your hair!” Joy exclaimed when she arrived at Belle and Miles. She leaned in and gave Belle a cheek touch and air kiss, her hands curling on Belle’s forearms. She leaned back and cried, “And your dress!” She said no more, her tone and emphasis were enough to say that words simply did not describe.
Belle fought the urge to touch her hair nervously. She’d pulled it back softly from her face and fixed it in a loose chignon at the side of her nape. It took about twenty tries to get it right but she’d finally done it.
Except one, long, thick tendril that curled down the side of her neck, which would not, no matter what Belle tried to do (and she’d tried everything), stay fixed in the knot.
“Thank you,” Belle whispered, her gaze moving to the guests in the vast hall, of which there were a fair few standing about, all of their eyes on her.
After the events of eight months ago, she’d become somewhat accustomed to eyes on her.
That didn’t mean she liked it and it
always made her feel awkward.
Or, more awkward than she normally felt.
Joy linked her arm through Belle’s and announced, “Let’s get you a drink, shall we?”
Joy pulled Belle away from Miles and toward the fantastic drawing room which was decorated in whites, creams, yellows and golds. Miles had given her the full tour of the castle that afternoon. It had taken more than an hour mainly because Belle was enthralled that any family could actually live in such historical splendour but also because it was huge.
It boggled the mind.
Or, at least, it boggled Belle’s mind.
Though, Belle had to admit, her mind was not difficult to boggle.
The drawing room had even more people and Belle felt her body grow tight as, upon their entry, many of their eyes moved to her.
Joy didn’t seem to notice and leaned close to Belle, not as if they’d met only hours before but as if they were bosom buddies and had been for decades. “Miles delivered your present to me while you were getting ready. I love it, Belle. Thank you.”
Belle turned her head to Joy at these genuine and heartfelt words and she smiled.
She didn’t know if she should give a woman she’d never met a present but considering she was attending her party and dating her son she figured it would be bad manners if she didn’t do something.
It took fifteen calls to her grandmother, mother and a variety of friends before Belle chose a piece of jewellery from her shop. Hammered silver that was cut sharply in places, rolled stylishly in others and liberally sprinkled with freshwater pearls, it had a unique style and Belle thought it was lovely.
Still, what did you get the woman who had or could have everything?
Clearly, Belle hadn’t done a bad job of it.
“I’m pleased you like it,” Belle murmured, sounding as pleased as she was and Joy squeezed her arm.
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