“You should ask her to give you your money back,” Suze had commented at the time. “Nobody looks good in that color.”
“I bought her a Calphalon stock pot for her wedding shower, and a four-quart saucepan for her actual wedding gift,” I said.
“Wow.”
“Home Depot was having a sale,” I said. “I had a coupon.”
“You should have just gotten her a tea kettle or a nice silver frame,” Suze said, “something totally boring that said, “I hate you for making me wear this fugly dress but here’s a gift anyway, bitch.”
Eventually the furor over my Vegas picture died down, and meanwhile, I still had my business to run, collections to design, custom orders. Thanks to my new high profile, there was more work than I could handle on my own. I hired more designers and promoted people within, and they did a fabulous job of keeping everything running. But I was stressed and unhappy. I flew back and forth between L.A. and London so often I was permanently jet-lagged.
Meanwhile, Artie was busy as well. He had gotten caught up in plans to turn London into a green city, with rooftop gardens and cascading greenery from every possible flat surface. He invited experts from all over the world who consulted with him on the logistics, and his pilot project and proof-of-concept was Camelot Castle. It was important work, but it consumed him, so that even when we were together, it wasn’t really quality time.
Chapter 4
I had made up my mind to break off my engagement, had even stopped wearing my ring, when a second plot twist threw everything into disarray. On their way back from a state visit to the British Virgin Islands, Uther and Anna were killed in a plane crash. They weren’t supposed to be flying together—that was another rule the royals always followed—but n approaching hurricane forced emergency evacuations and there wasn’t time to arrange a second plane.
The whole nation went into a paroxysm of mourning as the age-old formalities marking the death of a monarch were acted out with much solemnity and pomp. Arthur had not been particularly close to his father—Uther had been too consumed by his obsession with Igraine to care very much about anyone else, fostering out both his children until they were old enough to be interesting to him. Arthur had always been “the spare” in the “heir and a spare” equation, and now he had to take a crash course in modern monarchy, something his sister had been training for her whole life.
Artie had become king automatically—technically, the throne is never vacant—but proclamations needed to be read, and oaths of fealty needed to be sworn. The Royal Mint, which had been prepared to start printing currency with Queen Anna’s face on it, had to replace their plates with new ones bearing Arthur’s visage. That was true of postage stamps too. As with most heads of state, Uther’s funeral had been planned for years and the minute Uther died, everyone went into action. What no one had anticipated was that Anna would die at the same time, so her funeral was a bit more improvised. A little more haphazard. Kind of an afterthought, really. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Guess which obit got the most play. Two nights before the state funeral, when Artie and I were finally alone in our bedroom—the last time we would sleep there before he officially moved into his father’s apartment—Arthur took my hand tenderly and said, “I know you’re a little overwhelmed by all this.” By “all this,” I understood he meant the whole “royal thing.” I nodded but didn’t say anything. “And I know you were hoping for a longer engagement to get used to it.”
Is Arthur breaking up with me?
He lifted my hand and kissed it. “We need to marry as soon as decently possible after the funeral.”
“That is soon,” I said, feeling a slight twinge of panic.
“If we aren’t married immediately,” he said, “we won’t marry at all. Who I marry will become a political matter, a diplomatic bargaining chip. I’ve already had overtures from several royals pimping out their daughters.” He looked at me earnestly. “I’m old fashioned enough to want to marry for love.” My heart had gone out to him then and I found I was almost on the verge of tears. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” I responded.
“I know,” he said, and there was a note of wonder in his voice. “I’m a very lucky man.”
The look he gave me was so intense that it nearly triggered my impulse to deflect by saying something snarky, but fortunately, I throttled the impulse because the next thing he said was so heart-felt a joke would have felt dismissive. “I never thought I would find love. Not true love anyway.”
We were sitting very close, so close I could smell the faint traces of the cologne he wore, a bespoke scent with green notes and citrus, crafted just for him. One of the first gifts he’d given me was a bottle of the cologne. “So, you won’t miss me so much,” he’d said.
“Are you marking me with your scent?” I asked. “Like a cat?”
He’d smiled at that. “You’ve marked me,” he said. “I spent an hour at the perfume counter in Harrods trying to identify the scent you wear. Woodsy, musky, sexy.”
“Jil Sander Scent 79,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “It suits you.”
I smiled inwardly at that memory, leaned closer to Artie, inhaling. Though it was cool in the room, Artie’s skin was hot, almost feverishly so. I kissed the pulse point in his neck, then kissed his mouth. As if some switch had been flipped, we suddenly abandoned lunged at each other like teenagers—hands grabbing, mouths devouring. He practically ripped off the sedate silk blouse I was wearing, and I ruined his shirt in my haste to unbutton it. Soon enough we were both bare to the waist and he reached out to cup my breasts. The chill air had hardened my nipples and I was so aroused, the slightest touch of his fingertips made me arch in response. And when he bent to kiss them, I felt it to my core, which was throbbing with need.
“I love you,” he said again as he caressed me, and it wasn’t just something to say to fill the silence. It wasn’t just a polite bit of verbal foreplay.
Artie was a charmer, but he wasn’t a liar. And he didn’t say things lightly.
I wound my hands behind his head to draw him closer. The heat between us glued us together skin to skin, and there was no mistaking his own arousal. I reached for his zipper, pulled it down, and drew his cock into my hand.
He groaned as I began stroking him, half-closing his eyes in pleasure. I kept moving my hand. Artie was good about reciprocating oral sex, but this was just for him, a simple thing I could do to let him know that I would always, always care for him.
Our coupling was frenzied and messy and cathartic. We ended up on the plush faux tiger rug some whimsical decorator had placed in front of the fireplace. Afterwards, we talked long into the night and there were endearments and promises exchanged by both of us. “I cherish you,” Artie said just before he dropped off to sleep.
I watched over him, but I could not sleep myself. As much as I knew I loved him, as much as I knew he loved me, I couldn’t help but have serious misgivings and most of them centered on Morgaine, Arthur’s cousin. The double deaths had brought Morgaine back to the city, back to another little cottage on the grounds of Camelot Castle that had been designated for her use. We had moved into Uther’s old apartment which overlooked the cottage, and as far as I was concerned, it was just too damn close quarters.
Morgaine had not taken the news of our engagement well. Stopped by reporters at an airport on her way to the Cannes Film Festival, she had responded to the news of our betrothal by saying, “Arthur’s engaged? I hope it lasts long enough for me to meet her.” That clip had gone viral and inspired several memes.
. Morgaine was older than Arthur and much more worldly. She was also exotically beautiful with prematurely silver hair she wore long, a glorious mane that always looked like she’d just come from having a Brazilian blowout treatment.
Every time she was around Arthur, she clung to him as if her own legs were too weak to support her weight. She was so possessive of him and jea
lous of any attention he gave others, I knew she fancied him. I was certain others saw what I saw in her behavior, but of course, no one would say anything about it, at least not until they knew if I was going to be strong enough to stand up to her.
No one at Camelot much liked Morgaine, although they sucked up to her in public. She was an attention whore who basked in the adulation of the crowds that flocked to her everywhere, feeding off their energy like some kind of psychic vampire.
She was a professional mean girl who was a champion at passive-aggressive behavior. From the moment she met me, she took every opportunity to undermine me, with the family, to the servants, with the press, and the public, and even with Arthur.
Morgaine had a knack for sniffing out a person’s weakness and then turning those weaknesses against them, a talent that served her well as she manipulated her way through court.
I began to dread the nights she sat at our table. Most of Arthur’s closest advisors—the military men he called his “knights,”—were besotted by her. Gareth’s brother Agravain seemed to be particularly enamored of her, much to Gareth’s distress.
“You need to stay clear of Morgaine” he told me.
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
Gareth had given me a sideways glance. “I’m serious ma’am. She’s not an ordinary woman.”
I picked up on the stress he gave the word “ordinary.” I had heard rumors around the castle that Morgan practiced witchcraft.
‘I’m not superstitious,” I said.
“Neither am I.”
I didn’t know what to say to that and Gareth didn’t seem inclined to purse the subject. But later, I called my mother and told her what Gareth had said. There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I’m coming to Camelot,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
She hung up before I had a chance to question her or protest or even respond. That alarmed me because my mother was never intentionally rude.
True to her word, she arrived around noon the following day. Gareth drove me to the airport to meet her and at her instruction, then drove us to Holland Park so we could have a conversation in the lovely Japanese garden there. Gareth sat nearby, out of earshot but close enough to respond to any threat that might appear.
“This is my favorite place in the whole city,” my mother said as we sat down. “So peaceful.”
I was glad the location calmed her, but I’d been completely on edge since our phone call the night before. “Not that I don’t love you and appreciate the visit, but why are you here?”
My mother looked around, made sure no one was in the general vicinity, and said, “I need to tell you about the night you were born.”
I thought I knew what she was going to tell me, some variation of the tale she’d told me since I was young enough to notice that I didn’t look at all like her, tall and thin and brown-skinned. But that wasn’t her intention at all. And with her story, the trajectory of my life was changed for the third time.
“Your mother was near dead when she showed up in the Emergency Room,” Mom said, and it felt weird to have her call another woman “my mother.”
“She was pale as a corpse, and almost as cold, though she was wrapped in a silver fox coat.” My mother looked at me. “I thought at first that she was a shifter of some sort, but the paranormal folk in Los Angeles usually went to St. Bartek’s where they have doctors who know how to treat them.”
“Maybe she couldn’t get to St. Bartek’s,” I said. “Did the metro go down there back then?”
“The Gold Line did,” my mother said. Went right past it.” She paused for a moment, clearly lost in her memories. “We peeled off her coat and that’s when we saw she was heavily pregnant. She was wearing a white dress so soaked with blood we thought it was red and at first I thought she’d had some kind of catastrophic miscarriage, but the baby’s heartbeat was strong.”
She looked at me. “Your heartbeat was strong. We cut the dress off her and underneath—there wasn’t a mark on her. The blood wasn’t hers.”
Despite the warmth of the day, I felt a chilly breeze blow through my hair.
“The E.R. was insane that night, and by the time a doctor was freed up, you had already been born. We cut the cord and wrapped you up. I put you into your mother’s arms and she smiled at you. You have her smile, you know?”
I did know. That was something she’d told me often when I was a child.
“The doctor came in, saw that you were fine and left again to deal with some poor kid who’d been shot in a drive-by. But almost as soon as she left, Isobel crashed, every organ in her body shutting down.”
I nodded. This too, was part of the story I’d heard many times.
“She flatlined—all the monitors started beeping—and then she lay still, her face serene and at peace.”
This was where the story always ended—with Isobel released from her earthly pain and Cherie taking me home with her.
“I just sat there with Isobel for a few minutes, knowing you’d need to nurse, knowing that things would have to be done, when Isobel started talking to me.”
Goosebumps rose on my arms as my mother continued. “She told me she wanted to name you Guinevere. She told me to tell you how much she loved you and how sorry she was to leave you alone. She thanked me for choosing to adopt you. And then she told me that when the time was right, I should tell you her secret.” She paused there and it wasn’t for effect; she genuinely didn’t know how I would react to what she was going to say.
“And her secret was—”
That she was a witch and so was your father.”
Father? My mind reeled. At least I had a face for my mother. Not knowing who my father was had left a huge hole in my heart.
“Did she tell you who he was? Give you a name?”
Mom squeezed my hand. “She didn’t.”
“And she was dead when she told you this?”
I didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but none of it made sense. “You have to remember,” my mother said, “thirty years ago no one really knew that paranormal people existed. Witchcraft was considered a niche lifestyle choice and practitioners were looked upon as eccentric but essentially powerless people. It’s not like it is now.”
It was hard for me to process that because I’d grown up in a world where humans and paranormals existed side by side.
“She was dead?” I persisted, because that was the detail I couldn’t wrap my head around. That and the question of why she’d chosen such an old-fashioned name for me.
“Isobel wasn’t breathing, and she had no brain activity. Yes, she was dead,” my mother said, and I didn’t ask again because she’d spent twenty years in the Emergency Room and knew a dead person when she saw one.
“This actually explains some things,” I said.
‘Yes, I imagine it does.”
“Remember when I accidentally levitated the dog?”
“Vividly.”
“You told me it was a dream.”
“I did.”
“And that time I spilled juice on my favorite dress and got so upset that I somehow unspilled the juice, so my dress was fine.”
My mother nodded. “I remember.”
“You lied to me all those years. Why didn’t you ever say anything before now?”
She flinched at the word “lie” but answered anyway. “Because people weren’t as accepting about paranormal people as they are now. I didn’t want you to have to deal with that kind of discrimination.” She gave me a look that filled me with guilt. I knew she knew what discrimination felt like. “I hoped you’d grow out of it, whatever it was,” she added. “And mostly you did. But now that you’ve got someone like Morgaine to contend with…I couldn’t really keep it from you. If you marry Arthur, you’re going to have to deal with her. And you’re going to have to learn how to use whatever magic you possess.”
If? It was bad enough I was having second thoughts. It was even worse hearing the one person I trusted most in the worl
d had second thoughts about my marriage as well.
“You don’t think I should marry Arthur.”
My mother’s lips compressed. “It’s your choice,” she said.
“I love him,” I said. I had thought about this long and hard. What had started out as a blind date and grown into a pleasant diversion had blossomed into a full-blown love affair. It wasn’t just that my breath caught when he looked at me. It wasn’t just that the sex was great. I loved his kindness, his compassion, his empathy. His joie de vivre was contagious. I enjoyed being with him, the way you want to be around the cool kid when you’re a teenager. His presence just made things better. I felt like my best self around him, but I also knew I could be my worst self and it would still be okay with him, that he would always have my back.
“I love him,” I said again.
“Then you’ve made up your mind.” My mother smiled when she said that, but it didn’t reach her eyes. I knew she wasn’t convinced, but she wasn’t going to stand in my way.
I wanted her to stay longer, but she told me she had to get back to Bermuda. Nigel’s art gallery was having a showing of a new painter he was excited about and she’d promised him she’d be there.
“Be careful” was the last thing she said to me before she went through the departure gate.
That night, there was an out-of-season meteor shower, a rain of stars so bright it almost turned the night to day. I watched it from the roof of one of the towers, part of a small group of people who’d gathered there to see the light show.
“Look mama, it’s a dragon,” a little boy cried, and everyone looked up to see what he was pointing at. There was a fiery dragon in the sky, etched in darkness against the falling light. Even knowing it was some sort of optical illusion—like finding pictures in clouds—it was breath-taking. I knew an omen when I saw one. And in that moment, I finally knew for certain that I would marry Arthur.
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