Surprise had Kate frozen for a split second, but as soon as she came back to herself she pushed past the guards and moved close enough to wrap her hands around Rellie’s. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she lied, stomach twisting at the tear tracks both old and new still visible on the girl’s cheeks. “Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know!” The words were practically a shout, but Rellie leaned in closer to the bars as if she wished that Kate could hug her. “I was in the kitchen and some stupid guy dumped this big pot full of water at me, and I felt really guilty about ruining the feather dress so I went to find Jon to say I was sorry. He grabbed my hands to make me feel better—” Rellie’s eyes widened and she yanked her hands free of Kate’s fast enough she threw herself back a little. The guards, who at this point were seriously confused, gave up and decided neither woman was enough of a threat to pay attention to. “I’m sorry!”
“You cleaned the love potion off already,” she reassured her, reaching through the bars to grab her hands again. “It must have been in the water that was . . .” Her voice caught for a moment, brain helplessly calculating how much True Love might have been in that pot. “. . . dumped on you. I’m so sorry.”
Rellie’s eyes widened even further. “That was the love potion you were talking about?” she whispered, horrified.
Kate nodded, the knot in her stomach tightening even further. “I will fix this, Rellie. I promise. Tell—”
“Not Jon.” Rellie shook her head violently. “Even when the inside of my head is screaming ‘No, no, no,’ all I have to do is just look at him and—”
“It’s okay,” Kate said, heart curling up into a tight, painful little ball at the picture she wasn’t quite able to fight off in time. She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “Tell Lawton what happened, and that I’m working on finding a way to fix this. I just need a little time.”
Rellie nodded, then dropped her forehead against the gate. “If this is happily-ever-after, I hate it,” she whispered.
Kate touched her own forehead to the bars. “Me, too.”
NINETEEN
True Love
He was going to bury Fairy Godmothers, Inc. so deep in lawsuits it would take twenty years to claw their way back up to simple bankruptcy. While the royal family’s battalion of expensive, shark-like lawyers got started on the paperwork for that, he would personally do everything in his power to ruin the company’s reputation and destroy their client base. If he had time, he’d also bankrupt each and every member of the management team and get them cursed by the best evil sorceresses money could buy.
Unfortunately, none of that would be any use against his mother.
“You’re mistaken,” Jon repeated flatly, voice like ice as he stalked down the hallway toward the kitchens. After he and Rellie had ripped themselves away from each other—his mind clamped down on the dreamy sigh he wanted to add to her name—he had immediately ordered her to the far corner of the palace grounds. His mother, however, had already seen the entire show, and for some unholy reason decided it provided an excellent distraction. “I told you—she’s Rupert’s fiancée.”
“It’s not as if I didn’t hear you,” the queen huffed, picking up her skirts as she once again had to hurry to catch up to her youngest son. “But that has very little to do with the fact that you’re clearly in love with her.”
“I’m not in—” The word stuck in his throat, the nightmarish love potion rebelling enough to stop his voice, and Jon cut the rest of the sentence off in a growl as he fought the urge to slam his hand against the wall in frustration. His mother, he knew, would only take it as further evidence she was right. “She had an accident in the kitchen, and came to me upset and worried that her dress was ruined.” He made sure not to trip over any more verbal landmines the potion might have left in his brain. “I was helping her. That. Is. All.”
For a moment, the only response was blessed silence. Jon kept walking, allowing himself a brief, wild moment of hope that his mother had decided harassing him was no longer worth the trouble. He should promise her a new dress and send a seamstress by her room later to keep her sufficiently occupied.
Then he heard her voice again, coming from further down the corridor. “Then why won’t you look me in the eye?”
It was an unexpected moment of insight from a woman who had always devoted the bulk of her thought processes to figuring out what style of crown would be most in fashion next season, and Jon was thrown enough by the response to hesitate mid-step. He turned just enough to see his mother standing there with her hands bunched up in fists at her sides, chin lifted, and a gleam in her eye that could only be described as triumphant. It was clear she had some goal in mind, though the precise nature of what she felt she was getting out of this particular line of questioning was not something Jon had the mental capacity to fathom at the moment.
Instead, he lifted an eyebrow and aimed for what he knew would be a sure target. “I’m surprised at you, Mother. Attempting to rip Rupert’s bride-to-be out of his arms while he’s off trying to uphold the family honor.” He couldn’t stop the rush of fierce satisfaction at the thought of stealing Rellie away from Rupert, but he immediately slammed it back down by focusing on the absurdity of stealing something a person never actually had. “What would your ‘baby’ say if he came back and found his darling mother had taken away his true love?”
Rellie, his one and only true love, with a voice like songbirds and skin like the freshly fallen snow . . . Jon tightened his jaw, forcibly dragging his thoughts back into line. He had to get off this topic of conversation—he was giving the love potion exactly what it wanted.
His mother was too distraught to take any advantage of the opening. Her eyes widened at the mention of her “baby,” tearing up enough to pick up the shimmer of the nearby lights. She murmured something that might have been Rupert’s name, looking lost for a moment, but then her expression slid into anger. “You always do that!” she shouted, skirt moving as if she was stamping her foot. “I am your mother, and you talk to me like I’m some ridiculous child! I’ve spent the last week trying to tell you serious, important things, and yet all you’ve done is ignore me!”
Jon blinked, thrown for a moment. “What does that have to do with any of this?” If this was the first sign of the same sort of breakdown that had hit Rupert, he was going to put enough locks on that miserable library door to keep out the entire Somewhere army. “It’s not as if my getting married will suddenly help you win arguments.”
The triumphant look returned, and the queen threw her arm forward, pointing a finger. “I saw the way you looked at the girl! Before you got all high and mighty and ordered her outside, you looked as lost and flustered as I’ve ever seen you. If she keeps you smitten you won’t be so busy and in charge all the time, and you’ll finally have time to listen to important things like the details of my social calendar!”
Anger surged even hotter than it had been. “If I didn’t walk around here all ‘busy and in charge,’ the kingdom would collapse around your ears and leave you without either the money or the time to buy shoes.” He remembered Rellie’s flexible clear shoes, an elegant variant on the traditionally expected glass slippers. “And if you think Rellie has me flustered, I’m sure you’d adore—”
Kate.
Everything froze as the memory of her face burst into Jon’s mind. Kate, who hadn’t entered into his thoughts once since he’d taken Rellie’s hand. Kate, who deserved all the words the potion was making him use on someone else.
He didn’t have time for this.
Jon took a deep breath, feeling the fog of the love potion creep back in. Still, it had been enough. “If you’ll excuse me.” He gave his mother a small, stiff bow, not waiting for her response before turning around and stalking down the hallway toward his original destination.
Unfortunately, the kitchen staff proved as useless as Jon would have expected if he’d been thinking clearly. They remembered the giant pot of water in far more detail t
han the young man who had been carrying it, mostly because they’d been grateful they weren’t the ones who’d needed to haul it around. Further questioning might have yielded a scrap or two of mildly useful information, but after a while Jon started to notice the younger and more easily frightened kitchen staff had vanished utterly. Even the more experienced ones were all pressed against the edge of their counters, watching him with the looks of people desperately trying to disappear into the walls behind them.
Jon, recognizing he would still need these people after his life had regained some semblance of order, restrained himself from firing them all. Instead, he retreated to one of the spare offices upstairs, hoping the quiet and lack of a certain blond young woman who he would not name—though he’d keep her in his heart, loved, and . . . no, no, NO—would help him find the mental clarity he needed to figure out what he was going to do next.
Leaving the lights off, he sat down on the floor with his back against the door and closed his eyes, exhausted. There had to be some sort of cure for this, didn’t there? A corporation the size of Fairy Godmothers, Inc. would have to be aware enough of potential lawsuits to have some sort of way out. Not that it would save them this time, of course, but he seriously doubted he was the only person in the company’s history to not sit back and say “Yes, please” as they slipped everyone drugs.
Jon braced himself when he heard the knob turn. He felt someone try to push the door against his back, but it was the surprisingly polite knock that followed which caused his head to jerk in attention. He was pretty sure his mother had never knocked politely in her entire life, but there was always a chance that Rellie—darling, fragile Rellie—had wandered back inside and was trying to find her own place to hide.
“While I applaud the idea of sitting with your back to the door as a sort of rudimentary locking system, Jon, the fact that you are momentarily reminding me of your father is far too alarming to allow this state of affairs to continue.” Lawton’s voice always took on that extra-dry edge it got when he was forced into crisis-management mode, and even from the other side of the door Jon found it surprisingly soothing. “Also, a brief conversation with our young friend downstairs has made it clear the two of you have had an excessively exciting morning.”
In the process of standing up and letting Lawton in, Jon froze with a death grip on the handle. “She’s not with you, is she?” he asked, horrified at the yearning that ran beneath the panic in his voice.
There was a too-careful pause on the other side of the door. “She is not,” Lawton said, in the tone one might use on someone who was about to fling himself out of a rather tall window. “Open the door, Jon. I haven’t even smelled a proper glass of alcohol all morning, which means now is not the time to frighten me.”
Some time later, after the events of the last few hours had been related to him, Lawton said, “Obviously, we’re going to have to destroy them.”
Jon stopped his pacing and pointed at his friend. “Thank you! That is exactly what I’ve been saying.” Then he sighed, running his hands through his hair. “Unfortunately, destroying them will have to be put on hold for a moment. There are few more pressing matters that need to be dealt with first.”
“Such as the fact that Miss Rellie has the alarming tendency to get dewy-eyed at the mention of your name, and then scream and flee as if she were being chased by demons of some sort?” It was a straightforward recitation of the basic facts of the situation, which by depressing coincidence sounded remarkably like Lawton’s usual bracing sarcasm. “Or the fact that she has you so terrified and tongue-tied you’ve been rendered completely incapable of finishing a sentence?”
Jon glared at him, shoving any thoughts of comforting sweet Rellie deep enough into submission they hopefully wouldn’t have a chance of escaping again. “Unfortunately, I’ve been perfectly capable of completing each and every sentence I’ve started since I woke up this morning. If I haven’t said something, I assure you it was only because I was busy dragging the thought to the back of my head and destroying it.”
“Fair enough,” Lawton said, his brow furrowed in thought. “I can have some of my people keep an eye on our girl, though you’ll probably want to assign one of your men to help her navigate the palace and get her anything she needs. The slightly less naturalistic choice may draw some unfortunate attention, but it also eliminates the chance that whoever it is will feel any obligation to listen to your mother.”
“I’ll ask Dobbs to do it.” Very close to retirement, the man’s finest quality was a complete lack of interest in asking questions of any kind. “Do you think the original cover story is going to work? That R— that she’s Rupert’s fiancée and is staying at the palace until he comes home from questing?”
“As long as neither of you go anywhere near each other and we both manage to outtalk anyone who thinks to question it.” He hesitated longer than was comforting. “Maybe.”
Jon sighed. “Unfortunately, I think that’s the best we can manage right now.” Rubbing a hand along the back of his neck, he resumed pacing at a somewhat slower speed. “What I’m really worried about, though, is how we’re going to get our hands on the antidote before I do something stupid like propose marriage to the wrong girl.” He grimaced at the all-too-detailed picture forming in his head. “I doubt the company has told the Fairy Godmothers about it, or Kate would have mentioned it to me as a possible contingency plan during our initial bout of worry.”
He looked up to find Lawton watching him with an extremely careful expression on his face, and his eyes narrowed again. “What?” Jon asked.
Lawton lifted his shoulder in a move too subtle to be called a shrug. “You mentioned Katharine,” he said quietly. “I had been wondering how far-reaching the effects were.”
Jon’s jaw tightened, feeling the guilt of temporarily forgetting Kate hit him all over again. Then came the guilt for thinking of Kate instead of Rellie, which made him even more miserable and annoyed at the universe as a whole. “Scientific curiosity?”
“An attempt at guarding my tongue so as not to trip on any particularly sensitive spots in your psyche, an effort I am quite relieved to note was clearly wasted.” Lawton relaxed back on his heels, as if satisfied the matter was settled. “Now for the far more pressing question—if not even Katharine was aware of there being an antidote, what makes you so confident there’s one to be found? If I remember the stories correctly, Fairy Godmothers have never been particularly interested in offering return policies.”
Astonishingly, Jon felt the corner of his mouth flick up. Lawton might consider participating in a hug only under the threat of enforced sobriety, but he excelled at shaking people out of black moods when they needed it. “Lawsuits. There have to have been at least a few of them over Fairy Godmothers, Inc.’s long and rich history, and I have no doubt the powers that be would have created a way to get out of them without having to pay all that unfortunate settlement money.”
“As shocking as it is to believe, not everyone thinks like we do.”
“Your other option is to shoot me and put me out of my misery.”
Lawton paused. “All right, mild optimism it is.” This time, it was Lawton’s turn to pace, lost in thought. “Even if an antidote does exist, it seems logical that the company as a whole will not be pre-disposed to sharing their little secret. I presume the legal option you discussed would take far more time than we’re willing to devote to this particular matter.”
“I’d say that’s putting it mildly.” Jon scrubbed his face with his hands, trying to chase away the fresh wave of exhaustion that had hit him.
“I have some excellent thieves on the payroll, but even a genius at larceny will run into difficulty when he has no idea what he’s been sent to retrieve.” Lawton stopped and tapped his fingertips against his chin. “If I remember correctly, young Rellie said something about Katharine working to somehow repair this from her end. Though I understand entirely why you might not to wish to be the one to contact her—”
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Jon shuddered at the possibility of facing Kate while having these incredibly inappropriate thoughts about the sweet, lov—anyone but her. “No!”
“—but I suspect she would appreciate whatever assistance I might provide. Though it would undoubtedly only make things worse if I presented myself at the Fairy Godmothers, Inc. front desk and demanded to see her. I assume you’ve acquired some private way to contact Katharine during your whirlwind romance?”
Jon opened his mouth, ready to answer, then closed it as realization slowly sank in. “I don’t have anything.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Jon threw his hands up in the air, profoundly frustrated with both himself and the universe as a whole. “If you remember, I spent most of our relationship trying to make sure she didn’t figure out I was a prince. That sort of situation tends to put a damper on exchanging personal information.”
Lawton just stared at him for what felt like a full minute, then closed his eyes and sighed in a long-suffering manner. “It strikes me as horribly ironic that you apparently need a Fairy Godmother to properly manage your courtship of a Fairy Godmother.”
The sound of someone knocking politely at the door interrupted any further insight into Jon’s lack of dating skills. Jon tensed, hating how jumpy he’d become, but Lawton waved a reassuring hand in his direction before opening the door. A young woman in page’s clothing was standing on the other side, managing to look both alert and deeply nervous at the same time. “You asked to have anything unusual reported to you, Monsignor, particularly if it’s related to the queen.” She kept her eyes only on Lawton, either not seeing, or pretending not to see, the prince standing in the shadows.
When Lawton nodded, she handed him two folded sheets of stationery and scurried away. He began reading the first even as he shut the door and turned back around. As he got closer Jon could see the royal seal faintly through the other side of the paper. He didn’t need to see the handwriting on the other side to know what it looked like, full of spidery loops that suggested the woman was trying to make ruffles out of ink and paper. “Intercepted letters from my mother’s desk?”
Fairy Godmothers, Inc. Page 19
