by Peggy Jaeger
“I didn’t know. But then, I didn’t know she was married either. I wasn’t told she was getting married, nor was I invited to the wedding. But you know that, Vivienne.”
“Yes. Although Daisy was in charge of the invitations, Cynderella, not I.”
That statement didn’t even deserve a response. I gave one anyway.
“She must have been in charge of the invitations to her high school and college graduations too, since I wasn’t invited to those either.”
“Cynderella, please. Can we not drag up old business? I came here for a single purpose today, not to discuss what you were or weren’t included in during the past decade.”
“That would be nothing,” I said. “Just as a reminder.”
The pinched look she tossed me made her look like she’d taken a sip of a very tart Limoncello.
“Okay, bygones and all that. You’re here for a single purpose, you said.”
“Yes. It’s to thank you for what you did.”
“Refresh my memory because I don’t remember doing anything.”
“The donation from the Martha Baxter Foundation.”
A little niggle bit at the back of my brain, but I couldn’t bring it forward. I shook my head.
“What’s the Martha Baxter Foundation?”
“You don’t know?”
She seemed amazed by this. I lifted my shoulders. “Why don’t you tell me?”
With a succinct head nod, she took a breath. “Yesterday, I was notified that Dolly was being transferred to the Kinsley Wing of Uptown Hospital. The Kinsley is a specialized unit devoted to people who have had traumatic brain injuries.”
“Like Dolly.”
“Yes.”
“Well, good. I mean, wonderful, but…”
“You’re going to ask how that can be possible since we have no insurance, no clear-cut way to pay for it.”
“Well, yes.”
“At the same time I was notified Dolly was due to be transferred, I was also informed the bed is being sponsored by the Martha Baxter Foundation. It seems Dolly’s name was presented as need-worthy, and she was fast tracked. A bed became available, and she was slotted in. I assumed this was your doing.”
“Why would you think that?”
Her eyes narrowed as she regarded me across the desk. “Martha Baxter’s grandson is Duncan Prince, the man you’re…involved with. I’d assumed you spoke with him and arranged all this.”
Suddenly, I remembered where I’d heard the name before: when I’d done a quick Google check on Buddy. There were several mentions of him attending benefit events for the Martha Baxter Foundation.
“First of all,” I told her, “I’m not involved with him, Vivienne. We barely know one another. Second, I’ve got no idea what this foundation is, what it does, or anything else. This is all news to me.”
When I’d been a teenager, and had in some way done something that annoyed or tested Vivi’s patience, she’d look down her nose at me, almost dropping her chin to her chest, raise her eyebrows to within a millimeter of her hairline, and suck in her cheeks as if tasting something sour.
She regarded me right now the same way she had way back then.
“I can’t tell if you’re lying to me or not, Cynderella.”
“I’m not. But just for the record, why would I?”
She thought about that for moment.
“Why, then, would this man do this if you hadn’t asked him to? He doesn’t know us. Has no connection to either Dolly, Daisy, or me. You are the only connection, so I ask myself again, why wouldn’t you know if he did this?”
“Vivienne, I’m at a loss. Does the why really matter, though? Isn’t the more important thing Dolly will be receiving top notch care now and you don’t have to worry about who’s going to pay for it?”
She waited a beat then nodded.
“El, I just heard the Evil Bitch—”
Nell burst through the door and stopped dead when she saw Vivienne seated across from me.
“Ella?” Nell’s terrified gaze bounced from me, to my stepmother, then back to me.
I stood. “Vivienne, this is my friend, Nell Newbery.”
“Newbery?” She said it like it was a dirty word. “As in Darinda Newbery?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a relation?”
“She’s my mother.”
Vivienne nodded again and stood as I had. “I met your mother several times years ago at various charity functions, Miss Newbery.”
I held my breath and took a step closer to Nell, worried Vivi was going to say something nasty and set Nell off.
“She’s a lovely, sweet woman. Made everyone in a room feel welcome. That is truly a gift. Please give her my regards when you see her.”
“I-I will. Thank you.”
Vivi turned her attention back to me. With her purse settled in the crook of her arm, she gripped her hands together.
“For whatever way it happened, and for whatever reason, I want you to know how grateful I am. Believe that.”
I nodded.
“Well.” She took a glance around the office again. “I’ll let you get back to whatever it is you do here.”
Because I knew it was expected, I crossed the room and held the door open for her.
With one last glance at me, coupled with a regal head bob, she exited.
Slowly, I closed the door and collapsed back against it.
“Holy shit!” This from Nell. “Are you okay?”
“I feel like I just appeared in a scene from that old television show The Twilight Zone.”
“When Katie told me she was here, I wanted to get to you as fast as I could before anything happened. I figured I’d find the two of you on the floor pulling each other’s hair out.”
“Dramatic much?” I pushed off the door and grabbed two bottled waters from my office fridge.
Nell lifted her shoulders. “Why was she here?”
I told her.
“I want to look this foundation up. I saw it listed with Prince’s name a few times, but I never delved further into it.”
I sat back down at my desk with Nell perching a hip on the edge, watching me.
The foundation had six pages of links.
“Wow,” Nell said as I scrolled through the first one listed. “It takes in over a fifty million dollars a year in donations. How come we’ve never heard of this before? You’d think we would, since it’s so heavily funded.”
“Probably because we’ve never been in a place to need its services.”
The moment the words left my lips, I felt guilty and snaked a side glance at her.
“Don’t worry about it, El. I know what you meant.”
Link after link directed us to articles written about the foundation, the founder, and how the Prince family was keeping their matriarch’s legacy to help the sick alive.
“They certainly like philanthropy,” Nell said. “And this is how Vivienne said the bed’s being paid for? By a grant or donation from the foundation.”
“Yeah. And Buddy’s responsible for this. He has to be.” I exited the search program. “He didn’t need to do this. I have to thank him.”
I opened my desk drawer and pulled my cell phone out.
“You’re going to call him?”
“No. This is too important not to do in person.”
“Then who are you calling?”
“The one person I know who can tell me where he is.”
After calling Cal Burton and asking for Buddy’s number, she told me to come to her West Side apartment. I’d been there before, more than once, in fact, when she’d invited me for tea to check in with me once I started my business. This visit, though, seemed more of a command than just a drop by so I could check in.
The maid showed me to Cal’s sitting room, where she was ensconced in a Queen Anne cushioned chair that dwarfed her, a tumbler in her hand.
“So,” she said in lieu of a normal greeting, “tell me what happened with my nephew. All of
it, because I know something did. The boy tore out of town without so much as a goodbye to his dear old aunt. Spill it, Cynderella. All of it.”
That was all it took for the floodgates to open wide for me. Through two stiff bourbons and two drenched lace handkerchiefs, I told her everything, from the fact that it was me who’d cleaned the condo, to meeting Buddy at the nightclub, to Culverson. I even admitted to sleeping with him when I didn’t know who he really was. I may have sobbed a little harder when I told her that part because I found myself embarrassed at the confession.
Cal, true to form, swatted my arm and said, “I’m not dead yet, Ella. People had one-night stands in my day too, you know. Hell, I slept with my husband the day after I met him. And I was engaged to someone else at the time.”
I didn’t bother admitting I already I knew this.
After an hour, she had her cook bring in dinner for the two of us. Only after she’d fed me, dried my tears, and gotten me slightly buzzed from the excellent bourbon did she tell me where Buddy lived. She gave me his address and made me promise to call her after I spoke with him.
I hugged her goodbye, got into a cab home, and planned my next move.
The next morning, I maxed out my Visa by booking a turnaround flight to D.C. for the next day. I couldn’t get a flight out on the same day and not go into serious debt, so the added day to wait gave me time to think about and formulate what I wanted to say.
Sunday morning, the taxi drive to Buddy’s home took longer than it should have, due to the congested Washington D.C. traffic. I’d thought since it was a weekend day, the traffic would have been manageable. No such luck. D.C. was one of those twenty-four-hour towns like Manhattan, where the fun never ended and the people loved being out and about.
My nerves, already frayed and raw just thinking about what I was doing, were playing a wild fandango with my insides. When the driver turned down a tree-lined street, I told myself to calm down and suck it up. I had to do this. Buddy deserved an apology for the accusations I’d hurled at him and a sincere thank you for what he’d done for Dolly, and no matter how mortified I was about giving both, I was going to see it through.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when Cal told me that Prince lived in a huge house overlooking the Potomac, but I knew I’d never even considered it might be a castle.
Six stories, at least, and made of solid grey stone, the “house” had three towers with windowed turrets on top of them, a huge, oak door and two flags flying over the front entrance, one British, one Old Glory.
I was surprised there wasn’t a moat, but then, I hadn’t seen the back of the place yet.
I paid the driver and alighted from the cab. With a hand over the quelling muscles in my abdomen, I found the doorbell and rang it.
It didn’t take long for the door to open by an honest to God, dressed all in black, butler. At least six-foot-three with a thick shock of pure white hair combed straight back from his forehead and a long, crooked nose that looked as if it had seen a few too many punches. The guy’s suspicious stare made my teeth chatter.
I stated my name when asked and requested to see Mr. Prince.
“Who is it, Harold?” a melodic voice that reminded me of Princess Diana said from the interior.
“A young woman requesting to see Master Duncan, Ma’am.”
“Please, show her in.”
The entryway could have fit two entire apartments in my building and probably half of another.
“Miss Ella Jones, Ma’am.”
A perfect French manicured hand shot out to take mine. Captivating jade eyes, twins to her son’s, regarded me from a face with a genuine, wide smile that burst with kindness. Tiny crinkles etched the corners of her eyes in an otherwise unlined and flawless face. Skin the color of pink rose petals and looking just as soft, Buddy’s mother was a beautiful, regal-looking woman in her sixties. She must have been an absolute heart-stopper in her youth.
“Miss Jones, I’m Sarah Prince, Duncan’s mother. I’m afraid he’s not here right now. He went out for a run about an hour ago. Is he expecting you?”
I shook her hand, impressed at the strong grip.
“No, Ma’am, he isn’t. It was kind of a last-minute thing. I… I needed to tell him something. Something important, and I felt it was better to do it in person and not in an email or over the phone.”
“Well, if it’s that important, then I agree with you. Please come in. Harold, bring something to drink for our guest.”
“Oh, no, that’s not necessary. Please. Don’t go to any trouble.”
She waved a careless hand at me. “It’s no trouble at all. Harold?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Buddy’s mother led me through the gargantuan hallway into a room brilliant with morning light breaking through the floor to ceiling windows.
“We can sit outside and wait for my son to return.”
She opened two glass doors, and we stepped out onto a bricked walkway.
The terrace ran the length of the back of the house and had an unencumbered view of the Potomac. Not a moat. Not by a long shot. A slight, refreshing breeze blew up from the water, and as we sat under an umbrella-canopied table, I sighed.
“This is beautiful,” I said.
“It’s my favorite place to be on a lovely morning like this. I bring a book, a pot of tea, and I’m in heaven.”
I did a pan of the spot. “I agree. This is Heaven. And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve never been in a castle before.”
Her grin was pure delight. “It’s a bit ostentatious for the States, I think. But my husband had it built for me when we were first married. I grew up in a home quite similar in England. He didn’t want me to be homesick when I moved here.”
“Wow. That’s got to be the best present I’ve ever heard of.”
Her grin widened. “So. Ella Jones. Tell me about yourself. And why you’re here to see my son.”
Memories of my mom fleeted through me. Like Buddy’s mother, mine had been gracious and kind to everyone she met, soft-spoken, and with an open smile perpetually plastered on her face. My most vivid recollections were of crawling into her bed in the mornings after my father left for the office and just the two of us lounging and chatting about everything and nothing until it was time for me to get ready for school. When she was stricken with cancer, I tended to stay with her longer and longer each day, fearful it might be the last time I’d ever see her.
I explained how I ran my own business and gave her the details of Dolly’s injury. When I told her Buddy had arranged for a grant from the Baxter foundation, her eyes got a little misty, and her smile slipped just a tad.
Shaking her head, she told me, “He’s so devoted to the foundation. It was his idea to form it after my mother died. Buddy was the apple of her eye. Her death, well, it ravaged all of us, but I feel my son more than the rest.”
“I read a great deal online about how dedicated a fundraiser your son is for the foundation and how many people have been helped with one of its grants. I can add my own…family to that now.”
She tilted her head as she regarded me. I got the impression she was going to ask why I’d hesitated over the word but was prevented from doing so when the butler wheeled an enormous tea tray out to us.
“Master Duncan is coming up the drive right now, Ma’am. Shall I tell him to come see you?”
“Please.”
“Very good.”
My hands shook when she handed me a filled porcelain teacup, so much so, I set it down immediately without taking a sip, the cup rattling against the saucer. I didn’t want to drop it and knew I would. Lord, I’d never been so nervous as I was right at that moment. After almost a week of thinking about him constantly, about what I’d done and said to him, I was just moments away from seeing him again. Nervous didn’t begin to describe the emotion swirling within my system.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs. Prince said, giving me an encouraging look. “Everything will work out.”
I wanted t
o ask what she meant, but my voice and breath caught in my throat when the reason I’d come all this way walked out onto the terrace.
“Mom? Harold said you wanted to see me.”
He walked toward us, and like I had so many times before, I likened each and every step he took and subtle move of his body to that of a panther: smooth, defined, purposeful. His face was bathed in glistening sweat, his torso naked and dripping. He’d run without a shirt covering him, and little wisps of steam wafted up from his perfect pecs and abdominal trenches. A pair of low-slung track shorts covered those powerful thighs I’d been trapped between while he’d made love to me. He held a bottled water in his hand, already half empty.
In an instant, desire for this man flashed through me, uncontrollable and consuming.
“Yes, sweetheart. Come sit down. Someone is here to speak with you.”
Until the moment she spoke, he hadn’t noticed me. When his gaze drifted over her shoulder and locked onto me, a half dozen different emotions played out on his face in sequence. Surprise gave way to what looked like pleasure, which quickly changed to suspicion and ended in a guarded wariness.
“Ella. This is a…surprise.”
I rose from my seat much too quickly, and my knee banged against the table. This caused a tsunami effect with the tea in my cup. Deep umber liquid oozed all over the beautiful white table covering.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” I grabbed my linen napkin to mop up the spilled liquid, realizing too late the material was going to be stained from the tea as well.
“I’m so sorry,” I said again, tears on the brink of falling.
“Don’t worry about it, dear,” Buddy’s mom said. “Spills happen all the time. Nothing’s ruined. Here, give me that.” She took the wet napkin from me and folded it. “I’ll get some paper towels. Buddy, sit down and entertain your guest until I come back.”
“Vinegar and water,” I said. Both of them stared at me. I sounded like a lunatic. “Vinegar and water will get the tea stains out. I own a cleaning business.” I shot my index finger to my chest. “I know what works for stubborn stains. Equal parts vinegar and lukewarm water.”
The kind smile Buddy’s mom gave me was almost my undoing. “I’ll be sure to tell that to my housekeeper, dear. Thank you.” She gave her son a quick, wide-eyed glance then walked back through the terrace doors.
