by Julia Quinn
“We got that,” Hugh said into Georgie’s hair.
But Pyramus still wasn’t done. “Now am I fled. My soul is in the sky. Moon, take thy flight.”
The Moon seemed to have lost concentration, since Mr. Lear didn’t move until Pyramus glared at him. Finally he trotted off the stage, and Pyramus rose just far enough to give his final speech.
“Now die, die, die, die, die!”
Thisbe rushed onto the stage and caught sight of Pyramus right away, though it would have been hard to miss him, given the sword sticking straight out of his armpit. “Asleep, my love?” She fell on her knees and shook him. “What, dead, my dove?”
“Doesn’t this remind you of Romeo and Juliet?” Carolyn asked Gwendolyn.
“I prefer happy endings myself,” Gwendolyn responded.
“Me too!” Carolyn said. She clapped her hands. “May we have a happy ending, please?”
There was a moment of silence on the stage.
“Did I say the cloak was covered in blood?” Pyramus cried, sitting up. “My Thisbe must have brought a jug of wine with her. Oh, Thisbe, give me a sip!”
Thisbe rose nimbly, politely kicking the sword into the wings, and hauled Pyramus to his feet.
“Sip wine from my ruby lips,” she said with rather surprising eloquence.
“Live, live, live, live, live!” Pyramus shouted.
“Love … love … love … love … love,” Thisbe said, throwing herself into Pyramus’s arms.
“Now that’s a happy ending,” Carolyn said, with a sigh.
When the evening started, there were those in the audience who likely expected the performance to be ill received.
But the truth was that, in the end, when the players gathered together for their final bow, the audience rose to their feet and howled their appreciation.
Especially Carolyn.
Who never forgot her twenty-fifth birthday, and always told her husband, and then her children, and then her grandchildren, about the most romantic evening of her life. About the play that was practically written for her. And about the best present her darling husband ever gave her.
“You just didn’t understand it,” she would tell a polite, but disbelieving Piers, every year on her birthday. “It was about life, and death, and love …”
“And the duck?” he would ask, every time.
“The mystery of life and art,” she would say with a sigh. “You just have to accept that we’re not meant to understand everything.”
“There’s that one thing I do understand,” he would say, pulling her close.
And she would smile up at him because the gift he gave her on her twenty-fifth birthday, and her thirtieth, and her fiftieth, and her seventieth was always the same, and they both knew it.
Love was the best present of all.
“I had her make me a list.”
Alec stopped chuckling. “What?”
“A list. Of women. I had my sister make me a list of possible brides. I can’t be expected to figure this out on my own.”
“The rest of us generally do.”
Hugh gave him a powerfully irritated glare. “I’m busy.”
Julia Quinn is
“Smart, funny.”
TIME Magazine
“Delightful.”
Nora Roberts
Eloisa James is
“Extraordinary.”
Lisa Kleypas
“Romance writing does not get much better than this.”
People
Connie Brockway is
“Delightfully witty and dazzlingly imaginative.”
Booklist
“Simply the best.”
Teresa Medeiros
More Dazzling Romance From
Julia Quinn
TEN THINGS I LOVE ABOUT YOU
Eloisa James
WHEN BEAUTY TAMED THE BEAST
Connie Brockway
THE GOLDEN SEASON
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AVON BOOKS
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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New York, New York 10022-5299
Copyright © 2011 by Julie Cotler Pottinger, Eloisa James, Connie Brockway
ISBN 978-0-06-124782-8
www.avonromance.com
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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03741-1
First Avon Books paperback printing: January 2011
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