Free Keys to the Castle by Donna Ball Page B

three weeks !” she cried. “Damn it!”
    And suddenly she started to laugh, softly. She leaned back against her chair, shaking her head. “It is a joke,” she said. “It’s a great big twisted cosmic joke and I’m the punch line. I’m Cinderella trapped in a freakin’ fairy tale that just doesn’t know when to end. And what the hell am I supposed to do with a castle in France?” she demanded, turning on him. Her eyes glittered and her voice was beginning to take on a shrill edge. “Could you just tell me that, please?”
    â€œI thought we could discuss your options after dinner,” he said, watching her carefully. “I had hoped to get a couple of drinks into you first. Or perhaps a Valium?”
    Sara looked down at the sherry glass on the table as though suddenly remembering it, then picked it up and downed the contents in a single swallow. When she spoke again her voice was matter-of-fact, almost flippant. “You must think I’m a complete idiot. That’s okay. Because that’s exactly what I feel like.” She held up her empty glass. “Maybe I’ll have another.”
    Ash did nothing but lift a glance toward a shadow somewhere beyond her shoulder, and a waiter appeared to refill her glass. This time she sipped more slowly.
    â€œMy father walked out on us when I was six,” she said. “My mother—wasn’t the kind of person who could recover from something like that. She was broken, I think, from the inside out. She started to drink, couldn’t hold a job . . . I kind of took over for her, fixed the meals, made sure my little sister got to school on time and that we had clean clothes to wear . . . I lied about my age so I could get an after-school job at fourteen, and I kept telling myself if I worked really, really hard, I could get Dixie and myself out of there. And eventually I did. I got a scholarship, a degree, and a great job. It was all I wanted, all I’d ever wanted. Of course . . .”
    She shrugged, and sipped her sherry. “All those years I threw myself into my work like that I really was still just a little girl trying to get out of that trailer park, but by the time I realized that, half my life had gone by. And when Daniel showed up—the most impossible, exotic, romantic fantasy any woman could ever imagine—I tried to make up for every dream I’d never let myself have all at once. I was ready to be swept away. I wanted the insanity. I’d lived the buttoned-down life for almost twenty years and I was ready to throw caution to the wind. It’s not that I didn’t know better. It’s that I wanted to believe in the fairy-tale ending. My sister had it all, why couldn’t I?” A small smile. “And of course, who could resist Daniel? I sometimes wonder whether he wasn’t as caught up in my fantasy as I was.”
    As she spoke, twilight was deepening, bathing the terrace in rich blue shadows that seemed to encourage intimacy. In the background, silent figures moved, dropping a white linen cloth over the stone table, bringing out trays, lighting candles. With a gentle whoosh , a torchiere flared to light a half dozen feet away, smelling of butane and citrus, and in soft sequence— whoosh, whoosh, whoosh —more of them followed, encircling the terrace with a golden glow and casting dancing shadows across the stone. Ash watched her silently, and listened.
    Sara took another sip of her drink. “I knew it wasn’t real,” she said. “I knew it couldn’t last. I just didn’t care. I guess, if I thought about it at all, I expected to just wake up one morning to find him gone, like my dad . . . but no, I didn’t think about it. I just wanted to live the dream for as long as I could, because I had gone so many years without any dreams at all. I didn’t expect him to die . I didn’t expect him to die without telling me who his