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Chapter One
There were boxes everywhere. I hadn’t realized I owned so much—my peripatetic existence had hardly been conducive to gathering stuff, but apparently stuff I had in abundance. I couldn’t fault the boxes and boxes of books—I was both an academic and a dreamer, and books had always been my lifeline.
I couldn’t object to the carton of ancient vinyl LPs, remnants from my mother’s own gypsy past and treasures on their own.
But where had all the other shit come from? How had I managed to acquire four wine openers but no wire whisk? It could have said a lot for my priorities, except that I seldom could afford wines with corks. There were clothes I never would wear, shoes that didn’t fit, a lifetime of other people’s hand-me-downs that were too good to throw out but never felt quite right on me.
And all these things had to find someplace to go to, and no money to get them there.
It was hardly my fault that my deadbeat landlord had defaulted on his mortgage, thereby depriving me of the nice second-floor apartment in the old Victorian house on the edge of Hanover, New Hampshire.
And when you’re a graduate student working on clinical trials, it’s to be expected that funding occasionally runs out. The problem was I didn’t know whether the cruel gods of college loans would countenance any more delays, given that I’d been in school for the last eleven years. Not that I didn’t have the degrees to show for it. A BA in English Lit, surely the most useless degree in the history of higher education. Topping that off with a master’s in modern Spanish literature, and I’d ensured that I was virtually unemployable. My attempts to remedy that dire situation had resulted in being three quarters of the way toward a PhD in plant eugenics, with an emphasis on olive trees. Why I thought the icy northern climes of New England would be conducive to the study of olives still remained a mystery to me.
I knew why I’d chosen it, of course. A long-distance nod to the happiest time in my life, living in the warm, familial confines of Mariposa, the world-famous olive groves and vineyards owned by the patrician Whitehead family in the south of Spain. My family, once upon a time.
As for my worthless boyfriend, I was well rid of him. The truth was, I had lousy taste in men. I didn’t know what I was looking for and so far I hadn’t even come close. It was definitely time for another dry spell. I never held with the idea that a lousy boyfriend was better than no boyfriend at all, and I could happily consign Nick, and Simon, and Tony, and Snake (that’ll tell you how bad my choices tended to be) to the graveyard of failed relationships.
I had two more days in my denuded apartment, two days to either find a new place, pronto, or the cheapest fleabag motel in the Hanover area, leaving my aging Subaru Forrester filled with as many boxes as I could manage. Or I’d be sleeping with those boxes, and even in the so-called spring, New Hampshire was miserably cold.
I was so busy feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t even hear the car drive up our quiet street, the slam of the door, the steps on my stairs. Only the peremptory knock startled me enough to move me from my glum perch on the old sofa with the broken springs.
The knock came again, even more demanding, and I was so not in the mood. “Hold your horses,” I snapped, heading to the door. Whoever it was, I knew I didn’t want to see him or her. Given my recent run of luck, it was probably trouble.
Trouble that wasn’t going to go away on its own. I slammed open the door, about to snarl some off-color demand, when I stopped, struck dumb for one of the first times in my life.
“About time, darling!” My exquisitely beautiful cousin Isabella stood there, and the drizzly gray afternoon suddenly seemed shot with sunlight.
“Izzy!” I screeched, throwing my arms around her. Together we hugged and squealed, jumping up and down as if we were twelve-year-olds spending the summer together after a long winter apart. It had been so damned long.
But then she released me, stepping back and shoving a careless hand through her magnificent mane of golden, pre-Raphaelite curls. “It’s Bella now, darling,” she said with a throaty laugh, looking me up and down. “God, you haven’t changed!”
That wasn’t high praise, but I took it in the spirit intended.
“Neither have you,” I said. A lie. If anything, my magnificent cousin Isabella was even more of everything. More beautiful, more charming, taller, thinner. Everything about her seemed touched with gold.
All our lives I’ve been a pale shadow of my enchanting cousin. We’d been born a year and a world apart, but we’d always been thrown together during those long, idyllic summers at Mariposa. Her hair was always blonder, curlier, longer than mine, her eyes a bright green compared to my changeable hazel ones, her porcelain skin an affront to my adolescent breakouts. To make things worse, our features were almost identical.
She was funny and charming, where I suffered from mortifying shyness. And she had cousin Marcus, the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life, at her delicate feet which were, of course, a full size smaller than mine.
Somehow I ended up inside the apartment, the door closed behind us. Izzy...no, Bella...eyed the tower of boxes cramming the living room. “Going somewhere, Podge?”
I hated that name. It was bad enough that my mother, while giving me the perfectly respectable name of Kathryn, had insisted on calling me “Kitty” after her favorite old black-and-white movie, and the nickname was even worse when you counted the snarky teenage boys who decided to translate it into “pussy,” thereby mortifying me for all time. At least it wasn’t the cruel, hated nickname from my teenage years.
“Lease ran out,” I said briefly, fighting back my instinctive protest.
“Poor baby! I don’t suppose you have something to drink in this thoroughly tragic hovel?”
Considering this thoroughly tragic hovel was the nicest place I had lived in in the last ten years, I thought about being offended, then dismissed it. Isabella had more money than God, along with all the Whitehead family—privilege ran in their blood. That is, all the Whiteheads who were still considered part of the dynasty and hadn’t been cut off.
“There’s a box of wine in the fridge,” I said.
“A box?” Isabella said in acute horror. “Darling, what have you come to?”
I managed a cheery smile. “You know I’ve always been a peasant at heart, Iz...Bella. It might be a little vinegary by now, but it’s all I’ve got. Take it or leave it.”
Her beautiful nose wrinkled in distaste. The same nose I saw in the mirror, but for some reason, I never thought of my own as beautiful. “It’ll have to do. Do you still have glasses or will I be forced to drink out of the box?”
I laughed. “I can find you a glass. But you’ll have to tell me why you suddenly showed up on my doorstep after all these years.”
