Moonlight Masquerade Read online

  Reede had figured what was important to him right after he’d met Sophie, but he couldn’t help a sense of déjà vu because he’d felt like this before. He’d been a teenager when he’d first seen Laura Chawnley, and he’d decided right then that she was for him. He’d felt the same way since he’d seen . . . no, since he’d talked to Sophie. There was a vulnerability about her, a feeling that she, well, maybe she needed him, that appealed to him.

  He would never let her know it, but her story about the cookbook had shocked him—not because she’d stolen it, but because she was probably going to be in serious trouble. Treeborne Foods was big. Huge. Nationwide. Reede didn’t think they’d smile and say her theft was justifiable revenge for the way the heir apparent had treated her.

  Reede had admired Sophie’s sense of remorse and he’d liked her idea of returning the cookbook via a foreign country. But he didn’t trust the Treebornes—which is why he’d gone to so much trouble to keep a copy of the book and to have it decoded—something he was still waiting on.

  The night after Carter came to Edilean, Reede asked Sophie about the cookbook, and she’d told him what Carter had said, that there’d be no prosecution.

  Reede urged Sophie to push Carter further to make absolutely sure there would be no retaliation. The next day Carter had called the family housekeeper and asked her to tell him when the package arrived. A few days later Carter told Sophie that the cookbook was now under a pile of papers on his father’s desk. “He’ll never know it was missing,” Carter said.

  Still, Reede wasn’t satisfied. He called his former roommate again and asked how his brother was doing with the decoding.

  “Broke his leg skiing, but I’ll see that he gets right on it. The book, not his leg,” Kirk said.

  Reede didn’t tell Sophie that he was still working on the deciphering, and she didn’t ask, and later when Kirk called and said his brother had reported that the code was probably based on a book, Reede didn’t tell Sophie that either. He didn’t want to worry her.

  For Thanksgiving they went to Sara and Mike’s old house, and Jecca and Tris came home for the long weekend.

  “How miserable are you in New York?” Reede quietly asked his cousin Tristan.

  “If I start to tell you I’ll weep like a baby,” Tris said. “Not a pretty sight.”

  Reede didn’t miss the irony that Tris hated being out of Edilean as much as Reede disliked being in it.

  Although Sophie had helped calm Reede’s restlessness, and had made him more content, he still itched to leave, to travel, to go.

  It was at Thanksgiving dinner that Tris’s nine-year-old niece Nell handed Sophie a lump of modeling clay and asked if she could make a centaur.

  Sophie smiled. “A centaur, huh? Like in Harry Potter?”

  Nell, her beautiful eyes serious, nodded. To her, her aunt Jecca was a true artist, but Jecca said that 3D was Sophie’s field of expertise. “She can make anything.”

  Sophie’d always loved horses and had made many of them in several media, so that was easy.

  By the time she’d formed the animal, every child who could walk was around her and staring with wide eyes. Sophie stopped when she got to the man part of the creature and held it up.

  “So who do you think looks most like a centaur?”

  Instantly, every face in the room, over twenty people, looked at the sheriff, Colin Frazier. He was a huge man, his body covered with powerful muscles.

  Everyone, and especially Colin, laughed.

  After that, Sophie got no rest. She was asked to sculpt every adult male there into an animal. Tristan was a gazelle, Ramsey a bear, Luke a scholarly-looking badger, while Mike was a fox. Reede came last and she put his face onto a lion.

  Sara took all the figures and put them into a glass-fronted cabinet. She wouldn’t let the children touch them, but Mike gave them a flashlight so they could look at them.

  After the dinner cleanup, Reede caught Sophie in the hallway, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her. “That was very nice of you. The kids really appreciated it.”

  “I enjoy doing that kind of thing. The kids in the forest and now these.”

  “Better than Henry?”

  Sophie laughed. “Oh yes! He is so very serious about all of it. He wants to win awards and prizes, and I think his goal is to have a piece of his work put in a museum.”

  “And what about you? You don’t want awards?”

  “I—” She broke off because the children had found her. Nell was trying to herd them around the house but they were escaping her.

  “Miss Sophie!” one of them yelled, as she was now their favorite person on earth.

  They grabbed her hands and pulled her away with them.

  Sara came out of the bedroom, one of her twin baby boys in each arm, and handed one to Reede. “You should keep that girl.”

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  “Whatever you have to do, you should do it,” she said to him, and there was no humor in her eyes. “You’re not exactly a man who falls in and out of love easily. If you lose Sophie you’ll be an old man before you recover.”

  “Thanks for telling me what I already know,” Reede said.

  “Any time,” she answered as she went back to the kitchen.

  Every day Reede and Sophie grew closer, their lives intertwining. It quickly got to the point where Reede couldn’t imagine a life without Sophie.

  But Roan had told him that Sophie was staying only until the middle of January. “Think you’ve changed her mind?” Roan asked. “Think you’ve talked her into moving into your house and the two of you settling down in Edilean? What are you going to do when Ariel comes back and Tris does? Aren’t three doctors too many for little Edilean? Or are you hoping for a spread of cholera?”

  Reede glared at his cousin. He didn’t have an answer to any of the questions. Ariel was Sheriff Frazier’s sister, and as soon as she finished her residency in California she was going to return to Edilean and work with Tristan—when he got back from New York, that is. Ariel was married to Mike Newland’s best friend, and the two men planned to open a big gym that would have members from Edilean to DC.

  It was all family, Reede thought. It was all cozy and warm and friendly. And it was maddening to Reede! Just last night he’d seen a TV show about a doctor who equipped a boat as a hospital, and he went to remote areas of the world to help people.

  If Reede could get the funding he’d love to do something like that. But what kind of life was that for a woman? And by that he meant Sophie. How could she do her sculpture while moving around the world?

  And then there was her growing love for Edilean and the people in it. They’d accepted her quickly. And why not? She was kind and thoughtful. If someone told of a favorite sandwich, the next day it was on the menu.

  Sophie had become friends with the young woman Kelli. They were an unusual pair, Sophie so pink and blonde, Kelli so dark with her heavy eye makeup.

  Sophie had shown him Kelli’s sketches of her plans to cut into the building next door and make a real bakery. Since Roan owned both buildings, it was all up to him. Sophie laughed at how Kelli was working hard to make desserts to please Roan. Pears with almond cream and chocolate. Apples with a rice custard, orange with cardamom. There were savory tarts of pumpkin with garlic, potatoes with ham on puff pastry.

  “Kelli takes them out of the oven and hand feeds them to Roan while he’s at the cash register,” Sophie said, laughing. “One day I thought Roan was going to faint in ecstasy over Kelli’s apricots and cream, and he asked where she came up with all the things she made. She said”—Sophie grinned at Reede—“Kelli said she had an old cookbook from her French grandmother. Carter and I looked at each other and burst into laugher. Kelli and Roan knew we were laughing about the famous Treeborne cookbook but, as you know, there was a lot more to it than that.”

  She smiled at the memory. “But what’s best about it all is seeing Carter’s face get red with rage every time Kelli feeds Roan. P