Carolina Isle Read online

  “I forget that you’ve lived in a tiny world inside the tiny world of Arundel. Her picture is hanging in one of the corridors at the high school. She won every beauty contest in three counties from the time she was three until she left Arundel when she got out of high school. She went to New York, changed her name to Katlyn, and married one of the richest men in the world.”

  Ariel looked at the picture. The woman was pretty, yes, but in that well-preserved way that meant she’d had half a dozen face-lifts and spent her days in salons. “She’s from Arundel and she’s the wife of R.J.’s best friend? Hmmm.” Ariel’s head was whirling with this news. Her intuition told her that this woman was the way she was going to reach R.J. She’d already decided that the less Sara knew about her plans, the better. Unfortunately, this meant she couldn’t ask Sara’s advice about anything. What Ariel wanted to do was to get R.J. onto her territory, into Arundel. If her plan of impersonating her cousin was going to work, Sara needed to be near Ariel while they were pretending to be each other. Ariel knew she’d need help working for R.J., so she wanted Sara close. But how to get R.J.—and Sara went where he did—to tiny Arundel?

  Ariel put her hand on David’s arm, looked up at him, and gave him her best pleading sigh.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” he said. “I’m not going to help you in this. When you elope with that man, I plan to be the innocent, jilted, almost-bridegroom. I want our mothers to think that I did no wrong. I certainly don’t want either of them to think that I helped you.”

  “David, dear,” she said sweetly, “wouldn’t you love some tea? We could drink it while we have a nice, long talk.”

  “I’m going to regret this,” he said as he sat down on a chintz-covered chair.

  Smiling, Ariel started talking. David was so glad to see her happy again that he stayed the entire afternoon.

  In the end, David did help her. Through his girlfriend, Britney, and her connections in “that side of town,” he found a man who was sending Susie Edwards—a.k.a. Katlyn Dunkirk—information about Arundel.

  David got Mrs. Dunkirk’s address and Ariel wrote her a letter asking if they could meet if she ever happened to be in the area. As Ariel hoped, a letter came back soon, giving a time and place in Raleigh.

  On the appointed day, with David’s help, Ariel managed to escape her mother long enough to meet Mrs. Dunkirk for lunch in Raleigh.

  Ariel knew all about the woman the moment she saw her. For all her jewelry (a diamond necklace at lunch?), her careful accent (a sort of French-English concoction), and her five-thousand-dollar suit (in Raleigh?!), Ariel would have known her anywhere. There was an air of the cotton mills around her that no time or money could wipe away. The woman was very nervous and kept smoking cigarettes and talking too much.

  In the end, they both got what they wanted. Mrs. Dunkirk said her husband had talked about buying an island and developing it into “a billionaire’s playground.” It might as well be an island near Arundel. As she said this, she stubbed out a lipstick-tipped cigarette and gave Ariel a look to let her know that in spite of her origins, she’d married into Big Money.

  Mrs. Dunkirk said she would direct her husband toward one of the many islands off the coast of North Carolina, if Ariel would get her mother to crown her as Mrs. Arundel at the fall festival. Ariel had to work to refrain from exclaiming at the vulgarity of such a thing, but she knew where Mrs. Dunkirk was coming from. Mill girls were never made Miss Arundel, no matter how pretty they were. Ariel’s mother had been Miss Arundel and she had been too. To get my mother to agree to such a low-class display, Ariel thought, I’ll have to drug her—or give her what she most wants in life, which is for me to marry David.

  As Ariel smiled at Mrs. Dunkirk and agreed, she gave no sign of her inner turmoil. She said she thought it was a delightful idea to have a Mrs. Arundel, and who better than someone who had made such a success of her life. Mrs. Dunkirk stubbed out another cigarette and went out to her waiting limo. As she waved good-bye, Ariel thought that breeding always told. Even the one time she’d met Sara in person, when she hadn’t had a bath in what looked like weeks, there was an air about her that told who her mother was. Her blood had been diluted by her dissolute father, but the blood of the Ambler family was stronger, and it showed in Sara—just as Mrs. Dunkirk’s breeding showed in her.

  At these thoughts, Ariel could imagine David telling her she was a snob, but she didn’t care. In another era, David would have been a socialist.

  By the time Ariel got home, she was ready to go forward in her plan to get the man she loved. But first, she had to tell David what she and Sara were planning to do. He would, of course, protest and tell her that it would never work, but she knew he’d agree to help her. She couldn’t pull this off if he didn’t help, because David knew her. Really knew her. He wasn’t like her mother, who only cared that she was dressed properly and didn’t embarrass her.

  David was different. One wrong move on Sara’s part and he’d know she wasn’t who she was pretending to be.

  David would help, Ariel knew that. And it was going to work. She knew that too.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN SARA FINALLY GOT TO ARIEL’S bedroom, she was so tired that all she wanted to do was crawl under the covers and sleep. But she couldn’t because Ariel’s bed was covered with a menagerie of weird-looking stuffed animals. Sara vaguely remembered that Ariel had made her memorize some rule about her stuffed animals, but she was too tired to remember it.

  The two cousins had spent nearly three weeks together in New York. Ariel had wanted more time, but it was all she could finagle out of her mother. “And I had to lie hugely to get that time,” she said. “With David’s help, of course. Dear David.” When she said this, her mouth turned down at the corners, as though she was bitter about something.

  Since the cousins had corresponded for years, Sara would have said that she knew her cousin well, but as she found out that first day, she didn’t know her at all. Maybe it was because Ariel had grown up in isolation—homeschooled—but Sara soon found that the things she’d been hoping for didn’t happen. There were no girl giggles at night, no schlepping around in their pajamas for hours on Sunday morning.

  Sara was sure that Ariel didn’t know it, but when she described her mother, she might have been describing herself. It took nearly a week before Sara realized that Ariel knew that she was becoming like her mother and was doing anything she could to prevent it. However, try as she might to avoid it, there was something elegant about Ariel that made people take notice of her.

  It took Sara less than twenty-four hours to learn that there were things she just could not talk about, such as her drunken father. Sara was eager to unburden herself, to at last tell the secrets about her life with her father—but alcoholics seemed to be something that Ariel couldn’t bear to hear about. To stop Sara from telling more, Ariel gave her “the look.” It was a glance of such coldness that Sara thought that a couple of her toes were going to have to be amputated from frostbite.

  Ever the actress, Sara sat in front of a mirror later that night and practiced the look. But what came naturally to Ariel was nearly impossible for Sara. “I think you have to be raised royally to be able to carry off that look,” she muttered to herself. The next day she tried it on Ariel. Her hope was that she’d be able to freeze Ariel as she’d done to her cousin. Ariel giggled. “When you do that, you almost look like my mother.” Sara was tempted to tell her cousin that she was imitating her, Ariel, but she didn’t.

  Ariel wanted the two of them to stay in Sara’s tiny apartment all day and try to figure out how to be each other. For one thing, Sara was supposed to memorize the entire genealogy of the founding families of Arundel. “It’s imperative that you know who belongs to whom.”

  Sara said it sounded very interesting and she wished she had time to memorize it all, but she had to go to work.

  The mention of work made Ariel launch into a hundred thousand questions about R.J. Sara knew Ariel thought she was