Moonlight Masquerade Read online

  Sophie tried to digest this news and her heart went out to Dr. Reede. How many men would do such a noble thing? “Isn’t there a house he can rent here in Edilean?”

  “The man hardly has time to sleep, much less to go looking for a place to live. Sophie?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “My brother is miserable. He took a job he didn’t want and got stuck with it for years. I’d appreciate anything you can do to make his life more comfortable. And you have carte blanche to do whatever you want to that horrible apartment.”

  “I don’t know . . . ” Sophie said as she looked around the place. “I’m not sure . . . ”

  “You can do it,” Kim said and began a pep talk.

  Sophie had to smile. Kim was a doer, a go-getter. Tell her something was impossible and she went after it. Right now she seemed to believe that Sophie’s problem was a lack of belief in herself. That was far from the truth. Sophie was tempted to interrupt Kim’s little speech by saying “I’m just concerned that the FBI might be after me,” but she didn’t. Instead, she said, “You’re saying I should be a cleaning woman, a secretary, a cook, and an interior decorator. It sounds like a wife. Tell me, is sex included in this job?”

  Sophie meant it as a joke, but Kim didn’t miss a beat. “I would imagine that some all-night, mind-blowing sex would cheer both of you up. It’s done wonders for me. Speaking of which, Travis is pointing at his watch. I have to go. Oh, and Sophie, help yourself to my clothes. After all I’ve bought on this trip, I’m going to need the closet space.” With that, she hung up, and Sophie stood there, staring at her phone.

  “ ‘All-night, mind-blowing sex,’ ” she said aloud, and that made her think of Carter. Kim knew nothing about what Sophie had been through since they graduated. For that matter, she and Jecca didn’t know the truth about Sophie’s life before college.

  She set the phone on the kitchen counter and looked around. The women had said Dr. Reede wouldn’t be home until this evening, and Kim had asked Sophie to make him stay. Maybe she only had this day before she was found and had to face the consequences of what she’d done, so she was going to use the time to the best of her ability.

  She went downstairs and asked if she made a list of things she needed, could someone get everything for her. The three women nearly fell over themselves saying yes. “Including my things from inside my junked car?” Sophie asked. She looked at Heather as she said this, and the young woman’s face turned red. Sophie had an idea her car wasn’t as bad as she’d been told, but then, it looked as though the women wanted her to help their beloved Dr. Reede. And why not? He was an overworked doctor who thought of other people before himself. He should have the best.

  With that thought in mind, she went back upstairs, took off her cardigan, and set to work.

  Four

  Reede didn’t think he’d ever been so tired in his life, but then he knew it was an accumulation of things that had made him feel so bad. The young woman pouring the beer over his head had been the straw that was about to break his back. Today he’d called six people he’d been at school with and offered them the job. He’d praised Edilean until it made Nirvana seem like a wasteland.

  But the answer had always been the same: no. “You want me to move my entire family to some backwater town for just two and a half years? Then what? Your cousin returns and I have to get out?”

  No one was interested. Reede had even called a former professor and asked. Maybe the man would like to retire to a small town and deal with a lot of cases of poison ivy. He’d laughed at Reede. “Give up the comforts of a college city to move into one of those small town closed societies? Thanks for the offer, but no.”

  No matter what Reede tried, he couldn’t get anyone to take his place. Sometimes he felt like packing his car and driving away and saying the hell with all of them. He was sick of being compared to his cousin Tristan. Tired of hearing people say, “Dr. Tris would have—” Fill in the blank.

  If Reede hadn’t grown up in Edilean he wouldn’t have any idea what was going on, but he knew it all. The problem was that “the Tristans” were believed to be destined to be Edilean’s physicians. Since the town was established in the 1700s, an Aldredge had been the town doctor. That’s what the people wanted, and they weren’t settling for something different.

  But somewhere along the way, the Aldredge family had divided, and there were now two branches of it. One side inherited Aldredge House, which was just out of town and set on a beautiful lake, and they were the town doctors. But then, there were the “other Aldredges” . . . They didn’t inherit the house and they had different jobs.

  The problem came when Reede, like his cousin Tris, had been born knowing he was going to be a doctor. In other families that would have been treated as a gift, but in Reede’s case he was looked on as an oddity. “So you want to be a doctor too?” they said, looking at him as though he’d said he wanted to grow a third arm.

  The only person who saw nothing strange was Tristan. He couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to be a doctor.

  The two boys, born the same year and third cousins, were fast friends while growing up, and they’d talked about their professions as something that couldn’t change. It had made Reede feel secure knowing what his future was going to be.

  So maybe he was a bit jealous of Tristan, but that couldn’t be helped. Tris was going to live in town in the same house he’d been born in, and from the way the girls followed him around, he was going to have no trouble finding someone to share it with.

  Reede was a very different person. Whereas Tris easily mingled with people, played team sports, and dated every girl who smiled at him, Reede had always been a loner. He had a few good friends and he stayed with them. He’d never been easy in large groups.

  As for girls, he’d never been confident in asking them out. Quite a few of them had come on to him, teasing him, some of them even asking him out. But when he was with them, Reede had always bored them by talking of medicine.

  When he was fourteen he’d met Laura Chawnley. Her family had just moved to Edilean, and when she was introduced to the class she’d look so scared Reede thought she was going to cry. Later, he saw her from across the hall. She was trying to arrange all her books into a pile and wasn’t very successful at it. He smiled at her fumbling; she seemed so helpless. She seemed to need someone to come and rescue her. And Reede did.

  He carried her books and made sure she found her classrooms, and he introduced her to people. She was so shy that she’d stood behind him, almost afraid to even look up. From the first, Laura had made him feel good as she looked to him for everything—to introduce her to people, to take her places, and even to do all the talking. He loved telling her of his dreams for the future—and from the beginning he included her in those plans.

  His mother had a different view of the two of them. She said that Laura just sat and waited for Reede to come and get her. But Reede had liked that. Having grown up around his dynamic mother and sister, Laura’s quiet passivity was refreshing. And most important, she made him feel as though he could see his future. He knew that they’d get married, live in Edilean, and have children. Reede even knew the house they would buy. Like Tristan’s Aldredge House, it was a bit out of town, set on two acres, and the old house needed a lot of repair. Reede and Tris would jointly run the Edilean clinic and . . . Well, Reede’s life would be set.

  As far as he could see, the only bad part in his plan were the little comments people made. Especially his mother. One time she said, “You can’t be Tristan no matter how hard you try.” When Reede said he had no idea what she was talking about, she’d glanced around his room. There were travel posters everywhere. Egypt, Petra in Jordan, the Galapagos Islands. “How are you going to see these places if you live with Laura here in Edilean?”

  “We’ll go together,” Reede had said enthusiastically. “Laura wants to go places and do things as much as I do. And Tristan can take over while we’re away.”

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