Cinderella After Midnight

He hid another smile of satisfaction and amusement. He’d managed to identify the scratchy feeling on the heel of her hand, finally. A Band-Aid. Just now, he had sneaked a look and had discovered that it was the kind made for children, printed with red, blue and yellow dinosaurs.

Another tiny clue as to who she really was, another thing to pique his interest. Wearing a Band-Aid like that, she had to spend a lot of time with kids. It didn’t fit the character she was trying to portray, and she knew it, which accounted for her nervous reaction to his discovery. Strangely, it didn’t seem to fit the fortune-hunter stereotype, either.

“Will you be staying long?” he asked now.

“No, I don’t expect so,” she said quickly. “I’ll leave as soon as I can. I have to, uh, be somewhere else later in the evening. You know, one’s busy social whirl.”

“You’re talking about the ball. I meant staying in Philly.”

“Oh. Right,” Cat repeated thinly.

Drat! Again!

It was as if a cloak had slipped. She gathered her artificial role around herself once more and cursed the dropping of her guard. It kept happening, when she’d been so confident that she had it down pat. There was something about Patrick Callahan that was way too distracting.

And he was way too observant, as well. That darned Band-Aid! Yesterday evening, she’d cut her finger at the twenty-four-hour child-care center where she worked, slicing some fruit for the kids’ late-night snack. She had meant to exchange the dinosaur Band-Aid for a plain one today, but had forgotten in the flurry of getting ready.

“How silly of me!” she trilled with an effort. “Of course you meant this wonderful city of yours. But I’m afraid I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Somehow I thought you might be,” he murmured. “Flying first-class?”

“Naturally. To Paris.”

“Wonderful. Where do you usually stay when you’re there?”

“Oh, just an exclusive little hotel downtown.” She gave a vague wave, which accidentally brushed his neck. It was warm, and suddenly she caught the waft of a musky male scent, a mixture of him and his soap, released by the brief brush of her fingers. “You wouldn’t know it,” she finished hastily.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “Interesting, though. I’ve never heard anyone refer to Paris as having a ‘downtown’ before.”

“No, well, I didn’t know if you knew the city or not,” Cat said, trying to infuse a note of arrogant condescension into her tone. Paris didn’t have a downtown? How was she supposed to know that, since she’d barely been out of Pennsylvania?

The man was really starting to make her nervous. That glint in his eye. That little smile that came and went in his face. It drew her attention far too often to his extremely kissable mouth.

Yikes, no! Not kissable! Good gosh! Note to self: No more Mirabeau champagne tonight!

“I know Paris,” he was saying. “I was wondering if you do.”

“Well, of course I do!” she claimed, then added with sketchy logic, “Didn’t I just say I’m about to go there?”

“So you did.” Again, he smiled at her, creasing all the tiny laugh lines on his face in a way that made him look far less intimidating, far more human. Then he slowly pulled her closer so that she had no choice but to rest her head against his shoulder as they danced, and there was that fresh, musky scent again.

She could feel his legs, now, getting tangled in the layers of her dress, and his arm was no longer safely in the middle of her back but much farther round, in the curve of her waist, just below her breast. As they moved, she could feel the weight of her fullness there, nudging softly against his hand. It didn’t feel anywhere near as unwelcome as she wanted it to, and she was melting inside. Was he flirting with her?

A silence fell. She would have spoken, only she was too afraid of saying something that would betray herself to him, too afraid that she had betrayed herself already.

Darn it, she knew she had! He had guessed who she was—or at the very least, who she wasn’t—and he was playing along with her.

Instead of hating him for it as she should, she found herself responding at first. Responding to that little half-smile of his, as if they shared a delicious, creamy, edible secret, instead of a secret that could blow her whole plan to smithereens if he revealed it to Councillor Wainwright.

How much, exactly, did he know? The detailed truth about who she was? Surely not!

Not the fact that she’d been kicked out of her home by her mean-spirited stepmother Rose six years ago, the moment she hit eighteen. Not the fact that her stepsister Jill, almost the same age, had been kicked out right along with her because Jill was pregnant and unmarried and the baby’s well-heeled, well-connected father didn’t want to know about it.

Not the fact that Jill’s older sister Suzanne had refused to remain in a house where her sisters weren’t welcome, so that all three of them, plus Jill’s little son Sam, had ended up struggling to survive in a no-hope trailer park for several years.

Yes, a trailer park, and not the kind where the other residents troubled to grow flowers and put drapes in their windows.

Thanks to Cousin Pixie, that life was behind them now. Cat was well on the way to completing her nursing degree and she was loving it. After turning her back on a career as a show skater following a disastrous six weeks in Las Vegas earlier in the year, Jill was training in computers and administration while she worked in the ice-rink office part-time. Infiltrating tonight’s ball under deep cover had been her idea. Suzanne had recently gotten her degree in library science. They each had hopes for the future. Still, they counted their pennies every single day.

Patrick Callahan knew Cat had as much right to call herself Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown as she had to claim she could fly. But did he know how important this evening was to her? Did he know it wasn’t a game or a scam? Did he know that she and Pixie, Jill, Sam and Suzanne would all lose their home if he blew her cover tonight?

Of course he didn’t, and even if he did, if he’d somehow guessed why she was targeting Councillor Wainwright so assiduously, she doubted that he’d care. His type never did. From bitter experience, she knew this all too well.

There was a whole roll call of such people who’d impinged on her life. Curtis Harrington III, the Ivy League college boy who’d fathered Jill’s son. Barry Grindlay and his ruthless devotion to the bottom line. Her stepmother Rose, too, had given Cat many an unintentional lesson about the gulf that separated the privileged and the strugglers of this world.

The dance came to an end at last. Patrick led Cat from the floor, his fingers linked loosely through hers, and she was so relieved that this was ending that she didn’t spot his intention until it was way too late.

He’d taken her back to Earl Wainwright’s table and suggested cheerfully to the councillor, “That was fun. Why don’t you and Mrs. Wainwright take a turn now? There are a lot of couples out there now.”

Mrs. Wainwright’s eyes instantly lit up. “Oh, Earl. Why don’t we? He’s right. It isn’t just young people, and they’re playing our sort of music.”

Seconds later, Cat had to watch her elusive quarry stumble across the ice under the escort of a seventeen-year-old skate bunny. Patrick sat back in his seat, meanwhile, openly enjoying her poorly disguised chagrin.

“They’re serving more supper,” he said, then gestured at Jill, who was swishing by with a tray of filled plates.

She came to an elegant halt—she really was a beautiful skater!—and laid two plates down in front of them with a beaming smile. This quickly turned into a confused glare at Cat when she thought Patrick wasn’t looking.

Why are you wasting your time with this guy? the glare said.

Cat gave a tiny frown back and shook her head, as if to say, “Believe me, I’m trying to shake him off!” then Jill swished away with her tray once more.

“She skates well,” was Patrick’s comment.

“Yes, she does, doesn’t she?” Cat began warmly, then corrected her tone quickly. “That is to say, she seems more skilled than most of the people one sees on the outdoor rink at Gstaad.”

“Ah, we’re back to Gstaad,” Patrick murmured.

He tortured her without mercy as they ate. Cat hated herself for appreciating every moment of his cleverness. Never once did he say straight out that he knew she was a fraud. That would have been too easy. But he broke her cover again and again.

He trapped her and let her go again like a cat toying with a mouse, and she almost begged him, “Okay, you win. Call management and get me thrown out, if you’d enjoy the sight of my humiliation. I won’t bother to tell you why it matters so much. You’d only shrug.”

But he didn’t make his first move, and in the end she didn’t ask him to. Instead, she held desperately to the faint, fading hope that it would turn out all right. What other choice did she have?

Some minutes later, however, the Wainwrights came back, and despite Mrs. Wainwright’s suspicious glare, her husband gallantly whirled Cat away to dance at last. Patrick, surprisingly, didn’t interfere.

Suddenly, when she’d really believed all hope was lost, it was easy. Oh, it was so wonderfully easy! Here she was, out on the dance floor with a perspiring councillor, who was like putty in her hands.

One eager question from him about her ancestral home led her smoothly into the subject of chemical contamination of the poor, dear ancestral trout stream and consequent tragic demise of the poor, dear ancestral trout.