nervously. Here she was at the ripe old age of thirty, and Moriah Mallory had just received her first mash note. Sort of. Refolding Austen’s letter carefully along its original creases, she tucked the paper into her weekender bag and smiled a secret little smile. Maybe she’d never see the man again, but he’d definitely given her something to remember.
The three elder Mallory sisters arrived in a flurry later that morning, creating a stir and a ruckus that Moriah sensed even before she heard it. Leaving the sanctuary of her room to view the commotion, she watched her sisters’ advent with eyebrows raised and lips curled in speculation. Amid a blur of tailored luggage and the very latest designer vacation wear, with the sun glinting blindly off perfectly coiffed silver-blond hair and excessively applied lip gloss, between demands for assistance and complaints about the service, Morgana, Mathilda and Marissa Mallory floated into the hotel lobby with all the splendor of a thousand doves released into the sun-drenched azure summer sky. At least that’s how Morgana would have described it, Moriah thought drily. To her it seemed as if they simply stumbled in from the street.
“Over here!” she called out to them.
As if the three of them shared one brain, they all turned at once with an identical expression of inquiry. Leaving their luggage where it lay—no one would dare have the audacity to steal Mallory luggage—they strolled carelessly to where their youngest sister awaited them. Each appraised Moriah with a critical eye, and none of them liked what she saw.
“Honestly, Mo, what are you trying to prove dressed that way?” Marissa asked in reference to Moriah’s attractive, pale blue sleeveless cotton dress. “You know you have Grandma Maxine’s fat calves! Why do you keep wearing those awful short skirts? Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve ever told you about fashion?”
“And my God, Mo, do something with your hair!” Mathilda instructed, her voice filled with horror at the rambling cascade of gold that fell over the shoulders of her youngest sister. “I’ll braid it for you before we get to the boat. You’ll thank me when we get out in that wind.”
“Mo, where are your glasses?” Morgana wanted to know. “I hope you haven’t left them somewhere again like that time in Fiji. We lost an entire day looking for them. I think it would be a good idea if you just wore them all the time on this trip. Now, where’s your room? We’d like to freshen up before you check out.”
Moriah took a deep breath and surrendered to her sisters. It was far easier than arguing with all three of them, she knew. The Mallory family history was long and vivid, filled with the bloody battles she had waged with her relatives and lost mightily. When they returned to her room, her sisters pounced on the mirror while Moriah changed into a pair of baggy khaki trousers and a white safari shirt. She fished her horn-rimmed glasses out of her purse and donned them obediently while Mathilda wove her thick, unruly tresses back into a long French braid. When she looked sufficiently anthropological, her sisters, as one, expelled a long sigh of relief, thankful that Mo was back and that the strange, vivacious-looking woman who had met them was now gone.
While her sisters chatted and rearranged their belongings, Moriah observed them with a casual eye. A lot of people claimed that they had trouble distinguishing one Mallory from the other, except for the youngest one, of course, but Moriah didn’t see how that was possible. Each one of her sisters looked exactly like who and what she was.
Morgana Mallory was the oldest and, for now, the most famous of the four, having recently seen her newest novel go skyrocketing up every bestseller list in the county. She wrote her first book, Up on Rapture Mountain, over ten years ago, but it wasn’t until her third, They Call Me Hussy, that she’d made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. The one following that, Passion Rides a Spotted Horse, was turned into a miniseries, and since then, the name Morgana Mallory had meant gold to booksellers everywhere. Some time ago she’d started wearing tailored suits and conservative separates, and she’d had her long tresses shorn into a chin-length blunt cut. All this was done at her publicist’s suggestion, in the hopes that it would make her appear less frivolous and more like a “serious writer.” Moriah had recommended that her eldest sister give her books serious titles if she wanted to be taken more seriously. Morgana had responded by demanding what Moriah knew about the publishing industry anyway, quickly cutting her off before she could mention that little piece of anthropological fluff she called a textbook.
Mathilda Mallory was a fast-rising star on the Broadway stage, quickly catching up with Morgana in the fame department, something which Moriah was certain annoyed her eldest sister to no end. She had never seen her sister act, but her parents had, of course, and were forever gushing about the rampantly flowing ocean of talent in their family. If Moriah gave it much thought, which she seldom did, she would probably admit that Mathilda had more common sense than her other sisters and was probably capable of freethinking if left to her own devices. There were times when Moriah felt that Mathilda was as much a victim of the Mallory mystique as she, and believed that Mathilda might possibly have turned out to be rather interesting if she hadn’t so closely resembled the others in looks and been forced to comply with family expectations. Mathilda still broke out of the mold every now and then, Moriah noted, wearing berry shades of lipstick and rouge instead of the traditional peach, styling her shoulder-length hair into complicated creations instead of letting the silvery sheaths flow like a celestial river as the others did.
Marissa Mallory posed the biggest irritation to Moriah. Next to her in age, Marissa had always been closer to what was going on in Moriah’s life, had always known exactly how to draw the most blood. Like a perfect stereotype of the glamorous supermodel, Marissa was shallow, vague and superficial, her vocabulary consciously restricted to less than a hundred words. With hair that streamed to her waist and a body that most men would kill to possess, she’d also delighted throughout childhood and adolescence in pointing out what she considered an abundance of physical imperfections all over her little sister’s curvy form. And now that Marissa was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be so beautiful, she could smile in just such a way as to tell Moriah she was thinking, “I told you so.”
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