secretary half his age, everyone but him easily pegged Rachel for the gold digger she was. Bradley, though, either couldn’t see or didn’t care, and he smiled benignly in the background as Rachel ran circles around him, spending his money like it was going out of style and making him the laughingstock of the very society she’d worked so hard to infiltrate.
When Rachel tired of Dallas, Bradley officially retired and moved her and five-year-old Evie to the Caribbean, leaving Will in charge of the family company at the ripe old age of twenty-six.
And while Will dedicated the next ten years to running the company and expanding it into an international force, his father and Rachel frolicked on the beaches around St. Kitts and traveled the world, but made no attempt to prepare Evie for her place in Dallas society—or civilization in general, as far as Marcus was concerned.
Will hadn’t heard much from Rachel in the last couple of years—after his father’s death, she’d been little more than another issue for the accountant to deal with—but after the accident last month that had left her daughter an orphan, he’d found himself Evie’s guardian.
So far, it hadn’t been easy. Yesterday had just been the proverbial last straw for Marcus.
Will cleared his throat. “Mrs. Gray and her tutors…”
“Mrs. Gray is a housekeeper. She’s kind to Evangeline and makes sure you both eat well and have clean clothes, but she is hardly the person to teach the child anything about etiquette. Evangeline’s tutors, even if they were qualified, need to focus on her studies so she’ll be ready to start at Parkline Academy in the fall.”
Marcus could be remarkably and frustratingly single-minded at times, but he’d been the one unwavering pillar of Will’s life, completely dedicated to the company and the Harrison family. Evie’s arrival had given the old man new focus, and for that, Will was grateful. His own love life and the need for a new generation of Harrisons had been under Marcus’s microscope for far too long. At least he hadn’t revisited the idea of Will marrying in order to give Evie a female role model. Yet. The night was still young, though, so he needed to think fast.
“William?”
“All right, I’ll hire someone specifically to work with her on this—to teach her some manners and how to behave in polite society.”
“You must do it now, William. People are already asking where Evangeline is and why you haven’t introduced her to more of your father’s friends or her own peer group. I’ve held everyone off for weeks now, claiming she needs more time to mourn her mother’s passing.”
“She does need time.” His own mother had died when he was twelve; Will could relate to Evie’s grief. At least he hadn’t lost both parents so early in life. His father may have been distant, but he’d been around for the most part.
“Yes, but she has responsibilities that cannot be ignored now that she is back in the States.”
“Responsibilities? She’s fifteen, for God’s sake. She doesn’t have any responsibilities.”
“Let me tell you this, William Harrison. Evangeline must be introduced into society and take her rightful place in it. Everyone is expecting to meet her at the Hospital Benefit.”
With that pronouncement, Marcus sat back in his chair and swirled the Scotch in his glass, seemingly amused by Will’s sputtering.
“The benefit? That’s three weeks away.”
“Then you’d better get busy finding someone, shouldn’t you?”
Dear Miss Behavior,
I told my best friend I was hoping this guy we both like would ask me to go to a concert with him. She goes and buys tickets and then asks him to go with her! I’m so mad at her, but she says that if he’d liked me, then he wouldn’t have agreed to go with her. Now she wants to borrow my leather jacket to wear on their date. She says it would be the “polite” thing to do since she loaned me a pair of boots the last time I had a date. I think she’s the one being rude. Since we both love your column, I told her I’d let you decide. Do I have to loan her my jacket to go on a date with the guy I like?
Thnx.
Cinderella
Gwen reached for her coffee cup. Empty. She’d need at least another cup before she was awake enough to deal with teenage angst. She swiveled out of her chair and headed to the kitchen for a refill to fortify her before she waded in to the dangerous waters of adolescent controversy.
In the nine months she’d served as Miss Behavior, Teen Etiquette Expert on the TeenSpace Web site, she’d been embroiled in enough melodrama to write her own teenage soap opera. She’d signed on thinking she’d be answering simple questions like who asks whom to the prom or who pays for dinner. How wrong she was. The complexities of seating charts were child’s play in comparison to the day-today drama of high school.
The coffee carafe was still half-full as she pulled it off the warmer and poured another extra-large cup. Her experience with teenage dramatics had been vicarious at best. She’d been the “good” daughter—except that one time—leaving her sister Sarah to reap Mother’s wrath over her outlandish behavior. Funny how now, after all these years, she was still standing on the outskirts of the fray and trying to mediate the peace.
A yowl was Gwen’s only warning as Letitia jumped from behind the pie safe to attack the ears of Gwen’s bunny slippers, only to land claws first on her ankle instead. Coffee sluiced over her hand as she jumped, splattering to the floor around the black and white cat. Letitia hissed at the coffee puddles, took one last swipe at the slippers and bolted out of the kitchen.
“You’re going to get burned doing that, you silly cat.” Or declawed. This was a new trick from the previously laid-back Letitia. A gift from her sister, the new slippers with their oversize ears had pushed the cat over the edge. After five days of this, her ankles looked like she’d been attacked by a ravenous horde of three-inch vampires. The slippers were comfortable, not to mention cute, but not worth the constant battle. She left the slippers in the kitchen for Letitia to attack at her leisure and went back to her computer.
Stifling the urge to start with “With friends like that, who needs enemies,” Gwen typed out her response for Cinderella and posted all five of today’s questions and answers to the site before logging out of her Miss Behavior account and turning her attention to the mail on her desk. Miss Behavior had been an instant Internet success, tripling the hits to TeenSpace in the last six months, and her real-life consulting business was benefiting from the popularity of the column. As much as she hated it sometimes, practically every debutante in Dallas had her on speed dial.
In addition to bills and a few checks her bank account desperately needed, the morning’s snail mail brought yet another plaque of thanks from the Victorian Guild for her work with the current debutante class. She’d earned a plaque this year; that group of debs had been the worst yet. Just getting them to spit out their gum and turn off their cell phones had taken most of her patience.
She scanned her office, debating where she had room for it. Wall space was at a premium as debutante class photos, thank-you plaques and other memorabilia competed for a place. There was space over her certificates from some of the best protocol schools in the country, but she really didn’t want anything relating to her current work next to them.
She sighed. If her classmates could see her now. Those certificates—many awarded
