A Rather Curious Engagement Read Free

could have resulted in him being chucked into the Bastille. (The French do not take kindly to the pilfering of priceless art.)
    Now, about that “Belgravia bolt hole” I’m living in, technically, my mother was the one who inherited Aunt Pen’s London apartment, but Mom said she “had no use for it” and therefore gave it to me (and if you saw the New York City crackerbox I’d been living in, you’d understand why. Also, my folks are happily ensconced in Connecticut, and they winter in Florida, so nobody will ever convince them to move away and live somewhere else, ever again. They come to Europe once a year to see me.)
    It’s astonishingly true that Jeremy and I, together, inherited millions of euros, though, all totalled, it was closer to half the amount the newspaper said we did. Maybe it wasn’t so astonishing for Jeremy, who was pretty much born to be rich—he’s the stepson of Uncle Peter, my mother’s brother, and his mum’s family is quite wealthy, too. Anyway, Aunt Pen left him the villa in Antibes. I got the garage . . . and the car inside the garage . . . and the painting inside the car.
    The photograph in the newspaper was snapped on the day I sold the painting to a fine little museum in Italy that I knew would take proper care of it. The photo shows the museum director, an alert-eyed, slightly balding but very dignified man, standing to the right of the beautiful little painting of a Madonna and Child, done by a female student of Leonardo. Yup, da Vinci. To the left of the painting is Jeremy, standing protectively beside me, with just a hint of mistrust in his eyes as he gazes at the photographer. And then there’s me, looking slightly dazed.
    I still can’t quite believe it, even now. I keep expecting to wake up back in New York, scraping by as an historical researcher for romantic bio-pics shown on cable-TV movies-of-the-week. I continue to do some consulting for my friends at Pentathlon Productions, but it’s different now. (I can’t be the first to notice that work is more fun when you aren’t threatened with starvation if they fire you.) Sometimes I even have dreams that gremlins or police or my old grammar school principal is chasing after me for impersonating an heiress, telling me I’m now in big trouble and will be punished for it. Yet day by day, waking up in the dramatic big canopied four-poster bed in Great-Aunt Penelope’s London townhouse, I am discovering that this new life of mine is, after all, very real.
    Another heir to this fortune is Penny Nichols’ distant English cousin, Jeremy Laidley, who also inherited some of the property—and who recently divorced his wife. The barrister Jeremy Laidley is rumored to be a love interest of Miss Nichols. Do we hear wedding bells? Don’t forget that pre-nup! The couple are considering spending part of their inheritance on a flight to the moon as one of the world’s first space tourists. What else will a gal so young do with all that lovely cashola?
    Thanks a lot, boys. To this day I still get weird calls in the night from strange men who would love to “share my world” and help me handle all that “cashola.” Jeremy, too, has been constantly buttonholed (over at the watercooler in his law firm) by females who seldom before had reason to talk to him, but, upon hearing of his “windfall”, suddenly announced, abruptly and without prelude, that they wished to “bear his child.” (And these women are law partners. The secretaries just want him to either marry them or else buy them a car.)
    Now, as for that ridiculous bit about space tourism, well, believe me, there is just no way that either one of us would blow off any part of the inheritance on a trip to the moon. What happened was, I was sitting in a restaurant minding my own business when some hyper-friendly salesman actually plunked himself in the empty chair opposite me and unceremoniously proceeded to make his pitch to sell me a ticket to the moon. I politely declined,