A Rather Curious Engagement Read Free Page A

insisting I’d feel claustrophobic in a space capsule, so he bowed, got up and left, and I thought that would be an end to it. Instead, he told the press that I was on his list of upcoming space tourists, and so they printed it. This then opened the floodgates to all manner of salesmen and phony investors. I thought I had junk mail and telemarketing problems before. Phew! My parents still get surprise visits (at dinnertime) from people who claim that they went to school with me (they didn’t) and loaned me money that was never reimbursed (no way).
    Money really can do odd things to people, and Jeremy and I are trying to make sure that it doesn’t do strange things to us. Yet, obviously, the games have already begun. In a way, it’s like winning a lottery; if you’re not careful, pretty soon you only know two kinds of people in the world: 1) those who want to take your money away from you, and 2) those who say they want to help you get more money . . . and guess what? More often than not, those two types of people are actually one-in-the-same.
    But, much more important than all that finance stuff, I’d like to clear up one other little personal matter in that news story. I don’t care for the insinuations that I’m some kind of homewrecker. Jeremy was divorced long before I came on the scene, and before the inheritance. Also, technically, he’s not my cousin. His stepfather is my Uncle Peter (Mom’s brother) but there’s no blood connection to my family at all. None of us knew this until Great-Aunt Penelope’s will brought the whole thing to light. As kids, Jeremy and I had simply thought of each other as distant relatives, because he lived in England and I grew up in America. The inheritance brought us together as adults, amid wild circumstances that made it necessary for us to team up just to figure it all out. We rode that roller coaster together . . . and discovered how we really felt about each other.
    As for the bit in the article about wedding bells, well, that’s rushing things. Love is spectacular enough for the moment! Also, regarding the sneery talk about pre-nups, the fact is that Jeremy and I have already figured out a way to pool our inheritance so that we can make the most of it.
    So life is perfect and I toddled off to live happily ever after, right?
    Erm. Look. I’m not complaining. How could I?
    But even when you’ve fallen into good fortune and feel like you’re in heaven, you know, there’s always a snake in the garden. Our garden was no exception, and our snake was named Lydia.
    Jeremy’s first wife.

Chapter Three
    I can remember that day with crystal clarity, even though it happened months ago. There she stood, right in the middle of Jeremy’s living room, holding a drink in her hand, wearing a low-cut black-and-red chiffon dress, and diamond earrings almost as big as those ice cubes clinking in her cocktail. Her hair was expensively coiffed, and her skin and body had that highly polished, smooth, glossy, pampered glamorous look that requires a woman to spend all day allowing strange doctors to do fearful things to her.
    She looked me over once, twice, thrice, and then had the nerve to tell me, in her high-rent accent, “I’m afraid you’ll just have to go.” Funny thing is, she meant it.
    I’d known about her, of course, but this was the first time we came face-to-face. Blonde, beautiful, posh and totally batty, she’d been out of his life for several years, but she apparently reads the newspapers, too, or else she’d heard about the inheritance on the grapevine from Jeremy’s friends, but in any case—and, here I do not exaggerate—the ink had barely dried on the French judge’s settlement of Great-Aunt Penelope’s will, when Lydia turned up that day, having got Jeremy’s doorman to let her into his spiffy modern bachelor’s apartment in South Kensington.
    Naturally, with feline cunning, she’d managed to pick the night that Jeremy and I had just flown back from France