All for You Read Free Page B

she’d needed a change. She just hadn’t expected that she would get the particular level of help she was getting at the moment to make that change.
    Tess looked up. “Peach, these are all your clients—”
    “I’ll find new ones,” Peaches said with a casualness she didn’t feel. “No problem.”
    “I don’t want to pry,” Tess began slowly, “but—”
    “I have plenty of money,” Peaches said, hoping to cut Tess off before she asked for any details. Unfortunately, her sister was who she was and details were her specialty.
    “How much is plenty?”
    Peaches took a deep breath. “Almost three thousand dollars.”
    Tess blinked. “You mean almost thirty thousand.”
    “No,” Peaches said, trying to sound cheerful but failing. “You know how I always tell people,
Never do business with friends
? Well, apparently there really is something to that.”
    “Peaches,” Tess said, aghast. “What happened?”
    “Oh, this and that,” Peaches said. “A few bad investments in start-ups. The occasional dip into retirement funds to help out a friend in need.”
Giving my PIN to a trusted guy friend who wasn’t a husband.
“The usual.”
    Tess bowed her head for a moment or two, then looked at Peaches. “You’ll stay here until you decide what to do, for as long as it takes.”
    “I can’t,” Peaches said miserably. “I thought my visa was a done deal, but I got a letter yesterday—”
    “John knows a guy who knows some guys,” Tess interrupted her. “They’ll take care of it.”
    Peaches imagined they would. John did, after all, have someparticular immigration issues that would have definitely required the services of a guy.
    “I’m going back to the house now,” Tess said, sounding suddenly very far away. “I’ll go stir up some powdered grass drink for you.”
    Peaches looked at her sister. She was standing within reach, but somehow she sounded like she was in another world. She nodded, because she knew that was what she was supposed to do. What she wanted to do was burst into tears, but she knew that wouldn’t accomplish anything. And she wasn’t a crier; she was a gulper. If she had a nickel for every time she’d gulped, put her shoulders back, and soldiered on, she wouldn’t have minded at all that she was holding on to a stack of faxes that spelled the end of her comfortable, balanced life in the States. The only client she had left was Roger Peabody, who only hired her to come clean out his office so she would be forced to look at the illustrated charts hanging on his walls detailing the benefits of her becoming his wife.
    She looked again to find Tess gone. She wasn’t sure when that had happened, which probably should have worried her. She couldn’t even bring herself to look through the stack of faxes again. Anyone who believed Brandalyse Stevens probably wasn’t really the client for her.
    And perhaps, in the end, Fate was shoving her in the right direction.
    She pushed herself to her feet, ignored the final twitch of hanger, then walked toward the door. It was open from where Tess had gone through it, which struck her as spooky for some reason. She would have paused to analyze why, but decided it was a bad idea. Maybe later, when she had gone at least twelve hours without seeing any sort of paranormal activity.
    She walked through the barbican tunnel and stopped on the edge of Tess’s courtyard. It was nothing out of the ordinary, that stopping. She had stopped either in the same place or near to it dozens of times before and spent an equal number of times looking at the courtyard in front of her.
    Only during none of those dozens of times had she ever had the feeling of destiny come over her as it was coming over her now.
    What if … what if she had the courage to acknowledge what it was she really wanted?
    Audentes Fortuna Juvat.
    The thought of it almost stole her breath. She stood on the edge of her sister’s medieval courtyard, struggling to breathe normally, and