Edwina Read Free Page A

her sister. Cecelia could
change life- styles quicker than Edwina could put gas in her little
white Volkswagen.
    “I’ll let the airlines know I won’t be
flying. They’ll use my seat for a standby. Be right back.”
    Edwina barely heard.

Chapter 4
     
    I t
was Cecelia who loved to travel. Her dreams always came true,
including the fact that she, being the only child of an actress and
an Italian count, was also beautiful beyond imagination. Silky
golden blonde hair, blue eyes and a bone structure to die
for.
    Edwina’s mother and father were not of the
same stock. She was born not of a count, but of two college
professors who gave her, their only child, the gift of practicality
and the desire to learn. Unlike Cecelia who had the best educa-
tion money could buy at Oxford, Edwina had received two degrees:
one in Library Science and a second in Writing from the University
of Michigan, her father’s alma mater. But beyond her superior
education, Cecelia also possessed a star-quality beauty, not to
mention strong entrepreneurial leanings.
    Edwina’s widowed father, stern, yet of a kind
nature, had fallen completely in love with Cecelia’s mother, an
aged but still beautiful English stage actress. She was rich and
unattached and her father had married the woman within a
month—which was very unlike his conservative nature; the man who
planned every detail of his life right down to the annual purchase
of fresh, new underwear in January during the white sale.
    The passing of Cecelia’s father had left her
an Italian villa and who knows what else. With all the money
Cecelia would attain, she would still boss Edwina around. Her elder
by exactly twenty-three months, Cecelia insisted on acting the part
even though they were only stepsisters. Cecelia had been twenty
years old, she eighteen, when the pecking order had been
established.
    Edwina hated her name. Aptly named after her
father’s mother, she rather wished she’d been called by her middle
name, Emily. It sounded so much softer. But now her name and her
life were set in stone. And having a beautiful, rich, and very
spoiled stepsister, she’d been honor bound by some sort of human
chain of events to choose a lifestyle that was very sane, very
safe. Which she had done. A well-educated librarian had been her
choice of vocation, pleasing her parents immensely.
    So now she found herself bound by duty...
once again... to save her sister’s cash outlay and was presently
square in the middle of Scotland in the castle of a very handsome
Scot. She brushed her long, chestnut brown hair and tied it back
with a black ribbon.
    Edwina wanted to laugh. If her sister were
here, the hand- some Scot currently at Edwina’s service, Cecelia
would have made a play for him at the hotel counter... no even
earlier... on the plane. Cecelia would have finagled her way into
the seat next to the handsome man and chirped up a conversation
immediately. And with her golden blonde upswept hair around her
perfect heart-shaped face, she would have succeeded.
    Edwina giggled at the foolishness of it all.
Time to get to the business for which she came—the castle tour. She
fished through her small purse for Cecelia’s itinerary. She must
make her way to the hotel and fight with the hotel’s owner that she
was not Cecelia Grace Giatana but Edwina Emily Blair. Nothing about
their names matched and Cecelia’s driver’s license picture that had
been faxed ahead was clearly nothing like her own image. That’s
when the problems started.
    Snapping the folded paper out of her purse,
she smoothed it on the small bedside table and sighed. She’d much
rather be about the countryside, checking out plants and flowers
native to Scotland. And what industries were about the area? How
did Scotland carry its people? What were their likes and dislikes?
Again she found herself wishing to study people and places, not
ballrooms and buildings. It was Cecelia who bought buildings and
turned them into elegant