Ever After Read Free Page B

hope I didn’t mess up the flowers.”
    I kept the member of the yard maintenance crew in my peripheral. It was sort of hard not to. I turned back to Thomas.
    “I’m so sorry. Are you okay? I should have been watching where we were walking. I’m so sorry.” Thomas’s cheeks blazed red as I tried to see around him.
    “Who is that?” I asked Thomas.
    The guy with the weed eater moved from my sight. He reappeared, standing on the right side of the onlookers as he stared at the fourth floor.
    Thomas ignored my question and worked to get me standing in an upright position.
    “Your whole backside is covered. I don’t know how you fell from there to here.” Dalton took too much time to dust the back of my pants.
    I shoved away his hands.
    His mischievous grin returned.
    Thomas glared at Dalton and led me out of the flowerbed.
    I stomped dirt off my feet and said to Dalton, “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”
    “You can put whatever you want on me.”
    The weed eater guy’s dark red lips pursed, and his strong jaw drew taut. He glared at Dalton.
    As if I were the nasty brown stuff dripping from a rusty hole in a dumpster, a clump of gaudy, over-dressed girls close to my age glared at me. As if I were the kind of girl they’d just left with a twenty-dollar bill behind a dumpster, the other guys sneered.
    I shuddered.
    “What happened exactly?” Thomas asked, his face white now.
    “Um, I fell?” Was there a right answer?
    “Well, come along, then. Let’s not give them anything else to whisper about.” Thomas tugged me past the crowd. The yard guy sank into the multitude and out of sight.
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    I’d never had a headache like that. And I was never that clumsy. Tripping, maybe. Falling completely over, never. I could explain tripping over air if I’d seen the amazingly hot weed eater guy first. The front entrance and reception area had emptied of the audience. Hot weed eater guy was nowhere to be found.
    Thomas pulled me into the reception room and turned to drop his coat in a room behind the door.
    Wagon wheels clattered over the cobblestone drive, horses whinnied, and a driver with a strong deep voice called the horses to a halt. Two horses pulled a buggy up the crowded drive. The man drove right through the rest of the stragglers outside the entrance.
    He drove the wagon over the sidewalk and flower bed, stopped the buggy, and hopped down, the wagon creaking as his weight left the strained wood. He had shoulders so broad the fabric of his shirt stretched against its buttons. He turned and came straight toward me.
    My feet were rooted.
    As if I didn’t exist, the tall, handsome gentleman passed straight through me. In the direction the man had hurried, there was no one.
    “…and the reception room was designed by Ethan Kohler, an architect friend of the original owner.” Thomas hadn’t seen the man, so I had to keep cool.
    We walked through the heavy wooden doors, and to my left a staircase rolled up the wall of the vestibule. Cathedral ceilings soared over my head. The ceilings and staircase were similar in design.
    “…the Sistine Chapel with Greek mythological creatures instead of Biblical symbolism. No detail has been spared. If you look closely, you’ll see that each post in the staircase has a carving depicting a mythological character.”
    As I passed, I let my fingers trail over the eyes of Medusa. Rubies?
    The house was more like a museum, not a dwelling.
    “I especially love the pewter-colored chandelier hanging over our heads.” Thomas pointed. Attached to the center of the cathedral ceiling by a heavy black chain, hundreds of prisms dangled from its jeweled-claw feet. “Four gothic columns set twenty feet apart in a square support the soaring ceiling. Fifteenth or sixteenth century Finnish Tapestries garnish the walls, and reds and blues accentuate the jewels in the staircase.”
    My heels clicked on the polished marble floor. The walls were cool smooth stone.