Through The Leaded Glass Read Free Page B

and…
    … she started to fall.

Chapter Two
     
    Kate did a two-step to keep her balance, shook
her head, and turned around. Then back again. How had she gotten outside the shop?
    With the stained glass window in her
arms?
    Kate shook her head. This was weird. Odd.
Strange. And the whirling sensation in her head wasn’t helping any.
She probably shouldn’t have skipped breakfast this
morning.
    She hiked the window beneath her arm. She
needed something to eat before she passed out. Let the clerk keep
the change, she needed to find food and Alicia. In that
order.
    The heralds started trumpeting the moment she
stepped out of the shop, and the street became crowded with a
teeming mass of humanity all headed in one direction, dragging Kate
along with it. Oh well, at least the crêpe shop was this
way.
    Then a woman with the most amazing shade of
tangerine hair bumped into her, almost knocking the window out of
her arms.
    Kate scrambled to keep it from crashing to the
ground while the woman just gave her an uptight little sniff and
looked down her nose at her.
    The lady-in-waiting beside her did the same
thing.
    Kate raised an eyebrow, waiting for an
apology.
    Which didn’t come.
    Instead, the woman raked her gaze over Kate
while smoothing a hand over her own velvet dress that was covered
in every colored gemstone there was, with enough silver braiding to
ring a castle twice.
    Velvet in this weather? No wonder the woman
looked like she’d sucked on a lemon.
    Yeah, that apology wasn’t going to
happen.
    But then Velvet Woman looked at the window and
was suddenly all smiles—which was actually worse since she could
use some serious dental work. She should have spent her money on a
trip to a periodontist instead of that dress. Wacko .
    As the crowd surged, Kate lost sight of the
woman and her maid because they blended in with everyone else. Not
one person was in normal dress. And the smell… This was a special
“Members Only” opening Friday; she would’ve hoped that they
would’ve washed their costumes since last season.
    The crowd bypassed the food stands, instead
flowing into the jousting arena where people in the wooden stands
waved colorful flags and cheered as the actors rode in on horseback
beneath a blue banner. Ah, that’s where she’d find Alicia. It
figured that it was on the opposite side of the arena.
    Kate worked her way to the edge of the crowd,
then ducked beneath the seating area scaffold, a more direct route
than trying to shove her way through the throng. And she obviously
wasn’t the only one to think so. The path beneath the scaffolding
was littered with discarded wooden cups, scraps of fabric, and
crumpled little flags.
    She followed the path out to a small hill
overlooking the staging area that was dotted with horses and the
actors’ dressing room tents. Some were non-descript; others had
fringed awnings with heraldic crests emblazoned on all sides. It
was pretty, almost like something from a painting, but she didn’t
have time to admire the scenery. She needed to find Alicia and grab
a seat so she could put these bulky things down. She should have
bought them on her way out of the faire.
    She looked for the quickest path to their
rendezvous point. There had to be one since the actors had used it,
but where there’d been signage galore in other parts of the faire,
there wasn’t any now. If this were her account, she’d—
    Kate laughed at herself. Even on her day off
she was thinking of work. Apparently, you could take the woman out
of the boardroom, but you couldn’t take the boardroom out of the
woman. And, boy, was the boardroom where she wanted to be right
now, not lost in some re-created English village.
    Luckily, a member of said village crested the
hill just then, a bridle in hand.
    “ Excuse me,” Kate said, realizing
the “guy” was little more than a boy. They sure started them
young.
    The kid slammed to a halt. “My
lady?”
    Okay, this was getting old. Kate exhaled. “I
was