Lilian Darcy - Cinderella After Midnight

Not the fact that Jill’s older sister Suzanne had refused to remain in a house where her sisters weren’t welcome, so that all three of them, plus Jill’s little son Sam, had ended up struggling to survive in a no-hope trailer park for several years.

Yes, a trailer park, and not the kind where the other residents troubled to grow flowers and put drapes in their windows.

Thanks to Cousin Pixie, that life was behind them now. Cat was well on the way to completing her nursing degree and she was loving it. After turning her back on a career as a show skater following a disastrous six weeks in Las Vegas earlier in the year, Jill was training in computers and administration while she worked in the ice-rink office part-time. Infiltrating tonight’s ball under deep cover had been her idea. Suzanne had recently gotten her degree in library science. They each had hopes for the future. Still, they counted their pennies every single day.

Patrick Callahan knew Cat had as much right to call herself Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown as she had to claim she could fly. But did he know how important this evening was to her? Did he know it wasn’t a game or a scam? Did he know that she and Pixie, Jill, Sam and Suzanne would all lose their home if he blew her cover tonight?

Of course he didn’t, and even if he did, if he’d somehow guessed why she was targeting Councillor Wainwright so assiduously, she doubted that he’d care. His type never did. From bitter experience, she knew this all too well.

There was a whole roll call of such people who’d impinged on her life. Curtis Harrington III, the Ivy League college boy who’d fathered Jill’s son. Barry Grindlay and his ruthless devotion to the bottom line. Her stepmother Rose, too, had given Cat many an unintentional lesson about the gulf that separated the privileged and the strugglers of this world.

The dance came to an end at last. Patrick led Cat from the floor, his fingers linked loosely through hers, and she was so relieved that this was ending that she didn’t spot his intention until it was way too late.

He’d taken her back to Earl Wainwright’s table and suggested cheerfully to the councillor, “That was fun. Why don’t you and Mrs. Wainwright take a turn now? There are a lot of couples out there now.”

Mrs. Wainwright’s eyes instantly lit up. “Oh, Earl. Why don’t we? He’s right. It isn’t just young people, and they’re playing our sort of music.”

Seconds later, Cat had to watch her elusive quarry stumble across the ice under the escort of a seventeen-year-old skate bunny. Patrick sat back in his seat, meanwhile, openly enjoying her poorly disguised chagrin.

“They’re serving more supper,” he said, then gestured at Jill, who was swishing by with a tray of filled plates.

She came to an elegant halt—she really was a beautiful skater!—and laid two plates down in front of them with a beaming smile. This quickly turned into a confused glare at Cat when she thought Patrick wasn’t looking.

Why are you wasting your time with this guy? the glare said.

Cat gave a tiny frown back and shook her head, as if to say, “Believe me, I’m trying to shake him off!” then Jill swished away with her tray once more.

“She skates well,” was Patrick’s comment.

“Yes, she does, doesn’t she?” Cat began warmly, then corrected her tone quickly. “That is to say, she seems more skilled than most of the people one sees on the outdoor rink at Gstaad.”

“Ah, we’re back to Gstaad,” Patrick murmured.

He tortured her without mercy as they ate. Cat hated herself for appreciating every moment of his cleverness. Never once did he say straight out that he knew she was a fraud. That would have been too easy. But he broke her cover again and again.

He trapped her and let her go again like a cat toying with a mouse, and she almost begged him, “Okay, you win. Call management and get me thrown out, if you’d enjoy the sight of my humiliation. I won’t bother to tell you why it matters so much. You’d only shrug.”

But he didn’t make his first move, and in the end she didn’t ask him to. Instead, she held desperately to the faint, fading hope that it would turn out all right. What other choice did she have?

Some minutes later, however, the Wainwrights came back, and despite Mrs. Wainwright’s suspicious glare, her husband gallantly whirled Cat away to dance at last. Patrick, surprisingly, didn’t interfere.

Suddenly, when she’d really believed all hope was lost, it was easy. Oh, it was so wonderfully easy! Here she was, out on the dance floor with a perspiring councillor, who was like putty in her hands.

One eager question from him about her ancestral home led her smoothly into the subject of chemical contamination of the poor, dear ancestral trout stream and consequent tragic demise of the poor, dear ancestral trout.

The councillor’s open-jawed interest in everything she said then allowed her to run on about the charming bed-and-breakfast mansion she was staying at in upper Highgate Street, and how the owner of the bed-and-breakfast was very concerned about the proposed rezoning of one block of lower Highgate Street, where, she understood, the houses had been built on the sight of a former tannery.

The ground, according to the bed-and-breakfast owner, was hopelessly contaminated from the tanning chemicals below the surface of added top soil and rock fill, and it would be a tragedy, quite simply a shocking, frightful tragedy, if the contamination—not known about by the general public, by the way, because it had been hushed up—was brought to the surface through reckless bulldozing by developers.

In any case, the heritage value of the old Victorian houses on that particular block was, “like my own ancestral estate of Dungrove Castle,” absolutely priceless and must on no account be sacrificed to the frightful greed of commercial interests.

“Lady Catrina, you are absolutely right,” said the councillor eagerly. “You couldn’t have known this, of course, but environmental contamination and deliberate hushing up of its presence is one of my most strongly felt issues, and it’s the most amazing coincidence that I should meet someone like you who shares my concerns.”

He took a moment to mop his brow with a big, plaid handkerchief, as if the fluency of his oratory was exhausting him, then said, “As for the heritage values, of course I wish we, here in the United States, had the sensitivity of you British nobles in that area. Rest assured, however, that this city—as well as you personally, my dear—”

He really did have a very pleasant smile, Cat noted.

“—can count on my influence in council to hold these forces of darkness at bay, and council is going to know that at the very next meeting, because I am not going to hold my cards to my chest any longer. The rezoning in lower Highgate Street is off!”

The music ended at that moment, and a very breathless Councillor Wainwright escorted Cat off the floor and back to the table.

Before he reached it, he was waylaid by his wife Darlene, saying urgently, “Earl? Earl! Grab that waitress. She’s missed our table, and I’m ready for my supper. Those canapes wouldn’t have fed a bird. Earl? Go after her!”

He loped off obediently in the wake of the waitress, almost forgetting about the ice in his eagerness. His wife, evidently not trusting either his persistence about supper or his immunity to any of the beautiful women here tonight, followed him.

Cat turned from the councillor and reached the table, her success glowing in her face and making her smile helplessly.

She’d done it. She had actually done it! Pixie’s home and the other gracious Victorian houses in lower Highgate Street were safe, as were the other families who lived in them. Seven and a half weeks from now, when the vital council meeting was due to take place, sleazy Barry Grindlay would have no more reason to try and con poor, frail, simple-hearted Pixie out of her one and only asset.