Without hesitation, he entered the little sitting room.
“Garrett!” one of the women said. “You have returned.” She was a pretty young woman and smiling in a way that seemed to mean they were friends. “We didn’t expect your ship to get in for another few weeks.”
The other woman was older and she was frowning at Graydon. “Have you seen Mrs. Weber yet?”
Graydon was glad for his training in diplomacy because he felt like saying that when he did see the woman he might strangle her. Instead, he smiled. “No, I haven’t seen her. Is Tabby here?”
“I’m not sure,” the older woman said.
The younger one stepped forward. “I just saw her with John Kendricks’s daughter.”
“On the window seat,” he said and realized that he was now in Kingsley House and it looked like it was John and Parthenia’s wedding—which made him smile. That meant Tabby hadn’t yet been sacrificed to the storekeeper in an attempt to pay the bills.
As he headed toward the door that led to the big parlor, the young woman stopped him. “Garrett,” she said softly so only he would hear, “I think you should know what’s been going on while you were away. Mrs. Weber has arranged for Tabby to marry—”
“That little sea urchin, Silas Osborne? I know that. I’ve come home to rescue her.”
“How fortunate for her,” she said. “I wish you luck.”
“Thank you,” Graydon said and turned away. The large parlor of Kingsley House was full of people dancing and laughing, and Graydon in his tan trousers and short jacket fit right in. Many people greeted him by the name of Garrett, most of them expressing surprise that he was there so much earlier than expected.
“Where’s your brother?” a few asked.
Graydon covered himself by saying, “Which one?” He assumed they meant Captain Caleb, but he wasn’t sure. He looked over the heads of the dancers to see if he could find Valentina/Victoria, hoping she could tell him where Toby was. But he didn’t see her.
In the far corner was the little girl Ali, with her drawing pad. She was sitting on the cushioned window seat that just an hour before Ken had taken apart. Graydon quickly made his way across the room. He didn’t have time to make introductions. Besides, he assumed Garrett and the child were acquainted. “Was there a woman here with you?”
“Tabby,” the girl said. “Her mother is angry at her. She doesn’t want Tabby to marry you.”
“I know,” Graydon said, “but in this life, she can marry me. Do you know where she is?”
“I think she went home,” Ali said, and he knew the child meant the BEYOND TIME house. Graydon started to leave, but then he turned back. “Ali, I want to ask a favor of you.”
She was quite young and he doubted if she’d remember what he was about to tell her, but he could try. “When you are twenty-three years old, I want you to have your portrait painted and put it in a big frame. Have your father make it with secret compartments in it. I want you to write about and draw pictures of the houses you and your husband create and hide everything inside the picture frame. I want to make sure the future knows who you are and what you two did. Do you think you can remember all that?”
“Yes,” Ali said and nodded in that way children do when something nonsensical makes perfect sense to them. “Who will I marry?”
“Valentina’s big, healthy boy,” he answered as he hurried toward the front door.
When someone handed him a beer, he took it and kept walking. It was beginning to hit him that right now he was not a prince. He didn’t have the weight of a whole country on his shoulders. Who he married, where he lived, every word he spoke, was not going to be scrutinized, questioned, weighed, and measured. Any slip of his tongue would not be tomorrow’s headlines in the Lanconian newspapers. Being seen with a pretty girl wouldn’t show up on the Internet with the caption “Is This the Next Queen of Lanconia?”
And speaking of pretty girls, he saw a circle of men surrounding two of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. In the modern world he was used to seeing women who’d spent hours making up their faces, but these young women had the faces they were born with and they were exquisite, almost too perfect to be real. As he looked, hardly able to blink, one of them smiled at him, and he was so enraptured he almost ran into a door.
A man nearby laughed.
“Who are they?” Graydon asked, still staring at them.
“The Bell sisters, and don’t get too near or their father will go after you with a grappling hook.”
“Somebody should paint their portraits.”
“Garrett!”
Reluctantly, Graydon turned away and saw his brother. He wasn’t exactly like Graydon, but enough like him that they must cause comment. “Rory,” he whispered.
“Rory?” he said, laughing as he gave Graydon a masculine shoulder clasp. “I haven’t heard that nickname in years.” He turned to the woman on his arm. “Right after I was born, Cousin Caleb said I ‘roared like the wind’ and the name stayed with me. Until I was an adult, anyway.”
Graydon hadn’t at first noticed the woman with his brother, but when he looked at her, his eyes widened. Unless he missed his guess, she was Danna—and she was heavily pregnant. He very much wanted to talk to his brother, but he wanted to see Toby more. “I must—”