Moonlight Masquerade (Edilean 8)

Henry marveled at her talent. “I don’t understand why you didn’t pursue this.”

“There are things more important,” she told him, and Henry had looked at her oddly.

Later she’d told Reede about it. They were snuggled on his new couch together, a big bowl of popcorn between them, and watching a DVD.

“What’s more important?” he’d asked while pretending that her answer wasn’t of utmost concern to him.

But he didn’t fool her. “I haven’t figured it out yet,” she said and looked back at the movie.

Reede had figured what was important to him right after he’d met Sophie, but he couldn’t help a sense of déjà vu because he’d felt like this before. He’d been a teenager when he’d first seen Laura Chawnley, and he’d decided right then that she was for him. He’d felt the same way since he’d seen . . . no, since he’d talked to Sophie. There was a vulnerability about her, a feeling that she, well, maybe she needed him, that appealed to him.

He would never let her know it, but her story about the cookbook had shocked him—not because she’d stolen it, but because she was probably going to be in serious trouble. Treeborne Foods was big. Huge. Nationwide. Reede didn’t think they’d smile and say her theft was justifiable revenge for the way the heir apparent had treated her.

Reede had admired Sophie’s sense of remorse and he’d liked her idea of returning the cookbook via a foreign country. But he didn’t trust the Treebornes—which is why he’d gone to so much trouble to keep a copy of the book and to have it decoded—something he was still waiting on.

The night after Carter came to Edilean, Reede asked Sophie about the cookbook, and she’d told him what Carter had said, that there’d be no prosecution.

Reede urged Sophie to push Carter further to make absolutely sure there would be no retaliation. The next day Carter had called the family housekeeper and asked her to tell him when the package arrived. A few days later Carter told Sophie that the cookbook was now under a pile of papers on his father’s desk. “He’ll never know it was missing,” Carter said.

Still, Reede wasn’t satisfied. He called his former roommate again and asked how his brother was doing with the decoding.

“Broke his leg skiing, but I’ll see that he gets right on it. The book, not his leg,” Kirk said.

Reede didn’t tell Sophie that he was still working on the deciphering, and she didn’t ask, and later when Kirk called and said his brother had reported that the code was probably based on a book, Reede didn’t tell Sophie that either. He didn’t want to worry her.

For Thanksgiving they went to Sara and Mike’s old house, and Jecca and Tris came home for the long weekend.

“How miserable are you in New York?” Reede quietly asked his cousin Tristan.

“If I start to tell you I’ll weep like a baby,” Tris said. “Not a pretty sight.”

Reede didn’t miss the irony that Tris hated being out of Edilean as much as Reede disliked being in it.

Although Sophie had helped calm Reede’s restlessness, and had made him more content, he still itched to leave, to travel, to go.

It was at Thanksgiving dinner that Tris’s nine-year-old niece Nell handed Sophie a lump of modeling clay and asked if she could make a centaur.

Sophie smiled. “A centaur, huh? Like in Harry Potter?”

Nell, her beautiful eyes serious, nodded. To her, her aunt Jecca was a true artist, but Jecca said that 3D was Sophie’s field of expertise. “She can make anything.”

Sophie’d always loved horses and had made many of them in several media, so that was easy.

By the time she’d formed the animal, every child who could walk was around her and staring with wide eyes. Sophie stopped when she got to the man part of the creature and held it up.

“So who do you think looks most like a centaur?”

Instantly, every face in the room, over twenty people, looked at the sheriff, Colin Frazier. He was a huge man, his body covered with powerful muscles.

Everyone, and especially Colin, laughed.

After that, Sophie got no rest. She was asked to sculpt every adult male there into an animal. Tristan was a gazelle, Ramsey a bear, Luke a scholarly-looking badger, while Mike was a fox. Reede came last and she put his face onto a lion.

Sara took all the figures and put them into a glass-fronted cabinet. She wouldn’t let the children touch them, but Mike gave them a flashlight so they could look at them.

After the dinner cleanup, Reede caught Sophie in the hallway, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her. “That was very nice of you. The kids really appreciated it.”

“I enjoy doing that kind of thing. The kids in the forest and now these.”