‘The ticket is in my name. Tonight, you will be Amelia Coulter, and you will dance with handsome men and drink champagne and spend an evening being who you were born to be.’
Tabitha blinked, partly to push back the tears threatening to spill down her face and partly in shock.
Being who you were born to be...?
She had spent the past four years trying her hardest to forget her birth right. The memories were too painful. All she could do was tackle each day as it came and look to the future.
Her heart thumped. Did Mrs Coulter know...?
The twinkling eyes were steady on hers. If Mrs Coulter knew Tabitha’s true identity, she was keeping her cards close to her chest.
But Tabitha had never hidden her true self. Her name was the only thing her stepmother had been unable to take from her. She’d taken everything else, though. Her home, her education, her money, her future...
‘Take a look in my wardrobe. Go on, dear.’
On legs that felt strangely drugged, Tabitha stepped through to the bedroom.
‘Right-hand door,’ Mrs Coulter called.
‘What am I looking for?’
‘You’ll see.’
And she did see.
When she opened the right-hand door of the wardrobe, all that hung on the rail was a floor-length ball gown that could have leapt off the pages of a fairy tale.
She stretched out a hand and ran her fingers over the delicate material, her eyes soaking up the pastel-pale pinks and greens overlaid with embellished gold-threaded patterns and encrusted with jewels and the palest of pink roses. An eighteenth-century princess would have been thrilled to wear something so beautiful.
On the shelf above it lay a pair of white-gold high-heeled shoes, a white eye-mask with gold detailing and gold braiding around its edges and a plume of wispy pale pink feathers shaped into a flower on the left cheek.
Hands now shaking, she took hold of a shoe and examined it in awe.
It was her size.
Dazed, she went back to the living area of the suite. ‘How...?’
Mrs Coulter smiled. ‘A lady has her ways.’
‘I can’t. I wish...’ She took a deep breath and hugged the shoe to her chest. ‘I wish I could go but I can’t. If I get caught, I’ll be fired. We’ve all been warned.’ And warned unambiguously. Any member of staff caught trying to enter the ball would have their contract of employment terminated.
But Mrs Coulter was not to be deterred. ‘We will make you unrecognisable. No one will know it’s you—no one will be expecting you to be there. In my experience, people see what they want and expect to see. They will not see a chambermaid. Come back here at five. I’ve arranged for a beautician to join us. She will turn you into a princess. And then tomorrow you can join me for lunch and tell me all about it.’ She gave a tinkle of laughter. ‘I admit, I’m not being entirely altruistic. I’m too old and my knees too shot to go to the ball myself but I can live it vicariously through you.’
Hot tears prickled the back of Tabitha’s eyes. No one had ever done such a thing for her before.
‘Do not be afraid, my dear. Tonight you will be a princess and you will go to the ball, and I will not hear another word of argument about it.’
* * *
Giannis Basinas left the apartment he used as a base when in Vienna and strolled up the rose-hedged path that led to his hotel. He could have earmarked one of the suites for his own use but he preferred to give himself at least an illusion of privacy. Privacy was a concept frequently ignored by his large, exuberant family.
It was partly down to his family that he was making this walk now dressed in an all-black, leather swallowtail suit and hosting this masquerade ball. His sisters had been dropping hints since he’d turned thirty-five that he needed to find a new wife. He’d come to the reluctant conclusion that they were right.
When his oldest friend Alessio Palvetti had pulled in a favour owed from their school days and asked him to host a masquerade ball, using a specific event team to manage it, Giannis had figured the ball could work in his favour. He could repay his debt and let his sisters believe he was serious about finding a wife. Everyone would be happy.
He didn’t hold much hope that his ideal woman would emerge tonight but this was as good an opportunity to find her as any. He’d even let Niki, his youngest sister and the biggest socialite in his family, select fifty of the four hundred guests to invite. These fifty guests were unmarried women, their wealth determined by their ability to pay the forty-thousand-euro price tag he’d set the tickets at.
If Giannis was going to marry again, he had three criteria. Firstly, and most importantly, his potential wife had to be independently rich. He would not make the same mistake as he’d made in his first marriage. Secondly, she must be of childbearing age, a criterion that was self-explanatory. Thirdly, and least importantly, she must be pleasant to look at. She didn’t have to be a model, or even be particularly beautiful, but if he was going to spend the rest of his life with one woman he would prefer it to be with someone he found attractive.
Slipping through a rear door into the hotel he’d bought less than two years ago, he made his way to the ballroom.
Giannis’s business interests were varied but mostly concentrated in shipping and property across the globe. This former palace he’d spent millions on renovating into a world-class hotel was his first venture into the tourism industry outside his Greek home. As a status symbol, there was none better.
About to open a side door into the ballroom, he spotted a female guest on the cantilevered stairs. Her fingers trailed the railing as she made her descent. Her other hand clutched the gold invitation all ball guests were required to show on their arrival.
There was something hesitant about her graceful walk that made him look twice.
He looked at her. Then looked again.
Although much of her face was hidden behind a white-gold eye-mask with a plume of dusky-pink feathers on the left cheek, there was something about her that set his pulses racing.
He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Her beautiful dress, all delicate pale greens, dusky pinks, golds and jewels that sparkled when the light caught them, was strapless and form-fitting to the waist then puffed out to fall in layers to her hidden feet.
She looked like a princess.
She could be a princess.
He imagined the dazzling circle the skirt of the dress would make on the dance floor...
Leaving the door he’d been about to enter, he approached her as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
She was shorter than he’d thought and, up close, even more ravishing. Honey-blonde hair had been coiled into an elegant knot at the base of a graceful neck adorned with a gold choker necklace covered in jewels, and roses that matched her dress and the drop earrings hanging from the lobes of her pretty ears.
She was the most exquisite creature he had ever set eyes on.
‘You look lost,’ he said in English.
A pair of cornflower-blue eyes met his from behind the mask.
Full, heart-shaped lips curved into a hesitant smile.
‘Do you need directions to the room the guests are meeting in? Or are you waiting for someone?’ She wore a glimmering diamond on her right hand but there was no ring on her left.
She shook her head in obvious shyness.
‘You