The Marriage Miracle

When he opened them, the display of neon-bright, fairy-bedecked birthday cards was still there.

A week ago he’d been sitting in his Wall Street office, the fate of major corporations in his hands. All it had taken was one phone call to change his life from the American dream to a British farce. He just wished Matty Lang were here to see what the ‘big-shot New York banker’ had come to.

She, he was certain, would have enjoyed the joke. With her there he might have been able to see it for himself.

‘They were our most profitable line…’

Blanche Appleby, Uncle George’s secretary since time immemorial, hesitated, unsure exactly how to address Sebastian now that he was a head taller than her and, in his real life, the vice-president of an international bank.

He let the image of Matty’s smile fade. ‘It’s still Sebastian, Blanche.’

She relaxed a little. ‘It’s been a good many years since I called you that.’

‘I know, but you don’t have to go all formal on me just because I’ve grown a few feet. I’m still going to need you to hold my hand on this one. I know nothing about the greeting card business.’ Knew nothing and cared less. But he was stuck with it.

‘What about the staff?’

‘I’ll talk to them all later, when I have a better idea what’s—’

‘No. What do you want them to call you?’

He stifled a groan. Life was so much simpler in the US. There he was simply Sebastian Wolseley, a man defined by what he did and how well he did it rather than by the fact that one of his ancestors had been the mistress of Britain’s merriest monarch.

As Viscount Grafton, his title was a courtesy one, one of his father’s spares, passed on at birth to keep him going until he inherited the big one. He’d made damn sure that no one in New York knew about it. And perhaps that was a small upside.

Baiting minor aristocracy was a blood sport in the British media; any coverage of his involvement in Coronet Cards was likely to be of the mocking variety. Since it would be the Viscount they were mocking, he might just get away with it.

It would be worth any amount of mockery if it meant no one in New York discovered that he’d put his career at the bank temporarily on hold to rescue Forest Fairies from fiscal disaster.

‘What did the staff call George?’ he asked.

‘Everyone but the senior staff just called him Mr George.’

Paternal respect for the Honourable George, what else?

‘Maybe in another twenty years,’ he said. ‘For now I’d prefer it if everyone just called me Sebastian.’

‘Everyone?’ She sounded slightly shocked.

‘If you’d pass that on.’

‘Well, if that’s what you want.’

‘I do.’ Then, since there was no point in putting off the inevitable, he indicated the display of birthday cards, paper plates, napkins and balloons strewn across the conference table that took up one end of the office. ‘You say these were Coronet’s bestselling lines?’

Maybe he should have made more effort to hide his disbelief.

‘You’ve never seen the television programme?’ she asked, surprised.

‘I don’t believe so.’

‘No, well, I don’t suppose they’re on American television.’ Her tone suggested that their transatlantic cousins didn’t know what they were missing. ‘They were very popular here, which is why George bought a twenty-five-year licence to use the characters on a range of cards and party products.’

That got his attention. ‘Did you say twenty-five?’

‘Forest Fairies parties have been very popular with three-to six-year-old girls.’

‘George bought the rights to produce this stuff for twenty-five years?’ he persisted. ‘How much did it cost the company?’

‘It was a very good deal,’ she said, instantly protective. ‘The line was the mainstay of the business for several years.’

The fact that she appeared to be referring to all this success in the past tense finally got through. ‘Was?’

‘Sales have declined somewhat since the TV programme was dropped from the schedules,’ she admitted.

Sebastian was torn between relief that there would be fewer Forest Fairies in the world and despair that the one item keeping the company afloat was in decline.

It was a close call.

Distracted by a howl of frustration, Matty gave up any pretence of working. All morning she’d been stopping her mind from wandering off to think about Sebastian Wolseley. The sexy way his eyes had creased as his face had relaxed into a smile. The way his eyes changed colour.

Back in New York, he’d still be asleep, and that was a tantalising thought, too. It was so easy to imagine him lying with his face in a pillow, his long limbs spread-eagled across a wide bed.

She saw him in one of those vast loft apartments, with light flooding in from floor-to-ceiling windows across acres of floor space, ‘An Englishman in New York’ playing on an expensive stereo.

And she smiled. So few people were able to handle the wheelchair without embarrassment, but he’d passed every test with flying colours.

The journalist who’d been so anxious to interview her about her work hadn’t been able to get away fast enough. Promising to phone. And maybe she would. ‘Plucky wheelchair-bound woman illustrates cute book…’ had to be a bigger story than one about just any ordinary, able-bodied woman illustrating a cute book.

Or maybe it had been her fault. Maybe the woman’s carefully phrased questions had been in such sharp contrast to Sebastian’s matter-of-fact attitude that she’d been unusually difficult. Prickly, even.

But for a few minutes he’d talked to her as if she was whole. Saying things that no one else would have dreamed of saying. Asking her if she tap-danced…

And even when he’d realised that tap-dancing was not, never would be, part of her repertoire he hadn’t changed—hadn’t started talking to her as if she was witless. Dinner with him would have been a rare pleasure. Sitting at a candlelit table, she could have pretended for a few dizzy hours that on the outside she was like any other woman. The way she was deep inside. With the same longings. The same desire to be loved, to have a man hold her, make love to her.

She closed her eyes for a moment, shutting out the reminders that she was not, would never be, like other women. How dared he joke with her, talk as if she could get up and dance as soon as she made the effort?

Then, with a deep breath, she opened them again. It was unfair to blame him. She’d seen him staring into his glass as if into an abyss and just hadn’t been able to keep her mouth shut. She’d only got herself to blame for her disturbed nights.

Because it wasn’t just this morning that she’d been thinking about him. He’d been there, in her head, since the moment he’d taken her hand, held it a touch too long. Been there the minute she’d stopped concentrating on something else.

But Monday was a working day. She couldn’t afford to allow her mind to wander when she had a tight deadline, and she picked out a fresh pastel and concentrated on the illustration in front of her.

‘Go on, Toby, you can do it!’

She looked up again just in time to catch Toby’s attempt at scaling the brightly coloured climbing frame set up in the garden. It was a bit of a stretch, and he was finding it frustratingly hard to reach the top. She leaned forward in her chair, physically encouraging him with her body, yearning to be out there, giving him the boost he needed. Her frustration, unable to find any other outlet, vented itself on the paper in front of her, and with a few swift strokes of the colour in her hand Hattie Hot Wheels, her cartoon alter ego, was lunging from her wheelchair, arms outstretched, as she flew to Toby’s side, scooping him up and lifting him up.

Another triumph for her superheroine, whose special powers allowed her to convert frustrated helplessness into action…