“When I tried my new dress on, I couldn’t take it off,” Cee Cee said. “I feel like a princess in a fairy tale. Have you seen the decorations downstairs, Lily?”
“Not yet.” Lily was as happy as if she’d personally put every decoration in place. Cee Cee deserved a fairy-tale experience, and so much more. She was determined to help this child achieve her dreams.
“There are four gigantic Christmas trees all done in blue and silver,” Cee Cee said. “It looks like a castle or something.”
Annabelle snorted. “More like the Addams Family. This whole house is creepy. I expect Lurch to pop out from behind one of the stupid locked doors. Every time I go near one I get a lecture about snooping from that old man with the missing pinkie.”
Now she’d gone too far.
“You cannot talk that way about Stephen’s grandfather.”
“He does have only nine fingers, which is creepy.”
“Annabelle!”
Her daughter raised her hands in mock surrender. “Okay. Sorry, Mom. I’m going out front now to wait for Stephen.”
“Be nice to him, and his mother, too,” she said, but she wasn’t sure Annabelle heard. The girls were already racing off.
Lily slipped out of her robe and into her bath. When Stephen’s grandfather Clive escorted her into the party, he’d look every inch the aristocratic patriarch and powerful founder of a Southern family empire. She had no intention of embarrassing the family or herself.
Reporters had descended on Allistair Manor from all the major national television and newspaper networks. Some had even flown in from France and Great Britain.
And why shouldn’t they? Stephen C. Allistair was unveiling not only his bride-to-be but his latest hybridized creation, a stunning blue rose with white edging. There was nothing like it in Allistair Roses, and very few in the world. Breeders had not achieved a blue rose until eleven years ago, and then their efforts ran more toward lilac than true blue. Stephen’s vivid blue rose was so breathtaking it rivaled the Allistair rose that had started their horticultural empire. His grandfather Clive’s world-renowned black rose.
“When is your precious Lily Perkins coming down?” Stephen’s mother glided into place beside him at the bottom of the grand staircase. “Reporters from CNN and FOX are already clamoring to interview me.”
He tamped down his irritation. “They’ll just have to wait, Toni. This evening is not about you.”
“Well, it should be.”
Of course, that’s what she would think. Toni Allistair had always put herself first. She was a super model with bogus claims of Polynesian royalty in her family tree. Additionally, she was considered the reigning matriarch of the Allistair family. A term she hated.
In fact, she hated everything about the family except its founder…and his money. Even if Stephen’s father hadn’t had health issues, Toni would never have stayed in the marriage. She’d been only too happy to leave her husband in the hands of medical professionals and leave Stephen to be raised by his grandfather.
“If you wanted to be the center of the adoring press, you should have stayed in New York.”
“What?” Even when Toni raised her eyebrows, nothing else on her face moved. He’d lost count of the number of face and body lifts she’d had. “And miss meeting my granddaughter?” She shivered and cast a disdainful look in Annabelle’s direction. “Couldn’t you at least have picked a brood mare who didn’t have children? Especially a teenager? She makes me look old.”
If the press weren’t everywhere, Stephen would have walked off. Brood mare stung, but Toni wasn’t that far off the mark. She never was. That’s why she and Clive got along so well. Both were blunt to a fault.
It had been Clive who reminded him of his duty to the family.
You’ve got to find a wife and have a son to carry on the family tradition, Stephen. I’ve worked too hard to find the secret to the perfect rose to have it die with the third generation.
Stephen had met Lily this past summer at a benefit to raise money for the Walter Anderson Museum. She was a gorgeous woman with blue eyes and long wavy hair that looked like a sunset, vivid red streaked with gold. All natural. Her daughter was proof she’d bear him a great-looking son, one worthy of the Allistair name.
She was easy-going and easy to love. But the truth was that his work consumed him, especially of late.
That’s why he’d moved up the wedding date. The sooner he got Lily pregnant, the quicker he could concentrate on his masterpiece--a rose that would be so impossibly beautiful, he hadn’t even confided in his grandfather. His heart sped up just thinking about it.
“Look at what the cats dragged up.” Toni nudged him, bringing his attention to the second floor landing where Clive posed with Stephen’s fiancée on his arm. Wearing his full silver hair long enough to touch the collar of his tuxedo, he appeared to be a man far younger than eighty-eight. And Lily was simply stunning in the white Christian Siriano gown and heirloom necklace Stephen had given her. “I see the little tramp wasted no time getting her hands on your grandma’s diamonds.”
Thankfully, the press and the photographers Stephen had hired for the evening were too busy snapping pictures of Clive and Lily to overhear his so-called mother’s vicious remarks.
“Toni, retract your claws, or I’ll call you a cab to the airport.”
“I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t let that bedraggled urchin call me grandma.” She nodded toward Annabelle then made a beeline for a group of reporters on the other side of the room.
The air seemed fresher without her. At his grandfather’s signal, Stephen joined Clive and Lily at the top of the stairs where he announced his engagement with all the fanfare worthy of an Allistair.
With dozens of cameras turned on them, he leaned in and whispered to Lily, “Are you happy, darling?”
“Of course.”
Her smile was genuine, and that made everything so much easier for Stephen.
She had to have noticed he didn’t introduce Annabelle. But neither had he mentioned his wicked biological gene-pool of a mother. Thankfully, Lily would not be like the narcissistic Toni. And she certainly wouldn’t be like his grandmother, who had been too weak to be an Allistair.
Just as Lily’s daughter proved her great genes, her history proved her courage. She’d survived a pregnancy at sixteen, a tumultuous one year marriage to a muscle-bound football player who didn’t want her or their daughter, single motherhood, and the death of both parents. Still, she had managed to earn a college degree in interior design and start her own business.
“Kiss her,” someone called.
“I’m happy to oblige.” Imagining the picture they made, much like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, he held the kiss through the frenzy of clapping and congratulations that echoed through the downstairs ballroom. Allistair Roses could only benefit from this kind of publicity.
One of the reporters called, “Roses,” and the rest of the crowd took up the chant. “Roses! Roses!”
“Duty calls, Lily. You don’t mind finding the girls and bringing them to the conservatory, do you? Clive and I need to get there ahead of the reporters.”