The Royal House Of Karedes: Two Kingdoms. Marion Lennox

fine, Maria told herself wearily as the Lexington Avenue local rumbled to a stop at the Spring Street subway station.

      Never mind that the man next to her smelled like a skillet of sautéing garlic. Forget that her feet were shrieking after a day strapped into gorgeous-but-impossible Manolo stilettos. Pretend the rain that had become sleet hadn’t turned her sleek, three hundred dollar Chez Panache blow-out right back into her usual tumble of coffee-colored wild curls, or that she was obviously coming down with the flu or something suspiciously like it.

      Oh, yes, everything was going to be fine.

      And if it wasn’t… if it wasn’t…

      The train gave a lurch as it left the station. Garlic Man fell into her, Maria stumbled sideways and felt one of her sky-high heels give way.

      A word sprang to her lips. It was a word ladies didn’t use, even if they knew how to say it in Spanish as well as English. Not that Maria felt much like a lady right now. Still, she bit back the word, instead visualized it in big neon letters and decided that trying to figure a way to find the lost heel on the floor of the packed subway car was something only a madwoman would attempt.

      Goodbye, Manolo Blahniks. Goodbye, Chez Panache. Goodbye, Jewels by Maria.

      No. Absolutely, no. She was not going to think like that. What was it she’d learned in that stress reduction class? Okay, she hadn’t taken the class, not exactly; there was no time for anything like taking classes in her life but she’d read the course description in The New School catalog…

      Live in the now.

      That was it. Reduce stress by learning to live in the now. At the moment, that meant—damn!—that meant the train was pulling into Canal Street.

      “Excuse me. Sorry. Coming through!”

      She pushed her way through the rush-hour crowd, reached the doors just as they began to shut and hurled herself onto the platform. The doors closed; the train started. People surged toward the stairs, carrying a hobbling Maria in their midst.

      Climbing the steps to the street with one shoe now four inches shorter than the other was an interesting experience. Why did they make shoes with heels like these? Better still, why had she bought them? Because men thought they looked good? Well, they did, but that wasn’t the reason. There was no man in her life; she couldn’t imagine there would be, not for a long time after that incident two months ago on Aristo.

      The prince. The prince of darkness, was how she’d taken to thinking of him, and she felt the anger rise inside her again.

      Damn it, why was she remembering him, anyway? Why waste time on him or that night? It had all been a nightmare. She hated herself for it, would probably always hate herself for it, thought not half as much as she hated him and…

      And, there was no point in this.

      Aristo, the commission she’d wanted so much and lost because of him, were behind her. She had to concentrate on the present. On how to convince shops like L’Orangerie to buy her designs.

      That, she thought grimly, that was why she’d worn these shoes. Why she’d spent as much on a stupid blow-out as she could have spent to buy gold wire for the new earrings she’d been sketching. Why she’d all but begged for today’s meeting with the buyer from L’Orangerie. And where had it gotten her?

      Nowhere, Maria thought as she reached the sidewalk. Nowhere except out here, limping home like a derelict in sleet that was rapidly turning to snow.

      The weather, coupled with the fact that it was Friday, had sent people fleeing their offices earlier than usual. Still, the street was crowded. This was Manhattan, after all. The good news was that because this was Manhattan, nobody so much as looked at her.

      Still, she felt ridiculous, hobbling like this.

      Yes, Maria, but the better news is that your heel could have come off when you were on Fifth Avenue, heading for that meeting with the man from L’Orangerie.

      What an impression she’d have made then.

      Not that it would have mattered.

      L’Orangerie’s head buyer had been polite enough to keep the lunch appointment and honest enough to begin it by telling her he wasn’t going to buy her designs.

      “I like them, Ms. Santos,” he’d said, “I like them very much—but your name will mean nothing to our clients. Perhaps after you’ve had a bit more exposure …?”

      More exposure? Maria gave an inelegant snort as she turned the corner. How much more exposure did she need? After winning the Caligari prize, she’d sold to Tiffany’s. To Harry Winston. To Barney’s.

      She’d said all that to her luncheon companion. And he had said yes, he knew she had, but her status in those places was insignificant compared to designers like Paloma Picasso and Elsa Peretti, n’est-ce pas?

      Not, she’d wanted to say. Not n’est-ce pas.

      Maybe she didn’t have a lot of pieces in the display cases. Maybe the stores didn’t buy whole page ads for her in The New York Times and the high fashion magazines. Okay, maybe they didn’t advertise her name at all.

      But she’d sold to the big players. That mattered. And the pieces she’d designed were certainly more significant than that phony French accent laid over the unmistakable underpinnings of his Brooklyn upbringing.

      She almost told him so.

      Fortunately, sanity had made her put a forkful of salad instead of her foot in her mouth.

      She couldn’t afford to insult a jewelry buyer of such influence. The world to which she wanted entry was small. Gossipy. Insulting one of its door-keepers came under the heading of Shooting Yourself in the Head Just to See if the Gun Would Fire.

      Besides, he was right.

      She’d been incredibly lucky to sell a few pieces to those stores. Who knew if she’d ever sell them others? Who knew how she’d sell them others? Not landing the Aristan commission had been an enormous setback.

      When you could add a discreet line to your business card that said ‘By commission to Their Majesties, King Aegeus and Queen Tia of Aristo,’ you had the world by the tail.

      She’d lost the chance to have that happen.

      Correction. A man had taken that chance from her. A man who had seduced her and then tossed her out of his bed as if she’d been a twenty-dollar whore.

      “Stop that,” she muttered to herself. Why think of him now? Why waste time looking back? There was no point.

      Maria made a left on Broome Street, hobbled to the next corner, turned down that street and, finally, there it was. Her building. Well, not hers. The building in which she lived. And worked. That was the great thing about renting a loft. There was plenty of space within its high walls, room for sleeping and eating, but mostly room for working.

      If she could keep working.

      The fact of the matter was, she was in debt up to her ears.

      The loft cost thousands a month to rent. The gold and silver, the precious and semi-precious stones with which she worked, cost thousands, too. She had only one employee, Joaquin, but she had to meet his salary every week. And designing something that would be a fit gift for the Queen of Aristo’s sixtieth birthday had taken hours and hours of time.

      So she’d borrowed the small fortune she’d needed to pay her rent, her bills, to set aside other projects and devote endless hours to a design for the competition.

      Useless, all of it. Useless.

      She had been one of the three finalists. They’d all been invited to Aristo, where the winner would be announced at a ceremony. And she’d lost any possibility of being that winner in one night. One foolish night.

      A handful of hours had ruined