CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When Diana reached the top of the steps, she hesitated and took a deep breath. Her pulse was pounding in her ears, and all she could hear was her blood, swishing through her veins. She felt flushed, dizzy, but the hands she wrung in front of her were cold as ice. Goosebumps appeared on her chest, in that tender skin above her cleavage that wasn’t used to seeing the light of day. She felt like she might faint, but she also never felt more alive. More like this was destiny at play, finally interceding to make all of her dreams a reality.

What should I say? She wondered as she stood there, watching him at the balustrade, enjoying his champagne. “Hello, Stéphane, it has been a while.” or, “Hey, stranger!” or “Do you even remember me?”

What difference did it make what she opened with? If he loved her, he loved her. True soul mates never simply forgot each other, did they?

She just had the feeling that this was a monumental moment, one that would shape the entire rest of her life. Make the night truly unforgettable. And she wanted to make it perfect.

Oh, stop. Nothing in your life has ever been perfect. But it has worked out.

She was overthinking things. As usual. She just needed to move.

So she stormed forward and tugged on his elbow. “Bons—”

She froze when the man turned around.

The first thing she noticed was that the glasses were all wrong. They were square-framed, not circular. So he changed the style, she thought at first, but then she took notice of his long, angular hooked nose. His beady eyes, beneath an unfortunate thickly gray unibrow that even the black mask under his glasses could not hide. His pointed chin. When he smiled at her, he bared teeth the color of aged paper with a deeply pronounced gap between the top front ones. Stéphane had a smile like a toothpaste commercial. “Yes?” he said.

NO, every pore of her body screamed.

She took a step away. Then another. “Sorry. I thought you were someone else,” she muttered, then put her head down and tried to escape. She attempted to scurry off, but the dress made that impossible. She tripped and stumbled her way across the marble balcony until she came to the portico outside the palace.

When she was out of his sight, she sighed. Of course, she’d just been silly. How stupid to foster a fantasy of someone who’d likely forgotten her decades ago?

People were starting to go inside for the ball portion of the event. Diana looked around, contemplating whether she should go back to the buffet line and drown her sorrows in a big vat of crème brulee. Yes. Sure, she’d give the corset a workout, but how ridiculous was she? Did she really think she’d find love here, after all these years? The least she could do was eat her money’s worth of those sumptuous French pastries and desserts.