Stars in Your Eyes (de Piaget Family) - Softcover

Chapter One

Present Day

England

The next time she traveled halfway across the world, she was going to pack all her belongings in a bag with a functional zipper.

Imogen Honoria Maxwell looked at what her too-full suitcase had just belched out in untidy piles around her and wished she had the energy to be embarrassed. As it was, all she could do was imagine how blissful it might feel to lie down on those piles and nap.

She looked up what seemed an endless number of stairs at King’s Cross station, then wondered if she would draw undue attention to herself if she simply sat down in the midst of unmentionables and cried. She didn’t cry as a general rule, preferring to sort of slide past Fate’s notice whenever possible with a cheerful smile and a stiff upper lip, but she was in unusual and dire circumstances. She’d just finished a hellish trip she’d been sure would last the better part of eternity, she was in a foreign country where they drove on the wrong side of the road, and she had one shot at being brilliant at a job that could potentially bring her one step closer to her dream career. It was best not to add any more drama to what she already had going.

At least there didn’t seem to be a crowd of Londoners scooping up her stuff and running off with it. That was the last thing she needed, to be in the wilds of England with no clean underwear.

“Here, miss, let me help you.”

Imogen looked blearily at the people pushing past her and realized that someone had actually stopped to help her. She would have blushed at the sight of a very masculine hand gathering up her underclothes and stuffing them back into her suitcase, but she was too jet-lagged to do anything but stand there and yawn. She made a halfhearted effort to feel bad about not helping—no, that was too much trouble, too. She would have made a mental note to remind herself to get more sleep next time before a big trip, but she didn’t have a pen and her mind was a blank. Maybe she would remember it later.

The man straightened and picked up her suitcase, broken zipper and all. “Is the rest of your gear manageable, think you?”

She would have laughed a little at the turn of phrase, but before she could, she got a good look at her rescuer.

All right, so she wasn’t one to go for blonds. That guy there was definitely gorgeous enough to leave her wondering if she’d made that decision precipitously. He smiled, and the sight of his dimple left her smiling as well.

“Well,” she began.

“I’ll fetch your other case along as well, shall I?”

“Um—”

He didn’t seem to require more than that, which was good because she didn’t have any more than that to offer. He moved her second suitcase away from where she’d been standing guard over it, then fumbled very briefly with the extended handle before pushing it back inside its hiding place and simply hefting it as he had its misbehaving companion. He started up the stairs, then paused and looked over his shoulder.

“Can you manage your wee rucksack?”

“Rucksack?” she echoed.

He smiled and Imogen reconsidered again her hesitation about men with fair hair. Maybe it was the personality that mattered, not hair color, but she really didn’t have a chance to give that too much thought. She was too busy trying to haul herself and her wee rucksack up the stairs after a guy who should have had the decency to look as if he were lugging two heavy suitcases up those same endless stairs.

Maybe he was a hallucination. She paused on the landing to catch her breath and examine that idea. After all, what were the odds that a very handsome stranger would simply up and help her in the middle of a big city? She couldn’t even begin to face that math. All she knew for sure was that she wasn’t currently wrestling two suitcases all by herself and that was the sort of thing didn’t happen outside hallucinations. It was probably best to just play along until she snapped back to reality.

She gathered her strength and started off after a guy who seemed to know where he was going, which she couldn’t argue with. At least he didn’t seem to be having nefarious designs on her underwear.

“Headed north, are you?” he asked pleasantly, dropping back to walk beside her.

She looked up into gray eyes—so that was their color—that perhaps should have seemed at odds with such blond hair but didn’t. “Ah . . .”

“Beautiful country up north,” he said, “and look you, here’s your train right there. Have your ticket, aye?”

She was fairly sure she did, but that would have necessitated looking in her rucksack—er, her purse—for it. She supposed the best she could hope for was a seat where she could rummage through her stuff and hope it was still there. She could hardly believe they’d come so far through the station without her having noticed it, but maybe delusions were just like that.

“Imogen!”

She looked around blearily for the originator of that shout and finally saw a petite, dark-haired woman waving at her, obviously trying to get her attention. Imogen sighed in relief, realizing then just how nervous she’d been about her UK guide managing to find her. She waved back, then remembered her rescuer. She looked up at him.

“Thank you . . .” She waited for him to supply a name, but he only smiled.

“Of course,” he said with a little bow. “Chivalry is always convenient.”

Chivalry. What an interesting way to put it. She stared after the man thoughtfully, watching him walk away, then melt into the crowd.

“Who was that?”

Imogen struggled for one last view of him. “No idea. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“Next time, Imogen, get a name and number.”

Imogen looked at Tilly Jones, the woman who had promised to be her lifeline for the next four months, and sighed. “I would have, but he just spent five minutes rifling through my underwear. I was too off-balance to do anything but hope he wasn’t making value judgments.”

“Rifling through your knickers?” Tilly asked, looking as if she very much wanted to laugh. “Not that.”

“Well, I suppose there was less of that and more just stuffing them back into my suitcase, but honestly I was just too sleepy to really identify which it was. Getting his name and number was beyond me.” She yawned. “I think I need a nap.”

“And to think you could have been napping on that shoulder if you’d worked a little bit harder just now.”

“That kind of luxury would have been wasted on me, I’m afraid.” She rubbed her eyes, wondering how it was possible so that so much grit could have found its way into them. “I think I left my ability to recognize a good-looking guy somewhere back on my endless trip here.”

It wasn’t the only thing of the male persuasion she’d left behind, but she supposed that was something she didn’t really need to discuss at the moment. The truth was, her love life wasn’t complicated, it was a disaster. If her life had been her suitcase, the contents wouldn’t have been strewn hopelessly all over King’s Cross, they would have been piled in a gutter where the only thing to do would have been to stand on the curb and admire the wreckage.

No, better not to even begin to think about it.

“I think I’d make the effort for someone who looked like that,” Tilly said.

“Oh, please just don’t make that effort now,” Imogen said. “I have no idea where I’m going. I don’t even think I could find the train, much less figure out when to get off it.”

“The train’s right here, Imogen,” Tilly said, sounding faintly alarmed. “And we’re going to Edinburgh. Don’t you have the itinerary I sent you?”

“Of course I do,” Imogen lied. She’d meant to download it to her phone on her way, but she’d been too busy trying to keep up with all the plane changes to think about anything past London. She’d been planning on enjoying a nice cappuccino in a café with Wi-Fi before looking for the right train, but then her suitcase had exploded and she’d been distracted by a blond demi-god, and . . . She took a deep breath and smiled at Tilly. “I’m just grateful you found me before I wandered off somewhere I shouldn’t have. You know, until I’m more awake and can be captain of my own ship again, as it were.”

“Of course,” Tilly said with a smile. “You did it for me last year. Turnabout’s fair play.”

Imogen wasn’t going to argue with her, especially now that she was at her mercy, but the fact was Tilly was very overqualified for her current job as Imogen’s assistant. Tilly had a pair of degrees from prestigious film schools while she herself had two degrees in subjects she was too tired to name at the moment. She had leaped at the chance a year earlier to be an assistant to Tilly, who had been one of the minor assistants to the set designer of a major period film. That the roles were now reversed was a gift. It also could have been that the son of the executive producer was trying to bribe her into dating him, but maybe that was something she could think about later, after she’d had a good night’s sleep and could face it.

All she knew with certainty was that Tilly couldn’t have been thrilled about the reversal of roles, but she was an expert at placating cranky people and Tilly was, from what she could tell, a pragmatist. They would manage. Besides, she might find herself in the middle of nowhere without anyone to rescue her. Tilly might be her only link to civilization, so it was a good idea to keep her as happy as possible.

“Long journey so far?” Tilly asked politely.

“Endless,” Imogen said, with feeling. “I think I’ve seen half a dozen airports.”

“Your sister the travel agent was having one over on you?”

“Yes, and she’ll pay, believe me,” Imogen said grimly, trying to forget the recent memory of landing on grass thanks to what had been billed as a luxury flight with scenic bonuses galore. The only scenic bonus she’d been interested in had been getting off that puddle jumper and onto something with more than four seats. Pristine Maxwell had started and sold an alarming number of businesses in her short corporate career, but her current interest was travel. Imogen wasn’t sure she hadn’t decided on that just so she could send her siblings on horrible trips.

“What did you do to her this time?”

“Who knows?” Imogen asked carelessly. “And if I knew, which I’m not saying I do, I don’t want to think about it. I’d rather think about my revenge for the fifty-three-hour trip I’ve just enjoyed. I’m planning on repaying her by posting on all possible social media platforms unflattering pictures of her wearing braces. Then I’ll unfriend her. She’ll be crushed, I’m sure.”

“And you’ll be out of the country where she can’t kill you.”

Imogen smiled. “See? Things are looking up already.”

Tilly laughed. “Absolutely. Now, what can I get you to enjoy with your revenge?”

“I need coffee,” Imogen said. “And chocolate. Preferably together, but at this point, I’d take either in any form I can get them, thank you.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with on the train.”

Imogen paused and looked at her seriously. “This trading places thing is very strange. If I weren’t so tired, I’d feel worse about it, I promise.”

“Life changes,” Tilly said, shrugging.

Imogen wasn’t sure how to even begin to respond to that, so she put it off for later. Tilly was right, of course, but that didn’t make it any less uncomfortable. But what could she do? She hadn’t considered for a nanosecond turning down her current job opportunity. If Tilly was committed to being a part of the moviemaking process, Imogen was past obsessed.

She had wanted to live in the world of filmmaking for as long as she could remember. She’d tried to distract herself with university and grad school degrees that had gotten her parents’ notice mostly off her, but her true calling had been singing a Siren’s song to her the entire time. When the chance to be a grunt on a real, live movie set had come along thanks to a roommate breaking her leg—such a shame and fortunately something she’d had nothing to do with—she had ditched her PhD program without a backward glance and jumped without hesitation onto the dream train. Her parents had been appalled and her siblings speechless. She’d been thrilled.

That job had turned into other jobs as grunts on other shoots, opportunities to cement a reputation as a dependable, creative sort of gal to have around. All part of her master plan to eventually nudge some good old boy out of the director’s chair and plant her own backside there.

She couldn’t blow her current gig, no matter how jet-lagged she might have been.

“Let’s get ourselves seats, then I’ll find us something to drink.”

Imogen nodded, then let Tilly take one of her suitcases, leaving her with the one that hadn’t vomited its contents all over unsuspecting Londoners. She followed Tilly onto the train, trusting it was the right one.

She paused at one point only because there was no possible way to get past the foot that was extended into the aisle. The stiletto adorning that foot was something even her functioning suitcase would have suffered from an encounter with. She frowned. That hadn’t come out right in her head and she half feared she’d said it aloud. She was going to post braces pictures and anything else she could dig up on her phone when she had a decent connection and the mental wherewithal to make use of it. Prissy would pay dearly.

“Excuse me,” she said, trying not to slur her words.

The owner of that foot pulled it back into her own space. “Not to worry.”

Well, she wasn’t worrying, though maybe she should have been. She wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t looking—blearily, of course—at some species of nobility. She didn’t suppose royalty traveled in regular train cars, but what did she know? If ever there had been a passenger out of place on a regular old train, it was that woman there who simply dripped class and elegance. Imogen suppressed the urge to try to resurrect her own appearance. She couldn’t remember when she’d last brushed her teeth or combed her hair. Probably better not to think about it.

She managed to shuffle past the stunning Audrey Hepburn lookalike, shove her suitcase where Tilly told her to, then collapse into a seat. She was thrilled to leave the rest of the details to someone far more awake than she.

She leaned her head back against the seat and considered whether or not she deserved to be as wasted as she felt. She had, at her father’s insistence, trusted her sister to get her a good deal on her flight. That had been her first and last mistake. She had taken off from Denver and landed at Heathrow. That she’d visited a dozen different airports and enjoyed little hops in planes better suited to dusting crops than carrying passengers and their luggage was perhaps beside the point. Her older sister had known exactly what this job meant to her and how badly she needed not to look like an idiot at any time during its execution. It was payback, pure and simple.

She had hoped one of her other three siblings would have been the target of Prissy’s ire over that recent summer barbeque incident where they hadn’t intended to leave Prissy behind with the folks and half a dozen children under the age of four. Without a car. O...