Birthday Girls Read online

  Also by Jean Stone

  Sins of Innocence

  First Loves

  Ivy Secrets

  Places by the Sea

  Birthday Girls is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  2013 Loveswept eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1998 by Jean Stone.

  Excerpt from Mistletoe and Magic by Katie Rose copyright © 2013 by Katie Rose

  Excerpt from Claimed by Stacey Kennedy copyright © 2013 by Stacey Kennedy

  Excerpt from After the Kiss by Lauren Layne copyright © 2013 by Lauren LeDonne

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54659-3

  Cover design: Caroline Teagle

  Cover illustration: © Tom Grill/Corbis

  Originally published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House Company, New York, in 1998.

  www.readloveswept.com

  v3.1

  For my cousin, Linda,

  who has proved that life can

  begin at fifty

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Editor’s Corner

  Excerpt from Katie Rose’s Mistletoe and Magic

  Excerpt from Stacey Kennedy’s Claimed

  Excerpt from Lauren Layne’s After the Kiss

  To the number of Smiths who have dropped into my life: Cindy, who has shared her energy, support, and love for so many decades; Bob, who has never hesitated to share his wife’s time and has supplied so many airline tickets to make it happen; and E.J., who has taught me so much more than I’d ever planned to learn. Thanks to you all.

  Thanks, too, to Ann Hill, for her many contributions to this book and for helping to make the Michigan adventure such a memorable one; Dr. Keith Wilson, for the great escapes of shoptalk over chicken soup at Borders; Gail Lyders for her candid answers to my many questions; and Dr. Ron Wade for his time and medical expertise.

  September 1958

  The cake was big enough to have fed all the “young ladies” of Arbor Brook School, not just the four who stood in the dining room of Abigail’s grandfather’s manor house. Happy 10th Birthday was squiggled in birthday-girl pink across the thick white frosting. Then came their names: Abigail, Kris, Maddie, and Betty Ann.

  “I have an idea,” Betty Ann squealed. “Let’s make birthday wishes!”

  “Not until the candles are on the cake,” Abigail replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s how it’s done.”

  Kris crossed her arms and tipped up her chin. “You close your eyes and make a wish, then blow out the candles. And if you tell anyone your wish, it won’t come true.” She blinked her long lashes. “Unless someone has a better suggestion.”

  “Let’s write down our birthday wishes,” Betty Ann giggled, “then seal them in a bottle to keep them a secret.”

  “That’s not how it’s done,” Abigail repeated.

  “We can open the bottle next year!” Betty Ann’s words rushed out; her freckled cheeks glowed. “Then we’ll know if our wishes came true!”

  “One wish for each year?” Maddie asked, tugging at the hem of her Mousketeer T-shirt.

  “We’ll start off by saying, ‘By the time I’m eleven …’ then fill in the rest! We can start a tradition and do it forever.”

  “Forever?” Kris frowned.

  “Well, maybe not forever, but let’s say … until we are fifty.”

  “Fifty?” Maddie moaned. “When will we be fifty?”

  “1998,” Abigail answered. “And this is stupid.”

  “1998?” Maddie cried. “We’ll be old!”

  “With wrinkled-up faces and blue-white hair,” Kris added, then pirouetted. “We’ll have children and grandchildren and spend our days playing bridge.”

  “Oh, God,” Maddie groaned. “We’ll have nothing left to wish for by the time we are fifty.”

  Abigail stared at the huge birthday cake and wondered if Maddie would be right.

  August 1997

  Abigail Hardy bolted past the cameraman and spit into the sink. “The freaking coffee is cold again,” she barked to whomever was listening—which, under the circumstances, should have been everyone.

  “Cut,” the director’s voice groaned across the vast room, the Victorian-appointed, copper-and-brass-shining room. “Let’s break for lunch.”

  Slamming her mug against the stainless steel, Abigail snapped around the kitchen-turned-studio. “Kaminski!” she screeched. “Where the hell is Kaminski?”

  It had not been a good morning. The script called for shooting the bakery segment of Christmas with Abigail before the afternoon sun scorched the kitchen and wilted the cranberry phyllo puffs. But wide-eyed Paula Padderson, baker extraordinaire who’d been imported from lower Manhattan to Abigail’s estate on the Hudson, had the unfortunate habit of looking better on camera than her pastries. And her hostess.

  Standing beside chef Paula, Abigail appeared hausfrauish, old, and plain. Plain. Martha Stewart plain. Not every woman’s idol, Abigail Hardy, who dished up elegance with every easy-to-prepare, gourmet recipe and helped transform her middle-America audience into Park Avenue socialites. Anything but plain.

  She pushed up the sleeves of her red-sequined silk tunic and envied Martha Stewart that she could wear jeans. There was something to be said for being comfortable.

  Darting her eyes from the lace-trimmed velvet bows to the bundles of evergreens that swathed her kitchen, Abigail realized the absurdity of pretending it was Christmas when it was still August and eighty-nine steamy degrees outside, an hour north of the city, and how asinine it was that they’d had to camouflage the windows so that the viewers wouldn’t notice the explosion of color in the summer gardens beyond the French doors—the summer gardens that dotted the 1,500-acre estate and framed the forty-room sandstone Tudor mansion in a veritable rainbow of pollen.

  Abigail lit a long, slim cigarette and wished her hand would stop trembling. She detested taping these holiday specials, detested the damn fuss, detested the damn smiling. Tightening all those facial muscles couldn’t be doing her plastic surgery any good.

  Abigail much preferred her own weekly show … the half-hour syndicated show in which she called the shots, from choosing the featured guests (preferably male) to the meat of the content. Well, she decided now, pushing out an angry cloud of smoke, if they wanted her to continue these specials, she’d have to demand creative cont
rol from the network.

  “Do you need me?” Larry Kaminski appeared beside her, clipboard in hand.

  Abigail tucked her chin-length blonde hair behind her five-carat, diamond-studded ears. “The coffee is cold,” she said. “Again.”

  He let out a sigh that sounded too deep for his short, frail frame. Except for the gray that shot through his dark hair and the lines that burrowed into his brow, Larry could have been mistaken for twenty, not thirty-seven. Right now, the burrow deepened. “They must have unplugged the pot to hook up the cables.”

  She took another drag on her cigarette. “Our own crew knows better. These details should have been resolved before we began shooting.”

  “I’ll check it out.” He made a quick note.

  “Cranberries.” She scanned the set and shuddered. “How did we get roped into this?” Not that it mattered. If it wasn’t cranberries it would have been tofu or broccoli. Any food from any industry willing to pay big bucks to the network to have Abigail Hardy showcase their product and make it look delectable beyond the viewers’ most imaginative dreams. “I hope the supermarkets are prepared for the onslaught,” she said with a snort.

  “And the bookstores,” Larry added. “By the way, the proofs came in today.”

  “A hundred ways to cook with cranberries. How infinitely droll.”

  “It’ll be a bestseller. Your picture’s on the cover.”

  There was no need to doubt that Larry was right. There was also no need to admit that until the taping of this special, Abigail Hardy had never touched a cranberry in her life. But the audience would think otherwise, thanks to her well-spun aura, the illusion she’d spent a decade creating. Illusion, she thought now, inhaling again and wondering if any day of her life had been anything but illusion—if she ever, in fact, had spent just one day, one hour, one moment being the person she really was. Whoever that was.

  “Anything else?”

  She shook her head and stubbed out the cigarette. “Just get everyone out of my house before Edmund comes home. You know how he hates all these … union people crawling around the estate.”

  Larry nodded as if he knew it was Abigail—not Edmund—who resented the intrusion of the blue-collar crew of network strangers. Ten years as her assistant apparently left very few secrets.

  As he started toward the corner where two technicians stood, Abigail stared at his small butt squeezed into too-tight, black jeans. “Larry?” The small butt stopped moving, but the face did not turn around. “Tell Louisa to meet me in the master bath. I need my makeup redone. And make sure the coffee is hot when I return.”

  There was a slight pause, then the head nodded. Abigail rubbed the back of her neck, silently grateful for Larry, the man-boy who kept her life together. She really must remember to send him something—perhaps a cypress tub filled with loofah sponges and musky oils and trinkets from Tiffany’s; it would please him to share it with his materialistic, young lover named Grady, and would be less committal than another raise.

  The master bath was a sharp contrast from the original claw-footed tub and brass water closet, pinnacles of luxury in 1921 when the mansion was constructed. Today it was a five-room suite that would have curled a permanent smile on the handlebar mustache of Abigail’s great-grandfather: each of the two gold-fauceted baths—his and hers—had an eight-headed shower for total body cleansing, and the baths were connected by a glass-encased steam room.

  Off the steam room a deep hot tub bubbled beneath a domed stained-glass ceiling. Beyond that was the vanity area, where a sweeping counter stretched along a bank of windows and was accented by a wide, magnifying mirror that Abigail had installed sometime around her fortieth birthday, when the closer she’d looked, the fuzzier everything had become.

  It was practical in an opulent sort of way. She liked to think Great-Grandfather would have approved.

  She flopped onto the white satin chaise beside the vanity now and wondered why she was so tired, why she was always so damn tired these days and so damn edgy. The monthly magazine Entertaining with Abigail practically produced itself without her. She had a staff of sixteen who sifted through recipes in search of those worthy of her seal of elegance. Plus, a half-dozen designers were responsible for her trademark fresh flower arrangements, custom created to complement the table and each food presentation.

  No, the magazine wasn’t the problem. Neither was her syndicated TV show: the producers did all the work. All Abigail had to do was give final approval and endure a two-day-a-week upheaval of the kitchen and dining rooms in her home.

  Now, of course, there was also the pending deal with Rupert’s Department Stores, the deal that would catapult her image into hundreds of retail outlets around the world. It was a huge deal, but just one more deal on the fast track to immense success. And Larry was taking care of it. It was one more duty to justify his 15 percent of her business.

  She rubbed the back of her neck and thought about her accomplishment: her once-cottage industry that had erupted into a larger-than-life media hit with an even larger-than-life star—her. It was a dream come true. A life of her own, a name of her own, with millions of fans who tried to mimic her style, mimic her. Little did they know that to Abigail Hardy nothing seemed right anymore, nothing seemed worth it, as if somewhere along the way the star had been hopelessly derailed.

  Closing her eyes, she decided that things might be tolerable if only she weren’t so damn hot all the time. If only she could get a decent night’s sleep.

  “Menopause,” the doctor had warned. “Get ready. It’s coming.”

  “Absurd,” she said now, swinging her legs over the chaise and standing up. “I’m only forty-eight. I’m not a freaking dinosaur.” She stalked to the vanity and sat on a stool, pushing from her mind the reality that in six weeks she would turn forty-nine.

  Studying the mirror, Abigail confirmed that she looked as good as chef Paula Padderson. Not as young, of course, but surely as good. Better. More mature. Her eyes were naturally green—no false contacts for her—and the last little tucks at the corners had taken another decade off the calendar. Still, it was better to have a man standing beside her on camera. A good-looking, sexy man—any good-looking, sexy man—who would pump up the ratings by making her eyes sparkle if not her loins tingle. At her age, thank God, she was beyond that.

  A soft rap sounded on the door.

  “Hurry up, Louisa,” Abigail called. “And do something about the sweat all over my face.”

  Silence was followed by a low, throaty voice. “It’s not Louisa. It’s Sondra.”

  Abigail closed her eyes. The words “go away” formed on her lips but did not have the courage to come out.

  Sondra Desauliers Boynton was the twenty-four-year-old thorn in Abigail’s sleep-deprived side. It was a position the young woman had assumed twenty-one years earlier when Abigail married Edmund, Sondra’s father; over the years the thorn had probed more deeply, and become more hurtful with each twist on the nerve. In the beginning, Abigail had thought she could handle it—a motherless child, so like she herself had been, desperately needing to be rescued, desperately needing attention. But Abigail soon found she didn’t know how.

  As each week had come and gone, she’d vowed to try harder. But the days and weeks had passed into months, then years, and their relationship never quite gelled.

  When Sondra had the measles, Abigail sat stiffly beside her reading from a book the child did not understand. When a fall from her pony left Sondra frightened and crying, Abigail clumsily tried to tuck the little girl into bed, but it was Edmund who wiped her tears. And when the first blush of puppy love left Sondra with a badly bruised heart, Abigail merely watched from a doorway as Edmund held her and rocked her as if she were a child, not fourteen, not nearly a woman.

  The truth was, it was not Sondra so much that eluded Abigail but the girl’s show of feelings—tears, laughter, a hunger to simply be hugged. It was an open vulnerability that brought a lump to Abigail’s throat—a lump too st
uck, too stoically rooted, to rise past her fear and allow her to … love.

  Instead, Abigail did for Sondra what Grandfather had done for her: she bought her things, attempting to fill the child’s emotional needs with dolls and teddy bears and tea sets and clothes, and, later, with trips and cars and 10 percent of the Entertaining with Abigail empire.

  She had not, however, bought (much less selected) her stepdaughter’s choice of a mate—the man for whom Sondra had abruptly halted her Radcliffe education and fled to Paris for two years until the money ran out.

  “We’re taping today,” Abigail said now as Sondra entered the room. “This is not a good time.”

  “I only stopped by to say hello.” The distorted image of Sondra’s tall, lanky body moved closer in the mirror, revealing a disturbing sparkle in her blue-gray eyes, eyes that Abigail had been told were identical to those of the young woman’s mother.

  “Well,” Abigail replied, swiping a cotton ball across her chin with more vigor than necessary, “that’s nice. Is Craig with you?” She tried to say “Craig” as if she fully accepted Sondra’s husband, the struggling, practically penniless “artist.”

  “No.” Her stepdaughter perched on the counter and crossed her long, Newport-tanned legs, a product of the forty-two-foot, wedding gift sailboat from Abigail.

  “What happened to Newport?” She leaned into the mirror and carefully dabbed her eyelids, refusing to look at the chestnut-maned, motherless child or feel the never-ending guilt that she had not tried hard enough.

  “Craig thinks we should go somewhere less pretentious, maybe somewhere tropical.”

  “That hardly describes the breeze off the Hudson.”

  “He’s thinking maybe the Caribbean.”

  “How appropriate,” Abigail commented, “now that it’s hurricane season.” She sucked in her lip and wished she could bite off her tongue. Despite his economic failings, Craig was not a bad man, and he seemed to have accomplished what Abigail had not: he seemed to genuinely make Sondra happy.

  Sondra slid off the counter and examined the bottles and jars that lined the top. She lifted the lid off a ceramic powder crock, sniffed the contents, then dabbed her neck with the puff. “The truth is,” she said, “I’ve been getting seasick.”