Read Online The Juliet Club by Suzanne Harper - Free Book Online

lived in the seventeenth century and didn’t get out much. Lucy, on the other hand, was wearing a filmy turquoise dress that made her eyes look even bluer, and her gold hair was piled on top of her head in a careless mass of curls.
    Another pounding at the door, and the sound of her father’s voice. “Anon, anon!”
    As Lucy delicately brushed another layer of gloss on her lips, Kate wondered idly how she would cast Lucy in a Shakespeare play. Wearing her ethereal blue dress, she looked perfect for the part of Titania, but Lucy’s personality seemed too sweet for the strong-willed Queen of the Fairies. Perhaps Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew ? Lucy seemed like the kind of girl who would have several suitors dancing attendance on her at once. . . .
    Suddenly, Kate didn’t care to stand there any longer watching Lucy turn a pretty face into perfection. She muttered an excuse and went to her open bedroom window, where she stood breathing in the soft, scented air and gazing out at the garden. It looked like a landscape from a dream: mysterious and shadowed in the deepening twilight.
    And then, between one breath and the next, an unusual sensation swept over her. First, she felt as if she were floating outside of her body. Then she had the absolute conviction that her life back in Kansas—her ordinary, normal, regular life—was the dream world and that she had just awakened to a new, and enchanted, reality.
    She had just reached forward to touch the window frame, which was reassuringly solid under her hand, when her thoughts were interrupted by a rapid knock on the door and her father’s urgent voice calling out, “Come, let’s away!”
    With one last look out the window, she left her room to go to the party.
    The villa was ablaze with light. The high windows were open to the warm summer night. A river of guests dressed in silks and satins and tuxedos flowed through the rooms on the first floor, onto the terrace that had been strung with twinkling lights, and down into the garden, where carefully placed luminaries glowed softly in the dusk.
    Kate and her father walked into the ballroom, with Lucy and Tom right behind them. It was an expansive room, with large arched windows, six sparkling chandeliers, and pale yellow walls decorated with gilt. Lots of gilt.
    â€œWow,” Lucy said.
    â€œThis looks like the kind of room you’d sign a treaty in,” Tom said, looking a bit intimidated.
    Kate’s father bounced a couple of times from sheer joy. “Isn’t this marvelous?” he said. “Oh, look, there’s Sebastian!” He waved both hands exuberantly at someone at the other side of the room. “And Julian!”
    Kate followed his gaze and saw a bald man happily clutching a drink in each hand and talking to another man with a remarkably strange toupee. But she knew that they weren’t who her father was really looking for.
    â€œDo you see Professoressa Marchese?”
    â€œNo.” His eyes narrowed dangerously as he glanced from one person to another. “Of course, I’m not sure what she looks like these days. Once she became rich and famous, she stopped attending conferences. Too busy to toil in the groves of academe with the rest of us.” He added waspishly, “And she’s been using that same author photo for at least twenty years. Too vain to let the years show, I suppose.”
    â€œMmm,” Kate murmured noncommittally. Her father had spent two weeks hunched over his computer, learning Photoshop in order to “give a little touch-up, that’s all” to his own faculty photo. “I wonder if she’s even here.”
    â€œOh, she’s here.” Her father’s eyes darted around the room. “That woman loves being the center of attention. Quite narcissistic, Ollie Jameson says.”
    His face brightened. “Ah, speak of the devil! There’s Ollie over by the buffet table. Which looks