Moonlight Masquerade by Jude Deveraux Page A

upstairs, took off her cardigan, and set to work.

Four

    Reede didn’t think he’d ever been so tired in his life, but then he knew it was an accumulation of things that had made him feel so bad. The young woman pouring the beer over his head had been the straw that was about to break his back. Today he’d called six people he’d been at school with and offered them the job. He’d praised Edilean until it made Nirvana seem like a wasteland.
    But the answer had always been the same: no. “You want me to move my entire family to some backwater town for just two and a half years? Then what? Your cousin returns and I have to get out?”
    No one was interested. Reede had even called a former professor and asked. Maybe the man would like to retire to a small town and deal with a lot of cases of poison ivy. He’d laughed at Reede. “Give up the comforts of a college city to move into one of those small town closed societies? Thanks for the offer, but no.”
    No matter what Reede tried, he couldn’t get anyone to take his place. Sometimes he felt like packing his carand driving away and saying the hell with all of them. He was sick of being compared to his cousin Tristan. Tired of hearing people say, “Dr. Tris would have—” Fill in the blank.
    If Reede hadn’t grown up in Edilean he wouldn’t have any idea what was going on, but he knew it all. The problem was that “the Tristans” were believed to be destined to be Edilean’s physicians. Since the town was established in the 1700s, an Aldredge had been the town doctor. That’s what the people wanted, and they weren’t settling for something different.
    But somewhere along the way, the Aldredge family had divided, and there were now two branches of it. One side inherited Aldredge House, which was just out of town and set on a beautiful lake, and they were the town doctors. But then, there were the “other Aldredges” . . . They didn’t inherit the house and they had different jobs.
    The problem came when Reede, like his cousin Tris, had been born knowing he was going to be a doctor. In other families that would have been treated as a gift, but in Reede’s case he was looked on as an oddity. “So you want to be a doctor too?” they said, looking at him as though he’d said he wanted to grow a third arm.
    The only person who saw nothing strange was Tristan. He couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to be a doctor.
    The two boys, born the same year and third cousins, were fast friends while growing up, and they’d talked about their professions as something that couldn’t change. It had made Reede feel secure knowing what his future was going to be.
    So maybe he was a bit jealous of Tristan, but that couldn’t be helped. Tris was going to live in town in the same house he’d been born in, and from the way the girls followed him around, he was going to have no trouble finding someone to share it with.
    Reede was a very different person. Whereas Tris easily mingled with people, played team sports, and dated every girl who smiled at him, Reede had always been a loner. He had a few good friends and he stayed with them. He’d never been easy in large groups.
    As for girls, he’d never been confident in asking them out. Quite a few of them had come on to him, teasing him, some of them even asking him out. But when he was with them, Reede had always bored them by talking of medicine.
    When he was fourteen he’d met Laura Chawnley. Her family had just moved to Edilean, and when she was introduced to the class she’d look so scared Reede thought she was going to cry. Later, he saw her from across the hall. She was trying to arrange all her books into a pile and wasn’t very successful at it. He smiled at her fumbling; she seemed so helpless. She seemed to need someone to come and rescue her. And Reede did.
    He carried her