Rumours: The Dishonoured Copelands. Jane Porter

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СКАЧАТЬ at her during their honeymoon, but their picnics and dinners out and the afternoon trips on his yacht were so fun and romantic that she could almost forget how fierce and shattering the sex was when he was charming and attentive and affectionate. But in Athens when he disappeared into his work life, his real life, the raw nature of their sex life struck her as ugly, and she became ugly and it all began to unravel, very, very quickly.

      Upstairs in her suite, Morgan barely had time to open the two sets of French doors before a knock sounded on the outer bedroom door, letting her know her overnight bag had arrived. She thanked the housemaid and then returned to the first of the two generous balconies with the stunning view.

      She had never tired of this view. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could tire of it.

      The Amalfi Coast’s intense blues and greens contrasted by rugged rock had inspired her very first jewelry collection. She’d worked with polished labradorite, blue chalcedony, paua shell, lapis lazuli and Chinese turquoise, stones she’d acquired on two extensive shopping trips through Southeast Asia, from Hong Kong to Singapore to Bali.

      It’d been a three-month shopping expedition that big sister Tori had accompanied her on for the first month, and then Logan came for the second month, and Jemma for the third.

      By the time Morgan returned to New York, she’d filled two enormous trunks of stones and had a briefcase and laptop full of sketches and the first orders from Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. The designs were pure fantasy—a stunning collection of statement-making collars, cuffs and drop earrings—and had cost her a fortune in stone. It had tested her ability to execute her ideas, but had ended up being worth every stress and struggle as the Amalfi Collection turned out to be a huge success, generating significant media attention, as well as the attention of every fashion designer and fashion publicist of note, never mind the starlets, celebrities and socialites who all wanted a Morgan Copeland statement piece.

      Morgan’s second collection, Jasper Ice, had been inspired by her love of the Canadian Rockies and ski trips to Banff and Lake Louise. The collection was something that an ice princess in a frozen tundra would wear—frosty and shimmering pieces in white, silver, blush, beige and pale gold. The second collection did almost as well as the first, and garnered even more media with mentions in virtually every fashion magazine in North America, Europe and Australia, and then photographed on celebrities and young royals, like the Saudi princess who had worn a gorgeous pink diamond cuff for her wedding.

      Morgan was glad Jasper Ice did well, but the cool, frozen beauty of the collection was too much like her numb emotional state, when she’d been so fiercely, frantically alive and in love with Drakon Xanthis.

      Drakon, though, was the last person she wanted to think of, especially when she was enjoying the heady rush of success, and for a while she had been very good at blocking him out of her mind, but then one October day, she had been walking with Jemma to lunch and she had spotted a man in a limousine. He’d had a beard and his hair was long but his eyes reminded her so much of Drakon that for a moment she thought it was him.

      She had kept walking, thinking she’d escaped, but then a block away from her shop, she’d had to stop, lean against a building and fight for air.

      She’d felt like she was having a heart attack. Her chest hurt, the muscles seizing, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get air, couldn’t even speak. She opened her mouth, stared at Jemma, wanting, needing help, but she couldn’t make a sound. Then everything went black.

      When she woke up, she’d been in an ambulance, and then when she woke again, she was in a bed in the emergency room. She’d spent the next ten days in the hospital, six in ICU, being seen by cardiac specialists. The specialists explained that her extreme weight loss had damaged her heart, and they warned her that if she didn’t make immediate and drastic changes, she could die of heart failure.

      But Morgan hadn’t been dieting. She didn’t want to lose weight. She had just found it impossible to eat when her heart was broken. But she wasn’t a fool, she understood the gravity of her situation, and recognized she was in trouble.

      During the day they’d fed her special shakes and meals and at night she’d dreamed of Drakon, and the dreams had been so vivid and intense that she’d woke desperate each morning to actually see him. She made the mistake of telling Logan that she was dreaming about Drakon every night, and Logan had told their mother, who then told the doctors, and before Morgan knew it, the psychiatrists were back with their pills and questions and notepads.

      Did she understand the difference between reality and fantasy?

      Did she understand the meaning of wish fulfillment?

      Did she want to die?

      It would have been puzzling if she hadn’t been through all this before at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, and then at the Wallace Home for a year after that. But she had been through it before so she found the doctors with their clipboards and questions and colorful assortment of pills annoying and even somewhat amusing.

      She’d refused the pills. She’d answered some questions. She’d refused to answer others.

      She wasn’t sick or crazy this time. She was just pushing herself too hard, working too many hours, not eating and sleeping enough.

      Morgan had promised her medical team and her family she’d slow down, and eat better, and sleep more and enjoy life more, and for the next two plus years she did. She began to take vacations, joining her sisters for long holidays at the family’s Caribbean island, or skiing in Sun Valley or Chamonix, and sometimes she just went off on her own, visiting exotic locations for inspiration for her jewelry designs.

      She’d also learned her lesson. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, mention Drakon again.

      Those ten days in the hospital, and her vivid, shattering dreams at night, had inspired her third collection, the Black Prince, a glamorous, dramatic collection built of ruby hues—garnets, red spinels, pink sapphires, diamonds, pave garnets, watermelon tourmaline, pink tourmaline. The collection was a tribute to her brief marriage and the years that followed, mad love, accompanied by mad grief. In her imagination, the Black Prince was Drakon, and the bloodred jewels represented her heart, which she’d cut and handed to him, while the pink sapphires and delicate tourmalines were the tears she’d cried leaving him.

      But, of course, she had to keep that inspiration to herself, and so she came up with a more acceptable story for the public, claiming that her newest collection was inspired by the Black Prince’s ruby, a 170-carat red spinel once worn in Henry V’s battle helmet.

      The collection was romantic and over-the-top and wildly passionate, and early feedback had seemed promising with orders pouring in for the large rings, and jeweled cuffs, and stunning pendulum necklaces made of eye-popping pale pink tourmaline—but then a week before the official launch of her collection, news of the Michael Amery scandal broke and she knew she was in trouble. It was too late to pull any of her ads, or change the focus of the marketing for her latest Morgan Copeland collection.

      It was absolutely the wrong collection to be launched in the middle of a scandal implicating Daniel Copeland, and thereby tarnishing the Copeland name. The Black Prince Collection had been over-the-top even at conception, and the finished pieces were sensual and emotional, extravagant and dramatic, and at any other time, the press and fashion darlings would have embraced her boldness, but in the wake of the scandal where hundreds of thousands of people had been robbed by Michael Amery and Daniel Copeland, the media turned on her, criticizing her for being insensitive and hopelessly out of touch with mainstream America. One critic went so far as to compare her to Marie Antoinette, saying that the Black Prince Collection СКАЧАТЬ