Sweet Romance12 min read
I woke up in another girl's room — and kept her businesses
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I remember the rain hitting the car like a thousand small drums and the banquet breathing down my neck — a boardroom face that wanted forty percent of my company for nothing. Then the headlights. Then black.
When I woke, my chest felt like someone had driven a needle through it. "Aviana?" a man's voice — too distant. My last memory was a glass table, fluorescent lights, my name on a Forbes cover. The next was a carved wooden bed, a face in a mirror I did not recognize, and a sweet hand pressing rice broth to my lips.
"Leighton, please drink," the maid said. She had bright, anxious eyes. "Cody, more broth."
"My name isn't—" I started, and then felt it: someone else's life spread over mine like a second skin. The hospital breath I had just had dissolved into that foreign frame. I tried to sit up and my limbs moved as if they belonged to a fifteen-year-old girl.
"She's awake! The doctor said—" my father bowed over me. Ellis Dean's face wore relief like a mask. "Leighton, you mustn't scare me so."
Leighton. The name settled like a stone. Aviana Flynn, CEO, had been me and yet I was not me. I closed my eyes and saw a flash—a candlelit courtyard, a man weeping over a child's grave, a baby with a birthmark like a teardrop, a small girl growing, then a fever and an incense cone and a needle to the chest. I opened my eyes. This body had lived that life. My car, my company, the man who wanted my stocks — all of that might be gone.
"You're in my body," I told the mirror. "You hear me? Aviana Flynn—"
I laughed once, a short, sharp sound that scared Cody. "Cody, what am I supposed to do? I'm a CEO with a P&L in my head and you've got braid ribbons."
"Miss Leighton, you were ill. You look pale..." Cody fussed at the hem of my robe. She smelled of tea and starch and loyalty.
I pinched my leg and winced. It was real. I was Leighton Lane now, old money or not, a girl newly come out of illness with hands that had never signed a million-dollar contract. I had skills — sales, product vision, a ruthless sense of inventory — and the memory of a life where I had built everything from nothing. This was not a tragedy. This was a second chance.
"Tomorrow," I told Ellis Dean over dinner. "Get me to the dye shop, the pigment house, the old workshop. We will make something nobody has here."
Cody frowned. "Miss, your strength..."
"Strength will come," I said. I had been Aviana Flynn for years. I had fought men in suits and survived. This body might be young, but my mind had been tempered by boardroom fires. I started with what I knew best: products.
The workshop off our lane smelled of herbs and iron. The women who had worked at pigments for years looked at me with the weary, small-business suspicion people reserve for newcomers. I got my hands dirty. I taught them how to break down color palettes, how to mix a subtle brown that would read as a warm "Sunrise Amber" and a lavender that was not purple but "Wisteria Mist." I called one shade "Dawn Patron," another "Ember Silk." They laughed when I gave names like items in a catalog, but when they swatched them, the laughter went thin.
"You're bold," said Leaf Master, an old tailor who had once kept our neighborhood's hems tidy. His granddaughter Elisa Carlier had nimble fingers and a sharper eye. "You sew, or you design?"
"I design. I know what people will want." I named the small shop we opened: Rainbow Atelier — but the locals liked to call it the Rainbow Pavilion, and soon the banner read "Rainbow Atelier by Leighton." I opened a small pastry stall next door — sweet buns with cream, a milk pudding with ribbons of honey and crushed cardamom. I wanted entrances into every person’s day: color in the morning, sweetness at noon.
Orders came. The first week I sold as much as the old business had done in a year. I invested in boxes with carved lids, I embroidered a tiny symbol on the inner hem of each bespoke robe so that when a seam split the buyer could find the maker. I kept my branding tight, my supply chain tighter. I trained our girls like a company force: inventory sheets, lead times, quality checks. I treated them with respect; they returned loyalty.
"You're no regular girl," said Viktoria Price, the eldest of the Warne household's daughters, when I showed their family a sample palette. "You make this city look small."
"You're a modest chief," I replied. "You always liked understated."
The Warne family — Viktoria, Diane, Aurelie — took to our designs. Soon, the daughter of a minister wore one of my collars and the court noticed. Word moved like silk: Rainbow Atelier. Then the palace called.
I stood in the long palace corridor and felt the place like an organism: a heartbeat I could not touch but could feel. I delivered a trunk of custom palettes to Consort Faye Dawson of the Ling Hall. She smiled, said my name softly, and had me try a process on her brow. She liked how a tiny dusting of gold in the shadow made her eyes look like lantern light.
"Leighton, you are clever. Stay in the palace for a few days," she said breezily. "Come teach us this technique."
"Yes, madam," I said, and then I counted how many eyes watched me — a thousand of them, hungry and curious. After that first day the Empress Fernanda Barber's people summoned me. "You brought toys to the palace?" the Empress said, and when I explained which products were for whom and why, she tasted a small bite of a milk tart I had insisted on bringing and smiled in a way that made the servants' faces relax.
The Seven Prince, Ramon Lawrence, started coming by. He was a dangerous thing wrapped in lazy smiles. He came more than a man should to a merchant's shop. He called me "Leighton" without titles and watched me like one studies a game.
"I want what she has," he told the Consort once, and the whisper passed to me like a draft.
"Don't let him make you a palace prize," warned Erick Mason quietly one evening in the lane. Erick was from the grain family. He had the bright jaw of someone who had been cutting deals since childhood. "He is a problem. He can take a thing and make it disappear."
"I won't be taken," I said. "I will grow where he expects a sapling and not a tree. If he wants me, he'll have to take the company too."
Erick smiled, eyes catching like a knife's edge. "You sound like an officer. You always were unnatural for your age."
He came to the shop not just as a customer. He brought manpower when I needed it. He bought a thousand boxes for a feast in another town and insisted the ironwork be flawless. He stood by me at the Warne reception when the Prince made a spectacle, quiet and contained.
"You don't have to be afraid of him," Erick said one night, stepping into the shadow on my balcony where I smoked a rare imported cigar out of old habit. It made me laugh.
"Of course I do," I answered. "He is a prince. He has danger wrapped up in silk. But I've survived bigger storms."
He touched my wrist lightly. "Then survive another with me."
We moved like that, words like a rope. He came, he left. He kept to that patient, indifferent type men use when they think themselves immune — until he wasn't.
The city had teeth. Everyone wanted a bite. A jealous householdwoman, Diane McCoy, spun rumor that one of my embroidered gowns had been made with forbidden fabric — a rumor that curled into the palace like smoke. She wanted to claim that she'd seen the garments given to the Seven Prince and spread tales that my "night garments" were obscene, that they were used to teach indecency.
"You're making the wrong garments," Diane hissed to a circle of women in court. "She makes things to set fire to men."
I listened. I let them talk. In business and in life, people will throw stones to see which one of you bleeds. I kept inventory logs, ledgers, receipts. I kept a list of every thread, every bead, each box sealed and marked.
They dragged the matter into the open one crisp market morning, where all the town could gather — a festival of lanterns, the square full. Diane's accusations were a spark. She named me in front of magistrates, pointing, a ribbon of hatred wound tight around her fingers.
"She brought the consort a scandalous night robe! She has practices that are unseemly! She brought a fox-fur undergarment to the palace!" Diane said. The crowd murmured like a sea. A man — Bartolome Smith, a merchant who owed me money and had been crushed by my pricing — stood with her. He wanted me out. This was the knife he found.
"Do you have proof?" a magistrate asked.
"Yes!" Bartolome said, and he stepped forward with a crumpled note and a forged receipt he claimed came from my workshop.
I spoke.
"Bring the robes back to my shop," I said. "Bring every parcel I delivered in to the palace."
They looked at me with expectant faces like spectators at a duel. I moved slowly, deliberately. I opened my ledger and laid it on the table — a long roll of neat columns, signatures, tiny wax seals where the palace servant had confirmed receipt.
Then I asked for two things: a public examination of the alleged robe and for the crowd to note the hallmarks I stamped into every box — a small bird, a carved lotus, the Rainbow mark.
"When you accuse a maker," I told the magistrate, "you prove differently than you shout. Whoever forged a palace receipt or bought a dress under false names brought shame upon the court. Examine the seal."
They brought the robe. Bartolome held it up with showman's flourish. Diane turned her face to watch me. Erick stood in the crowd, his jaw tight. Ramon stood to the side like a storm cloud.
"See the faded thread?" Bartolome announced. "See the wrong hem?"
"I sewed that hem," said Elisa Carlier, the tailor's granddaughter. She stepped forward, took the robe, and unpicked a cuff with nimble fingers. "This stitch is in the hidden inner seam. Leighton's mark was set here; this thread was added last in a rush. These beads came from a merchant two blocks down who owes money and uses cheap brass. This is not from the palace order."
I waited.
Then I unfurled a second sheet: a ledger showing Bartolome's debt and his recent panic purchases, and a sworn testimony from a palace page — copied black and white — where he said the robe Bartolome held was bought on the street from a peddler who takes old cloth and reworks it.
"What proof do you have that the page isn't paid?" someone shouted from the crowd.
"Here," I said, and I handed over a sealed letter from Consort Faye. She had marked the robe with her private seal and recorded the parcel number. Then I turned to the magistrate and read the consecration list aloud, line by line — the names, the sizes, the dates.
The crowd quieted. In the square, a thousand people listened. Bartolome's face, flushed red before, paled. Diane tried to cough into her hand and failed.
"Why would you do this?" asked Erick later in the hush.
Bartolome's mouth opened. His confident smile cracked. "I... owed coin. I hoped the storm would drown her."
The magistrate gave the judgment as an amplified echo: "Public restitution and shaming."
They put Bartolome at the center of the square. They took his fine goods and laid them beside the robe he'd tried to pass off as mine. They called for the town crier to read his debts, and to speak of the truth: that he had been caught forging palace papers and investing in libel. He was made to wear a crude replica of the robe he had sold — the same robe's trim sewn into his collar — and to walk the circuit of the market twice, holding the robe high for all to see. The market laughed, then murmured, then the laughter grew sharp with scorn.
Diane McCoy's face crumpled in stages. First, a flush of triumph at being believed. Then confusion as the ledger names and seals were shown. Then a pale despair when her own co-conspirator named her. She had hoped to trade my name for an advantage. But hope was a brittle thing under a public sky.
"Diane," her brother cried from the edge of the square, "what have you done?"
She stood on a crate and tried to speak. The words fell from her like loose coins. "I... I thought—"
"Thought?" the crowd echoed. "You plotted with a debtor to destroy a woman because she shined stronger than your jealous star."
She began to back away. I watched her face fold. It was not an extravagant downfall — no theatrical collapse — but the change was there: greed, then denial, then the prickling heat of exposure, then the hollowing.
"I wanted— I wanted—" she stammered, then an old woman in the front row spat, and the sound of disgust went through the crowd like a blade.
They made her publicly apologize, to me and to the Consort and to the guild. She had to step forward and read aloud the forged letter she had written. She could not look me in the eye. Bartolome sobbed, shaking with shame. He pressed the robe to his chest as if to hide.
"Let them learn," the magistrate said. "Let the market know: trade fairly. Let the palace know: treat with truth."
People watched, photographed in their heads, retelling it as a lesson. They cheered when I did not scream or lash out. I did not feel triumphant. Truth had weight; the public fell upon the scales and favored me. Bartolome's business was ruined. Diane's reputation among the ladies was shredded like an old hem. The crowd's faces shifted from curiosity to pity to indifference. That shift stung her hardest. She had wanted to hurt me; she had hurt herself.
Erick stood by the edge of the crowd. He took my hand then, once the shouting eased. "They will think twice before doing that again," he said softly.
"They will," I answered. "But now we move on."
After the market episode, the palace's attention turned again. The Seven Prince watched and watched. He could be generous; he could be dangerous. He sent for me to fit him for the garments Elisa and I had made. I walked into the palace and saw him waiting, impatient and poised.
"Leighton," he said, "why do you make things that stir men so?"
"Because they are meant to be seen," I replied. I kept my voice even.
He smiled. "One day you will sit beside me and see how far I might take you."
"You forget," I said, "I am not for sale."
He studied me, and that day his guarded composure twitched. He took my hand — the same way he had the day I first fitted him — and before any courtier could gasp, he let go.
"Do not marry him," Faye Dawson had whispered to me in the greenroom once. "He is a map of storms. He doesn't love; he claims."
Erick's expression shifted in the courtyard later, dark as the underbark of a tree. "Do not let him steal you in silence."
"I won't be stolen," I said, and smiled because I meant it.
Days blurred into seasons. I opened a side shop: a confection room — the Sweetheart Parlour — and the city camped in lines outside. I taught palace ladies how to use cream and tint, and the Empress learned to let her face carry a secret shimmer I had developed: "Sunrise Halo."
Ramon Lawrence, the Prince, did not relent. He visited more. He sent small gifts: a purple bracelet of lavender jade, the match to a bracelet Erick once gave me as a joke. People noticed. They whispered.
At night, when he was away, Erick would come, often by the window. He walked into my life like someone who understood the value of a quiet harbor. He never demanded my whole world. He simply sat and shared plans: a branch operation in the next city, a trade shipment, a new line of cashmere undergarments that were warm but modest.
"Will you?" he asked one night, when the moon lay like a coin on the street.
"Will I what?" I asked.
"Marry me — when you are ready. Or don't. Just know I'm here."
I looked at his hand. "I am building an empire, Erick. I have led teams of men who wanted to ruin me. I don't need a protector, but a partner."
"You won't be alone," he promised. "I will be a partner."
I was not easily swayed by romance. But I was human, and when his hand closed over mine, there was a warmth that felt like home.
In the months that followed, I watched the Seven Prince temper and tilt. He tried to buy me with position; he tried to frighten me with courtly threats. But he learned that a woman who had owned her life twice was not easily frightened. He tested me like a mariner tests a reef and found that I would not crumble.
Business grew. The palace adorned itself with Rainbow Atelier embroidery. The Sweetheart Parlour had lines hourly around its door. I had staff who were more like family. Erick stood in the warehouse and watched workers seam garments and box powder pouches, and once he looked at me across a table stacked with ribbons and said, "Do you know what you have here?"
"Customers," I said.
"No," he said. "You have people who trust you. And that is worth any kingdom."
I laughed. "Then I will not sell it to a king."
When the next storm came — a rumor that the Empress was displeased, that I had overstepped my place — I met it in the open and with the ledger. Truth and craft together have a power that pomp cannot match. The market had taught a lesson. The palace had learned a new maker's mind. Men like Bartolome and women like Diane went back to their rooms with less hunger in their eyes.
At the end of a late afternoon, Erick came to the shop with two small boxes. He knelt in the doorway.
"Aviana—" he started, and then stopped at the wrong name. "Leighton," he corrected, smiling. "Will you marry me when your work feels right?"
I looked at him, at the room where I had cried over threads at three in the morning and where I had been carried on shoulders at dawn when a line of women had bought more than they needed just to be the first.
"Yes," I said aloud. The word felt right, like a click clasping a chain. "Yes, but not because you saved me. Because I choose you."
He smiled, and the sun fell across the redwood table.
The last thing I ever thought I would keep from my old life was a tiny, glossy paper corner: a photo of a glass tower, my old office, Aviana Flynn's name printed under it. I kept it in the bottom drawer — a reminder of a life burned and learned.
When people ask me later why I married Erick and not the prince, I say, "I chose trust over a crown." When they ask if I ever returned to the city where I had been a CEO, I tell them, "I keep the photograph. One day, if the river runs right, perhaps Aviana Flynn will be more than a memory."
This story is not the beginning and not the last. It's a day of many days, a string of small decisions: shade names, a pastry glaze, a ledger signed in wet ink, a public square where truth overrode rumor, a market's laughter and a girl's apology, and the little purple bracelet that once dangled on a prince's wrist.
I keep the bracelet in my pocket sometimes. It is light. It is a promise I never asked for.
The End
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