Austensibly Ordinary (28 page)

 

We spent the night in The Castle, curled up together against the chill, snacking on the provisions available courtesy of Ethan's planning instincts.

We talked through the last few weeks . . . about our impromptu slide into benefits, about Jake, Bad Manners, the CIA, and the silence. It was agreed between us that the silence couldn't happen again. If something went awry, we needed to regroup and talk it out, not simply “go dark.” Ethan was being a particularly good sport over my espionage lingo, which was great, because I didn't think I'd be able to rein it in anytime soon.

He admitted that while getting that call from Jake on a burner phone buried in lollipops had irked him—“You could have told me. I can turn up the charm when I need to”—he'd really been mad at himself. I'd caught him off guard with my little Q&A and subsequent seduction. (Judging by the grin this mention brought on, I could see I'd be given full credit for this particular match.) And then there'd been Bad Manners and his threat to investigate, “Which is nothing,” Ethan assured me. “I'm taking care of it.” After a quiet pause, he continued: “Honestly, I just needed to back off a little and figure a few things out. And Gemma called right in the middle of that.”

That brought me up suddenly, and my hand stilled on his chest. “
Gemma
called you? Why? Was she working?”
Oh please, God, say no!

“She may have called from work—I don't know—it didn't come up,” he said, looking at me curiously. “The weird thing was she was a little flirty.” He shook his head, slightly baffled. “Evidently your mom called her to discuss our ‘little speed bump' and suggested she help nudge us along.”

I sat up now, frustrated on two separate levels. “Why are the two of them interfering, and why the hell wouldn't they come to me?”

A slow grin settled over Ethan's face, and he tugged me back down so that I landed very cozily on his chest. “Because apparently you don't appreciate a little well-meaning help.”

I rolled my eyes and tightened my jaw, silently conceding the truth of that assessment. “So Gemma called, and you answered, but you let
me
go straight to voice mail?”

“I wasn't ready to talk to you yet,” he insisted, tightening his grip on my hand. “I didn't know what to say or how to say it. And I figured I was only going to get one chance to convince you to give me another shot.” He reached up and tucked my hair behind my ear. “When she offered The Castle, I jumped on it. What could be more romantic than this? This is worthy of Mr. Darcy himself. Although I did consider donning a ruffly white shirt and some breeches, and walking out of the lake as you and Gemma hiked around it.”

I giggled, raising an eyebrow. Clearly my insistence that Ethan watch the 1995 BBC adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice
with me had been the right decision. “Oh, really? You know you can't keep screwing me around. You're either Darcy or Knightley—you can't be both.”

“Oh really?” I nearly giggled again at the pompous British accent Ethan assumed. “Why can't I be the estimable Mr. Knightley with the romantic sensibilities of Mr. Darcy? I daresay I can. That is, my dear, if that is what would make you happy.”

My heart thudded heavily, and my throat was dry. As I gazed into Ethan's dark eyes, I marveled that it had taken me so very long to truly “get” him. Now that I had, though, I had no intention of letting him go. “
You
make me happy,” I said honestly, and leaned down to lay my lips on his.

“What do you suppose your Gypsy Jane has to say about this latest development?” he asked huskily, skimming his index finger over my jaw.

I fought for concentration, trying to remember how I'd left it with her. Something about the man thwarting the best-laid plans.
Which is precisely how things had played out.
Not that I'd had a firm plan in mind, but I was working it, getting there. I would have. And he would have thwarted it anyway, because I hadn't been expecting him here. He was one step ahead of me, and so, it seemed, was Jane.

“I suspect she'd approve,” I finally answered. The journal was tucked down into the bottom of my weekender, but we'd be having a little back-and-forth at my earliest convenience. Until then, I was on my own. Without the slightest concern for ladylike behavior.

I kissed him then with wild abandon, wanting to convey everything I felt in that one fiery kiss. As it swelled with urgency, I suddenly pulled away, caught my breath, and said, “Don't talk to Gemma on the phone.”

A long time later, we'd pulled the Scrabble board out and started up a game. As usual my head was only half in the game. I fiddled with my tiles, shifting them on the rack, searching for a way to play on a triple-word score.

“What did you mean about the investigation and you taking care of it?” I said, looking up at him.

Ethan glanced up from his tiles, met my gaze and smiled. “I have a little surprise for you on Friday. You get to ride along on an off-the-books sting operation.”

I raised an eyebrow in amused curiosity, but didn't say a word. Ethan wouldn't tell before he was ready—I'd learned that the hard way—so I didn't ask. Instead, I let my imagination whirl with possible scenarios and thrilled at having Ethan firmly established in my life again.

And then I laid down my tiles to spell “DAZED” on the triple-word score, feeling that “dazzled” would have been more appropriate. Either worked. And forty-eight points was very respectable.

T
hanksgiving was a lovefest. Everyone but Gemma and Dmitri was coupled up, and from the looks of things, the two of them were chumming up nicely. Mom had decided to skip the turkey and cook up beer-butt chickens instead, a task she had delegated to the “boys.” This basically involved them drinking beer and sitting on their butts, warming themselves near the grill while the “girls” prepped the rest of the meal in the kitchen.

“It's sort of ironic that things ended up the way they did,” I said, rolling out homemade pie crust. “Okay, maybe it's not ironic. Maybe it's just weird that I envisioned a beer-butt Thanksgiving and imagined Rodney would be in charge of the bird.” I glanced up at Mom from beneath my lashes, curious to gauge her reaction. “Maybe I have ‘the sight,' but it's only one-eyed.”

She stopped whipping her bowl of sweet potatoes, let go of the spoon, and propped her hand on her hip. “Do you know that I introduced him to my Zumba instructor, and now they're going out! I could have invited them, but I think I heard they were going to eat at IHOP today.”

“No,” I admitted, shaking my head in bafflement at the world in general and my mother specifically. “I didn't know that.” And I wished I still didn't.

“
She's
twenty-six, so if I'm a cougar, what does that make him?”

“Young at heart?” Courtney suggested from her position at the sink, peeling potatoes. “You could use that term too.”

“Oh, I like being a cougar, sweetie. It gives me a little edge.” She winked at Courtney, Gemma, and me in turn. Any more winking and I'd wonder if she had a nervous tic. I held back my grin as I rolled the crust up onto the rolling pin and rolled it back off into the ruffle-edged pie plate.

“Sugar daddy?” Gemma proposed. She was supposed to be arranging a plate of crudités, but mostly she was just crunching loudly on carrot sticks. “Showboat? Casanova? Fan of flexibility?” I pinched the edges of the crust, spinning the pie plate until I'd gone around, cringing all the way.

That last one had us all laughing. Except Mom, who, troublingly enough, had a comeback for that too.

“It's funny you should say that, Gem. Because I recently quit going to Zumba—”

The three of us glanced at one another, wondering where this was going. I latched the can opener onto the can of pumpkin pie filling and twisted, waiting to hear the rest.

“—and I've been going to Pilates instead.” She paused, I assume for impact. “You would not believe how tight my core is . . . and how extraordinarily flexible I've become. In just a couple of weeks. Brady is wildly impressed.”

I didn't even look up. I left the can opener dangling from the can of filling and sailed around the kitchen island on my way to the door, fighting back the giggles. “I'm just going to go out and check on the beer butts.” No need to specify. “Back in a few!”

As the door sailed shut behind me, I heard Mom saying, “What about the pie? The pie is what it's all about. How can any child of mine not get that?”

At that point, the hysterical giggles that were welling inside me could not be stopped. I staggered over to the group of men circling the grill who'd all gone abruptly silent. Ethan handed over his beer, and I took a long, steadying swig. Better.

“How's it going out here?”

“Fine,” Ethan answered. “What's going on in there?”

“Just a little girl talk.” I felt the hilarity bubbling up inside me again and took another drink of beer.

I noticed that now they all exchanged a look, probably realizing that, excepting Dmitri, they were very likely the topic of conversation. Any more time spent with Gemma, and Dmitri would be on the table too . . . so to speak. I smirked.

“I can't go back in there right now,” I whispered to Ethan.

“Do you want me to go fill in for you?”

“You don't want to go in there either,” I assured him.

I inhaled a deep breath of smoky November air. “Maybe I'll just take a minute to be alone. . . .” I suggested.

Ethan leaned in, turning his face away from the guys. “Is that code for something? And does it involve me?”

“It isn't and it doesn't. But if you want to start talking in code, let me know, because I'd be all over that,” I told him.

The panic in his eyes assured me that we wouldn't be doing that anytime soon. I handed him back his beer and headed up to my apartment. I was finally in the mood to talk to Gypsy Jane. Settling on the sofa, in the still quiet, I waited until the giggles and the echoes of girl talk subsided.

I skimmed through the pages of the narrow little book (including the inserted sheets of notebook paper from two separate bathroom visitations), now graced solely with the advice she'd offered up in an effort to steer my path toward a happily-ever-after . . .
at times the answer is hidden in plain sight . . . an unexpected development can change everything . . . a perfect match demands an open mind . . . absence may In fact produce a very desirable effect . . . puzzle it out between you . . . There are secrets, and then There's Clueless . . . Ethan is sweet, serious, stable. work your magic . . . He is your K . . . Is it enough? . . . it's the little surprise s that tell the story . . . Occasionally a man thwarts Even the most careful plans. why not let him.
She'd seen it long before I had—that Ethan was the one. She'd nudged me through my amateur investigation, hinted at his feelings for me (I suspected that's what the “Clueless” reference was all about), downplayed the burner phone in the lollipops situation (I suspected that might have been a big “little surprise”), and then encouraged me to back off so that he could take the lead on at least some part of our little dance of love. Looking back at the drama and frazzling uncertainty of the past month, I could see all the components of a quirky and elegant solution to Ethan's uncertainty and my utter obliviousness. We'd been in desperate need of an intervention.

I smiled, suddenly feeling very worldly wise, and started fresh on a new page.

 

 

I tipped the journal closed, feeling very bittersweet. The giggles were gone. The silliness had dissipated with the feeling that I was losing a stellar sidekick. I'd have to think of a good drop spot and leave it up to Gypsy Jane to find another open-minded individual in need of a little romantic nudge. This whole thing had played out like a zany reality program:
Jane Austen's Happily Ever Afters,
and I'd played my part.

Just as others had played before me. It struck me that I'd missed a little opportunity. It hadn't even occurred to me to flip back a few pages in the full-sized journal to perform a little detective work on the person who had left the magical little book for me to find. Suddenly I was desperately curious. Extracting the key, I slipped it into the lock and waited, my breath caught, for the missing pages to slip primly back into place. Shifting the tome on my lap so that the back cover was face-up, I paged backward through my own entries until I'd reached that first world-rockin' one. My fingers quivered slightly with nerves and excitement as I turned back one more page.

 

 

Obviously the previous owner hadn't been quite as gung-ho about the disappearing words and secret messages as I had. With my dreams of femmes fatales, secret spies, and superheroes. She was probably totally sensible. I flipped back one more page and skimmed over the entry. Totally sensible. Who else mentions mutual funds in their journal? Particularly their magical journal . . .

For one split section I had visions of winning lottery tickets and my life as a day trader with a little insider information, but I quickly squelched them. That was so beneath Gypsy Jane . . . or Fairy Jane . . . or whatever her next incarnation might be. And perhaps a little illegal. I needed to be done—I had to pass the torch. Otherwise I'd obsess over the stories and the secrets forever, and convince myself that after
one more question
I'd give it all up.

I retracted the key, let myself savor the moment as the magic seeped back inside one final time on my watch, and then set the journal carefully on the coffee table. Averting my eyes, I dug around for an orange cream Dum-Dum and headed determinedly back downstairs into the fray of this year's Thanksgiving feast.

Things were precisely as I'd left them, and I slid back in without anyone missing a beat. Little did they know that I'd been chatting with a two-hundred-year-old literary legend, and that she had quite a bit of spunk left in her. Some spook too. Well, Ethan knew and Courtney knew, but neither of them knew
everything.

I looked over at Ethan, who'd moved to the couch and was now watching the UT/Texas A&M game. I felt a little flurry of excitement spark inside me at the knowledge that this was just the beginning.

I took credit for the pie, despite having left it unfinished to escape the mother/daughter sex talk, and, topped with Cool Whip, it was my favorite part of the meal. Well, that and catching Dmitri staring fixedly at Gemma. If this had been an English country house, they would absolutely have “taken a turn” in the gardens after dinner. As it was, I think they might have groped a little in the ligustrum when no one was looking. I volunteered to wash dishes and spent the time linking each couple with a famous Austen pair. And then imagining muttonchops on all the men.

When we said good night, I made no secret of the fact that Ethan and I were going upstairs together, and we wouldn't be playing Scrabble. (It was possible we might be playing Scrabble, but that wasn't all we'd be doing, and that was kind of the point I was making.) We collapsed on the couch together, and I immediately put my feet up on his lap, remembering the night, weeks ago, that I'd been careful to stay on my side so as not to send the wrong message.