Undressing Mr. Darcy (10 page)

Determined to get this minuet thing over with, she moved to stand next to him, he dropped her hand, and she learned the minuet as the sun went down behind the skyscrapers and the streetlights flickered on.

All this time she’d lived downtown and she’d never danced with anyone on the beach. Although, admittedly, many a man had kissed her on the shores of Lake Michigan here, and some had managed significantly more than that, but now one man had
not
kissed her on the beach.
That
was a first.

Well, she didn’t want him to kiss her anyway, as it would only complicate a very simple business relationship, and it would make things awkward, as they had to travel to Louisville and then, poof! He would be gone, off to New York and then back to his life of writing books and shoring up his country estate, and she would be bereft of nothing—nothing more than a client who didn’t pay.

“Congratulations, you’re ready to try this with music now,” he said. “Wonderful work. You’re a quick study. It’s going to make your aunt so happy if you open the ball.”

“Yes—about that. I’m not so sure I’ll be the one opening with you.”

“Oh?”

“It’s a long story . . .”

He bent down to pick up her sandals, bag, and jacket.

Was this what it was like to be treated like a lady? He certainly did surprise her with the gesture, and, even though he hadn’t kissed her, he did look adorable carrying her bag.

They walked right by the beach volleyball courts, with girls in their bikinis gleaming under the lights, and Julian didn’t flinch. He didn’t look. Was he really a gentleman? One thing was for sure, he wasn’t a hookup, clubbing, player type of guy, Vanessa knew that. He had a crumbling estate, a legacy that was losing the race against time, and maybe that weighed heavily on him. Or it could simply be jet lag. It had been a long day.

“Let’s get you back,” she said.

On the way she checked the number of responses to opening the ball with Julian. Three hundred and fifty-one? She had initially thought twenty, maybe thirty women would respond.

She also no longer felt impartial enough to judge the contestants.

When she unlocked the door to Aunt Ella’s condo, she heard a shrill noise and fear ran up her spine. She hurried in and found, there in the kitchen, the teakettle on the electric stove, boiling and whistling without water in it. She twisted the burner to off, tossed the kettle into the sink, where it made a sizzling sound, and barreled into her aunt’s bedroom.

Her aunt lay sleeping soundly in her bed, her ample chest rising and falling regularly, thank God. Vanessa would have to tell the doctor about this tomorrow—what luck that they were going so soon.

When she closed the bedroom door, she backed right into Julian, who stood directly behind her. His strong, tall body took her at first by surprise. Then she felt only palpable relief. He put his hands on her shoulders and slowly turned her around.

“She’s safe,” he whispered. He led her to the living room and took her in his arms. “You mind her so well. But some things are out of your control.”

She fought back the tears welling in her eyes. It felt so good, so right, to be comforted by him. Then again, she might have felt the same about any man there at that moment, right? It didn’t have to be a Mr. Darcy from England, did it? She didn’t want to become . . . attached . . . or had she already? Would he try to kiss her again? She didn’t want a kiss. No, she didn’t want the
possibility
of a kiss and the possibility of a changed mind. He was a client, after all.

She broke away from him with a smile. “Aunt Ella isn’t the only one causing me problems at the moment.”

“Who else is?”

“You.”

“Me?”

If he only knew. “Yes, you.” She pulled out her phone and got an updated tally. “There are three hundred and fifty-seven women—and two men—who would like to open the ball with you tomorrow night. One of the women is Lexi. Some of the people who responded aren’t even at the conference!”

He watched as she scrolled through the litany of responses. “Vanessa. Whatever have you done out there in cyberspace? You are being cautious, aren’t you?”

“Cautious? This is the kind of stir we want to create.” She sighed. “Mostly. But now my aunt has her heart set on my opening the ball with you. Any suggestions, Mr. Darcy?”

* * *

L
ater that night, propped up with her laptop in bed and her phone by her side, she replayed his response to her in her head.

He had brushed her cheek with his hand and said, “You need to tell them all, and that includes Lexi, that I’ve made my choice, and I’ve chosen you.”

He had said it so quickly, and with such determination, that, under different circumstances, she might have thought he was flirting with her. But why would he flirt with her when he had chosen not to kiss her?

As she stared at her eBelieve in-box in the glow of her laptop screen, she convinced herself that he probably chose to open the dance with her simply to please Aunt Ella.

Vanessa told him she didn’t quite feel comfortable communicating the news to everyone, and he said he would post the message himself tomorrow. Julian on social media?
That
she couldn’t wait to see.

She clicked on her eBelieve in-box, but none of the men nor their messages appealed, and she soon found herself doing an Internet search on Julian. She had done this before she put together his Chicago PR plan, to get a feel for what kind of media coverage he’d received, but now she found herself digging for personal information about him.

His name garnered hits in the six-figure range, but absolutely everything related to his book, his show, or his property. Did he have a girlfriend? Pets? Silly pictures someone had taken of him drinking a pint at the pub? No. There didn’t seem to be anything about his personal life at all, and nothing dated further back than three years. But then again, she was tired, it was late, and she’d only checked a handful of hits.

A few months before, she had, just as a precaution, run a background check on him to confirm he could stay with her aunt, and everything checked out. Many of Aunt Ella’s colleagues vouched for his character and had known him for years, so she wasn’t concerned about anything criminal, by any means, she had just become . . . curious. But his Internet reputation proved very clean and professional. And he didn’t have any personal social media presence whatsoever. No blogs, nothing. Odd for an author.

She chided herself for wanting more dish on him, cursing the fact that this kind of digging was even possible, and admitting that yes, she liked him a bit more than as a client. She didn’t run Internet searches on just anyone.

She shut down her laptop with a sigh. She felt much like Julian’s estate—projecting a strong facade, but dealing with a crumbling interior in serious need of repair.

C
hapter 6

S
he had landed Julian a morning radio interview and posted:

Wake up with Mr. Darcy! 9:00 a.m. @91.1FMChicago #JASNAagm #UndressingMrDarcy

Her posts were, disturbingly, now revealing her innermost thoughts.

But she had posted this before the early-morning doctor’s appointment with her aunt. It would be hard to keep up the spunky posts after that appointment.

She and her aunt made their way into the Quilling Paper Workshop at the conference while Vanessa’s head rattled with the doctor’s news. It had taken weeks of blood tests, scans, and questioning, but yes, Aunt Ella had Alzheimer’s, one of the most common and deadliest forms of dementia. At her age, the average life expectancy once diagnosed was only about seven years.

Medication could slow it, but the disease would progress. Her aunt would, in time, eventually lose all her independence and need to move into a home. Vanessa had frantically taken notes on her laptop, keying in that accommodations for the condition would have to be made, and finances, wills, and power of attorney needed to be reviewed. Did they have a caregiver in mind?

Aunt Ella had shaken her head no.

“If I wanted to live with someone,” she’d said, “I would’ve remarried decades ago. And then I could’ve driven someone else completely mad without having to pay for it! No, no, I cannot have a stranger coming to live with me.”

Vanessa had bought herself one coffee for each hand after the appointment and then determined to brave the quilling class despite being arts and crafts challenged. It made her aunt happy to have her in the workshop, by her side. Paul sat on the other side of her and Sherry in front of them in a
Dibs on Darcy
T-shirt.

Vanessa’s hand shook as she tried to slip a yellow strip of paper into the quilling tool’s slot. Sherry chatted and quilled as the ponytail that stuck out of her baseball hat swished from side to side. Her hat read
Mistress of Pemberley
. She was the Mistress of Pemberley while Vanessa seemed to be the Master of Nothing.

Julie, the instructor, a pert young Asian American dressed in a day gown with a bonnet hanging down her back, filed up and down between the rows of tables, checking on everyone’s progress. They were supposed to decorate a small wooden picture frame with paper filigree designs, and she had demonstrated how to roll the thin strips of paper into curls and then glue them onto the frame to create hearts, flowers, and teardrops.

“In
Pride and Prejudice
,” Julie announced, “Mr. Bingley refers to young women being accomplished, and he said, ‘They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished.’ Quilling, or paper filigree, was one of the ways an accomplished lady spent her time.”

Aunt Ella, Paul, and Sherry had all practically finished decorating a third of their frames, while Vanessa struggled to make lopsided hearts, wilting flowers, and misshapen teardrops. From across the room she eyed the finished wooden picture frame Julie had on display, and it looked gorgeous. Why couldn’t Vanessa make it happen?

A strip of pink paper, at first seemingly coiled around her quill, completely unraveled and spilled into a swirling vortex of pink in front of her that looked nothing like a heart.

She looked up only to see that the woman across from Paul was actually crocheting a doily and quilling at the same time.

Distracted, Vanessa put too much glue on her attempt at a blue paper coil to make a flower petal, and the glue glopped everywhere.

“Do you need help?” Julie asked, eyeing Vanessa’s rapidly uncoiling flower.

Yes, she needed help! Lots and lots of help, and maybe a fishbowl-sized martini, too.

“No, thank you. I’m fine,” Vanessa said. “I’m just not as ‘accomplished’ as everyone else, clearly.”

That got the whole room laughing, including her aunt, and that made it all worth it.

How could it be that she could field press conferences on live TV but couldn’t roll a strip of paper around a quill to save her life?

Julie couldn’t hold back. She bent over Vanessa’s picture frame, and within minutes the glue had been forced into submission, and the sad little frame appeared more populated, and Vanessa could actually distinguish the hearts from the teardrops.

At least now she was on par with the eighty-year-olds and the one eleven-year-old in the crowd, but the women her age were nearly done.

“Thank you,” Vanessa said to Julie. Maybe if she rolled her coils looser, she could cover more of the frame.

Julie caught on to Vanessa’s hastily rolling her paper. “I’m here to help, you know. In Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility
, Elinor Dashwood helps Lucy Steele by rolling papers for a basket Lucy’s working on.”

Aunt Ella looked up from her quilling. “Are you implying that my niece is a Lucy Steele?”

Everyone in the room laughed, except for Vanessa, who didn’t get any of these insider Austen jokes. But she was glad to see that her aunt’s wit was still as sharp as ever. Aunt Ella hadn’t been able to remember which high school she went to, during her battery of tests, but she could make a roomful of intelligent Janeites laugh! And which, really, was more important?

“Lucy Steele,” her aunt whispered, “was a villainess in
Sense and Sensibility
. She was secretly engaged to the hero, Edward. Elinor Dashwood couldn’t account for his odd behavior. But all along it was the secret engagement!”

Secret engagements, happily, were a thing of the past, from a time when people didn’t have “it’s complicated” as a relationship status option.

There. She’d covered her entire frame and managed to be the first one done! She couldn’t recognize anything except what Julie had glued down, but it was covered, and colorful, too. If she’d taken more time and had more patience, it could’ve been beautiful. Regardless, she gained something from this experience, and that was a few stolen moments of peace.

She had to admit she felt better. She hadn’t made anything by hand in a while. She propped the frame up to admire it. Not bad.

“Next thing you know you’ll be speaking French, sketching landscapes, and singing at the pianoforte,” Aunt Ella said.

“I don’t think I’d subject anyone to that,” Vanessa said.

“It’s lovely, dear, really,” Aunt Ella said as she eyed Vanessa’s frame. “Especially the flowers at the bottom.”

Okay, so, did her aunt remember that the instructor had done the bottom of the frame for her? She didn’t want to scrutinize everything her aunt said or did, but the “Alzheimer’s” label changed everything, it seemed.

The door to the workshop stood ajar, and she noticed Julian pacing in front of it. Back from the radio station already? She hoped he’d remembered to ask them to e-mail her the audio files for posting. She stood and gently lifted her frame. “Aunt Ella, this was fun! Is Paul going to stay with you? Julian’s back and I need to check on him.”

“Go right ahead. Perhaps you and he can join us for lunch. We’re hosting a small gathering, and Chase offered a picnic on his boat for our friends. He’s going to pull his boat over to the riverwalk especially for us.”

“That’s nice of him,” Vanessa said.

“He is a dear. Always has been. Ever since you two were in high school together.”

Vanessa almost dropped her frame, with the glue still wet. So it was true. They had gone to high school together. Or was it? How could her aunt remember Chase and she couldn’t? Could she trust her aunt’s memories?

“Sherry will be there, won’t you, Sherry?” Aunt Ella asked.

“I wouldn’t miss it!” She beamed.

Chase had a boat? Everything from a dinghy to a yacht to a cigar boat flashed through her mind. She picked up her frame and smiled at Julie, the instructor. “Auntie E, Julian has lunch plans with a group of professors, and I need to work through my lunch. So I may not see you until the promenade at five. Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay, dear. I’m fine, you know. Paul won’t let me out of his sight.”

She kissed her aunt on the head and swooped down to pick up her purse and gym bag.

“What’s in the duffel bag?” Aunt Ella asked.

“A Wonder Woman costume,” Vanessa said.

“A what?”

“Chase convinced me to join him at Hero Con for a swordsmanship workshop, but maybe I can bow out of it.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” her aunt said. She pointed her finger at Vanessa. “I insist that you be nice to him. He’s Paul’s right-hand man. I won’t have you leave him hanging.” She turned to Sherry. “I can’t tell you how many poor men Vanessa has let fall by the wayside over the years. Half of them end up at my place, practically crying into my teacups. Someday you will meet your match. I’m hoping for sooner rather than later.”

But by the time Vanessa extracted herself from the class, Julian had disappeared. She saw the door to another conference room close and she figured he must have gone in there.

All this chasing him around made her realize how dependent she’d become on texting. He ranked right up there with her aunt in not using the phone, and it was a wonder his publisher dealt with it.

She opened the door to the conference room, but the room was so full, and so quiet, other than the lively Professor Miranda Fuller, one of her aunt’s friends, up at the podium lecturing, that she dared not draw attention to herself but instead found a seat as quickly as possible.

As she scanned the room for Julian, she heard Professor Fuller speaking of Lydia Bennet, explaining how a slit in her gown suggested her loss of virginity before she eloped. Loss of virginity? She scanned the entire left side of the room, but Julian wasn’t there. Professor Fuller went on to discuss the sexual significance of Elizabeth Bennet’s petticoat being stained with “six inches” of mud.

Okay, Vanessa had to look up the schedule and see exactly what lecture she had stumbled into here. It happened to be “Slits, Spikes, Steeds, and Scandals!: Coded Sexual Indiscretion in Jane Austen’s Fiction,” and it was enough to make even her blush!

She scanned the right side of the room for Julian, but got distracted when Professor Fuller spoke of Kitty and Lydia Bennet cross-dressing a soldier in a gown, of carriages and horses symbolizing male sexuality, and how a certain Mr. Rushworth from
Mansfield Park
didn’t seem to have the “key” to a certain “gate.”

Who knew? Maybe the time had come for Vanessa to read the full Austen canon. Even as she sat in the lecture, she decided to download all the novels to her phone. As much as she wanted to find Julian, she found herself fascinated by the lecture—and paralyzed by the rapt audience. She didn’t dare leave now.

Once everyone clapped and stood to leave, she saw Lexi, once again in her Xena costume, approach the professor afterward.

Vanessa hurried out of the room, and there, in the hall, leaning against a pillar reading a book, stood Julian. He looked over at her with a smile.

“There you are. How did you find Professor Fuller’s lecture?” he asked.

“Intriguing.”

“The conversion has begun. It’s in your blood. Resistance is futile.” He looked into her eyes and took a step backward. “You’re becoming an Austen fan.”

She picked up on his cue. “I am. Check out the picture frame I made in the quilling workshop.” She showed him her handiwork.

“Fantastic. I most especially admire the flowers and hearts on the bottom here.”

Vanessa smiled and neglected to tell him Julie had done those.

“I’m quite glad I found you at last,” he said with a pause.

She didn’t want to read anything into that statement, but he did seem to drink her in as he looked at her.

“I would like to hear all about your aunt’s appointment, and we need to let everyone know you are opening the ball with me tonight. I am very much looking forward to
that
. However, it seems I am always chasing after you and waiting for you at every turn,” he said.

“Really?” She felt exactly the same way. “You realize that using your phone would actually solve all of these logistical issues, right?”

“I do, but you know my stance on technology.”

“I know it, but I don’t understand it.”

“I shall explain when we have time. There are good reasons.”

In the meantime, having to actually see him for their every communication wasn’t that bad. Not being able to text, call, or IM him only added to his value and mystique.

She couldn’t help but wonder if we moderns were doing ourselves a disservice by being so available—remotely, electronically. There was something to this archaic face-to-face time.

“Perhaps you will reconsider my invitation to the Jane Austen Festival in Bath.”

Perhaps she would. But how could she with her aunt’s Alzheimer’s?

“Mr. Darcy, can we talk with you for a moment?” A woman and her friends broke into their bubble.

Vanessa had to remember this was just a job, and, hassle though it had been, she realized she didn’t want it to end.

When she looked at the time she realized she’d better take this opportunity to change into her Wonder Woman costume.