Jane and Austen (33 page)

“That man with you earlier?” Jennings’ face turned into a row of hard lines, her pursed mouth spread across her face along with the wrinkles in her forehead, every bit of her scrunched up in thought. “He still loves you,” she said finally. “I saw the way he looked at you—he can’t get enough of you. I’m not a tabloid writer for nothing. I can sniff out tragic love stories from a whole chapel away.”

What a lie. It was also Jennings’ job to weave a story that would sell—I knew better than to believe her now.

“Jennings,” Elly interrupted us out of nowhere. She had been so quiet that I could’ve taken her for a church mouse. She held out a manila envelope—I recognized it as the one that had held those hated photographs. “Taylor wants you to have these.”

Jennings snatched the envelope from Elly’s hands, ripping off the top. I stared at the floor, not able to do this anymore. Jennings was wrong about Austen. He didn’t care enough about me to say goodbye. My cell phone vibrated with a message, but I couldn’t look at it.

Jennings slipped photographs out of the envelope. “Willard Dancey,” she breathed. The photograph was of him, but this time I saw that his arm was around Taylor and he was kissing her.

“A picture of the happy couple,” Elly explained.

“I had high hopes for those two after she broke my camera,” Jennings said.

Elly blushed in Taylor’s behalf. “My cousin’s full name is Taylor Elizabeth Weston—for when you do the write-up. If-if . . . you do a write-up, I guess.”

“Taylor Elizabeth?” Jennings couldn’t keep back her satisfaction. “Her parents are fans of the movie star, I take it?”

“Actually her mother named her for Elizabeth in
Pride and Prejudice
.”

I startled at that, at the same time that my phone vibrated. I turned it off.

“That’s not all.” Elly handed Jennings her last envelope. “This is Mr. Charles Frank Bigley the III, with the new Mrs. Bigley . . . the third; or shall we say, Junie Bennet Fairchild-Bigley. Looks like Taylor and Dancey ran into them at the strip—Chuck stole Dancey’s idea to elope.”

I gasped, my reality spinning so much that it rocked my world. I could scarcely believe it. “Junie Be Fair?” I asked. “B” stood for Bennet—Austen had known that and never put it together that she could be Jane Bennet from
Pride and Prejudice
? “But, but . . . ?” I stared at the photographs in Jennings’ hands. The couples posed in front of the “Chapel of Love” on the brightest strip in Vegas. They smiled broadly. And why wouldn’t they? They had played us all for fools.

Austen had taken Junie to the airport to meet Bigley, not to marry her. What a big, stupid misunderstanding. So where did that leave Austen and me? I scrambled for my phone. DeBurgy said that we would feel his displeasure. He couldn’t have done anything worse than the photographs—I hoped not. I stared at the screen on my phone, my fingers shaking. Sure enough, there were twelve messages. All from Austen. I flipped through them.

AUSTEN: I AM WALKING TO THE DOOR.

AUSTEN: I AM WALKING THROUGH THE FOYER.

AUSTEN: I SAID GOODBYE TO THE REVEREND.

AUSTEN: HUGS FOR EVERYONE. FIRST A BIG HUG FOR MRS. BIGLEY THE SECOND AND THEN A BIGGER HUG FOR MRS. BIGLEY THE FIRST, COULDN’T GET HER TO SMILE. I’LL KEEP WORKING ON IT.

AUSTEN: REDD PATTED ME ON THE BACK. HE’S HOLDING HANDS WITH BELLA.

AUSTEN: I AM WALKING DOWN THE STEPS.

AUSTEN: I’M GOING TO MY JEEP, LISTENED TO AN AWESOME STORY FROM FREDDY ABOUT YOU.

AUSTEN: ONE STEP.

AUSTEN: TWO STEPS

AUSTEN: THREE STEPS.

AUSTEN: TWELVE STEPS.

AUSTEN: I AM WAITING FOR YOU ON THE HOOD OF THE JEEP.

Austen had promised to give me the itinerary of his trip and there it was. Jennings was right—he still liked me. I interrupted her conversation with Elly. “I’ve got to go. Someone’s waiting for me outside.”

Jennings burst out laughing. “Give that cute boy a kiss for me.” Her cackle followed me out of the chapel. I couldn’t get outside fast enough. The wind from the crisp morning air hit me as soon as I rushed out the church doors to find him. The wedding guests lingered near their cars under the sun, gossiping and joking about the non-wedding. Austen sat on the hood of his Jeep, his head down. I got another text on my way to him.

AUSTEN: I’M GETTING HOT. A LITTLE BORED.

“Austen!” I called.

He put down his phone. I saw he was laughing at me. I looked down at my dress. I knew I looked very Jane Austen-esque. Despite everything that I had learned during the last week, all my beliefs in romance and happy endings stared back at me from the folds of fabric in my skirt. Sappy dreams of love weren’t true, and yet they were happening anyway. Austen sat on the hood with his suit and tie. I didn’t have to imagine that he looked like the man of my dreams—he just was.

I hurried down the chapel steps . . . and ran into a guy and his dog. The leash got tangled around my legs. I clawed at the leash in my haste to escape. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said and looked up to see an abnormally attractive man.

“Quite all right,” he said. His warm eyes found mine. “Do I know you?”

This scene could’ve come straight from my daydreams. “No, no.” I untangled myself, glancing over at Austen. His head was tilted at me. I excused myself from the handsome dog-walker and tried to cross the street. The latch on one of my Greek sandals broke, leaving my right foot completely bare. I desperately scrambled around to find the sandal and saw an exotic-looking man holding it. “Is this yours?” he asked.

“Uh . . .” I was stuck in another meet-cute. I stepped backwards and ran into a dumpster. My arms paddled through the air as I felt myself tip into it. Another man wearing a tie and vest rushed forward to save me from my fall. He was muscular and athletic, and reached me far too fast. With sheer force of will, I forced myself upright without his help, my pulse rushing. The guy with my sandal stepped tentatively toward me, and I picked up my skirt and deserted them all, running for Austen like my life depended on it.

I reached him in a matter of seconds and leaned heavily against his jeep, trying to catch my breath. That was a close one—a million meet-cutes coming at me at once, and still I had managed to elude them all for the man that I adored. I grabbed his hands. “Austen! I thought you and Junie eloped.”

“What?”

“It was a misunderstanding. I get that now.”

“I was just taking her to the airport.”

“I know, I know! I thought she was taking the deal she made with DeBurgy, and you were mad at me, so I thought . . . but I didn’t know that the B in her middle name stood for Bennet.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, it’s a weird middle name.”

“Well, Junie is like Jane Bennet from
Pride and Prejudice
, so of course she’d want her own Charles Bingley.” One of Austen’s eyebrows sketched up, and I held up my hands to defend myself. “I get it; we’re not stuck in a novel anymore, but you want to hear something even stranger? Chuck’s middle name is Frank! That also makes him Junie’s Frank Churchill. Weird, huh?”

“He gets another character?”

“Yeah, from
Emma
. And she’s his Jane Fairfax—you always did call her ‘Fair.’ It makes sense that she’d elope with him.”

 “Wait. She married
him
?” he sounded irritated now.

“Yeah, it’s awful, but they looked so happy in their photos, and maybe they’ll be fine. And here’s the other thing, Austen. I was selfish before. I’ve made so many mistakes, but I understand that now. I shouldn’t ask you to keep North Abbey. You should sell it. It’s not your dream, it was mine.”

Austen’s forehead crinkled. “No, no, this is all wrong. This isn’t how it goes. We’re not supposed to be this way.” He slid down from his jeep, picking me up by the waist and setting me on the hood where he had been. It left me breathless. His arms stayed around me. “As you were saying.”

I had a harder time concentrating now—I felt like I was in the middle of an iconic love scene. “I wanted you near me,” I said, “but I couldn’t be happy for you when you were following your dreams. That’s not what real love should be. I’m happy for you, Austen. I’ll support whatever you decide to do.”

He laughed. “Great, because I’m going to need your help at North Abbey. DeBurgy came through with his threat.” I waited in dread to hear what DeBurgy had done. “Colin’s not taking the resort,” Austen said. “DeBurgy signed him on.”

“Wait, for real?”

“Yeah, DeBurgy’s making Colin a rock star—he whisked away our buyer. What a low move, right? He thinks he’s ruined everything, but, Jane, I was going to withdraw the offer to Colin anyway. Dancey’s marriage will bring enough publicity to keep us popular for a long time.” Austen loosened his tie in his excitement, then set it on my lap and took my hands. “Let’s stay and fight for the place, Jane. You and me together.”

“But you don’t want to be here,” I argued.

“I know what I want.” He trailed a finger down the side of my face. “I’m just not the romantic guy you’ve been dreaming of—not even close to it.”

“I like reality a lot better.”

His eyes glittered with mischief. “But we had such a lousy beginning,” he said. “Even you said our meet-cute was lame.”

My lips twitched at the memory. “It was a terrible first meeting,” I said.

“I can explain that. One look at you and you tied my tongue—I couldn’t be clever at all.” My heart went all gooey at the admission—how cute! I didn’t care if it wasn’t true. I’d tell my kids that story for decades. “And then we fought during our end-cute the first time we tried it,” he said. “It wasn’t cute, or the end, at all.”

“I’m glad that it wasn’t the end.”

A smile touched his lips. “Is there any hope for us?”

I put his tie back around his neck and played with it. “How about we just accept that things don’t happen like a book?”

He ran his fingers through mine. “Not to say that I don’t like a little romance.”

Now I knew Austen was teasing me. “You like romance?” I asked. “We
did
get cursed.”

“Of course we did. There were so many signs. How could you miss them all?”

“Signs?”

The way he looked at me captivated me. “Best friends fall for each other, our Jane Austen adventure, the evil villain playing right into our hands. And Jane? It’s just a good thing our friends know how to run their own lives, because we’re lousy matchmakers. I can’t say that won’t stop me from plotting something between us, though.” He caught a curl from my auburn hair and trailed his fingers through it.

I bit down a smile. “Austen?”

“Yeah?”

I didn’t need a rundown of the last week to know how he felt about me. “You can kiss me now.”

His thick lashes dipped down over his hazel eyes, and I felt his hands tighten on my waist as he touched his lips gently to mine. For an unromantic, his kisses were the sweetest I had ever known, and I began to suspect that he knew more about love than he admitted. From his words to his kisses and smiles—I adored what he could do with his mouth.

“Not bad,” I told him, “for someone whose brain hasn’t connected yet.”

I felt the rumble of his laughter against my cheek, and he pulled back to grin at me. “I love you, Jane.”

Even if it was cliché and not very original, I told him that I loved him back, and, after adorning his lips with my own kisses, I wrapped my arms around his neck to feel his heart next to mine. Jane and Austen were finally together.

EPILOGUE

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”

—Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park

I sat in the lobby,
reading through the client applications coming in through the North Abbey’s website. We had a rush of applicants for our wedding packages. Dancey never lost an opportunity to talk about how he’d rediscovered love at a quaint beach resort meant for romance. Taylor was always beaming. So the world was convinced. North Abbey had become the new hotspot for couples planning on tying the knot. It was impossible to service them all.

Ann-Marie played her piano from the Allenham Lounge. It was a love ballad, something she had written for her very dear Harry Crawley. It made the perfect background music in our lobby. We kept the overcast day at bay with a cozy fire crackling in the fireplace—it had been Austen’s idea to replace the big screen TV with it. It had also been his idea to give Ann-Marie back her movie collection.

He worked on the business ledgers across the checkout counter from me. He was dressed down, in casual jeans and a t-shirt, his hair a little messy just the way I liked it—I could play with it without anyone noticing. Austen’s eyes darted to mine over his laptop. His mouth turned up in a grin that meant he was about to tease me.

“Jane.” He reached over the counter and fiddled with the wedding ring around my finger. “We are going to get this thing resized. It doesn’t fit right.”

“I don’t know,” I matched his playful tone. “I think it fits you much better than it does me. Maybe you should take it back.”

He slid the ring off my finger and kissed the bare skin left behind. The tender way he did it warmed my blood. Still holding onto my hand, he brought me closer to give me a kiss over the counter, one that left me wanting more.

In the meantime, he had stashed my wedding ring on the tip of his pinky. “Oh, look at that,” I said. “It fits much better on you.”

He studied it. “I don’t know. Something’s not right.” He slipped my ring back onto my finger and met my eyes, just like he had the first time he’d asked me to marry him. “That never gets old.” He gave me another kiss, this one more lingering.

We hadn’t eloped like we had planned. Our parents had insisted on an old-fashioned wedding, and we’d shrugged and complied. The honeymoon had been hurried, because we needed to get back in time for work. It involved camping and backpacking, but we’d ended up taking refuge in the tent for days because it had rained the whole time. And still, things couldn’t have been more perfect, because I had shared it all with Austen.

His hands left me to go back to work on his laptop. The basket of “unintended gifts” still held a place of honor next to him. It was packed with even more useless items collected from our North Abbey guests since last summer. It was tradition now to put a memento inside from someone beloved. It held a dried California poppy from Dancey, a broken foosball player from Crawley, and Austen’s bracelet. It seemed sacrilegious to fish anything out now, almost like stealing dreams from a wishing well.

I searched through the applicants on my laptop and laughed when I pulled up the latest profiles. “We’ve got a Ms. Shaye K. and a Mr. Speare who want to use our services.” I turned my screen so Austen could see. “Look! Put their names together.”

Austen peered at their names and groaned when he read them together. “Shakespeare? Forget it. We are not taking on clients named Shaye K. and Speare. The last thing I want is a reenactment of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. No way.”

I turned the screen from him and crossed their names off the list . . . but then, after a few minutes of imagining the worst, I scheduled them for May. A little romance was never a bad thing for North Abbey.

THE END

Thank you for reading
Jane and Austen
! I had a fun time writing this romantic comedy and I hoped you enjoyed reading it. If you got this far, take a deep breath, and be sure to leave a review on Amazon for my book:
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There are more books where this one came from. Be sure to watch for them from my new “Hopeless Romantics” Collection (five books from 2014 to 2016). They’re sweet romances for sweet readers—and yes, I know that pun is lame. I’m truly sorry!

Thank you for reading.

Stephanie Fowers

PS: Take a look at the next page to read my glossary of my
Jane and Austen
characters and how they compare with the very dear characters immortalized by Jane Austen’s pen.