Jane and Austen (9 page)

He smiled. “I let you win.”

“Dancey!” Bigley shouted.

And there was my big confirmation, not like I needed it. Bigley came through the door. His face had gone serious. “Is that what you did to steal my fiancé’s heart? You lowlife.” Dancey swung around to face his friend, his back to us. Bigley glared. “Why did you come anyway?”

Dancey’s shoulders stiffened. “Because you invited me to come to your big, stupid, ugly, fat wedding!”

Bigley broke into a huge grin, and soon the two were hugging and slapping each other on the back. “How are you, old boy?” Bigley asked.

Taylor’s and my eyes met in confusion. She broke away from them and joined Austen and me at the counter. “Jane,” she asked under her breath. “Where did you decide to put Dancey?”

“Uh, yes.” I touched my wet hair, knowing the curls I had taken such pains to straighten had gone frizzy. “We’re putting him in the Morland Loft.” I refused to look at Austen but guessed he’d think it was pretty funny that I’d be losing my room to the rock star.

“We’re putting Dancey in the Rosing’s House,” Austen corrected quickly. “That’s where he belongs.”

My heart skipped a beat the same time Taylor’s expression twisted into abject horror. She turned to her husband-to-be for confirmation. “But, but, Chuck, aren’t your grandparents staying in the Rosing’s House, dearest?”

Bigley abandoned his welcome party to come to his fiancé’s side. He patiently rubbed her back. “As I was telling Austen earlier, hon, my grandparents are frail and want a quiet place to sleep. Austen suggested they go to the Kellynch across the way. It’s much less drafty for them over there, and I agreed.”

Austen had come to my rescue. Not only had he suggested that we use the competition, he even blackened the name of his parents’ resort to do it—North Abbey was drafty? It certainly wasn’t. Taylor’s chin lifted, and she pierced Austen with an accusing glare.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’ll make this easy on you. I work with Dancey on that special project that we talked about earlier, and you work with the Kellynch. Got it?”

She agreed more readily than I thought she would. “Fine. Great.” She clapped her hands. The glint in her eyes showed she liked a good bargain. “Rosing’s house it is.” She turned to her guests. “Let’s drop off your bags there, Dancey . . . before Austen changes his mind. Spit-spot, I’ll ring for some tea.”

Chapter 8

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

“Will Dancey?” I asked.
“
The
Will Dancey.”

Austen looked down at the guest list. “Willard,” he corrected.

“Willard?” I was going to pretend that really wasn’t his name—it wasn’t romantic at all. It had only been a minute since Taylor had walked off with my new valet, and I was freaking out.

Austen’s eyes danced with bottled-up amusement, and I realized that he thought this was funny. He put down the lid of his laptop and studied me over it. “Looks like you’ve had your meet-cute.”

“Oh no!” I held up my hand. “That was a meet-awkward. That was a . . .” I struggled, trying to remember how Austen had put it before.

“Meet-get-out-of-my-face?” he asked with a snicker. “Did you really make him park all the cars with you?”

“I . . . hey! It was an honest mistake. The service was supposed to send some valets. Why didn’t any of them show?”

“Oh.” Austen scrubbed at the grizzle on his face, looking a little sheepish. “Maybe that one was my fault. Taylor might’ve told me to call a service.”

“And when I ran through waving a puppy around that didn’t remind you to do it?”

Austen fiddled with the guest list. “I told Ann-Marie to do it. And then when I saw you out there with your rock star, I kind of figured you had it handled. I didn’t see his face until you two walked in . . .”

“Just great,” I complained. I realized something was missing. “Hey, where’s the puppy?”

“Ann-Marie.”

And so the puppy went the way of the valet service. They were both kind of floating out in space somewhere with Ann-Marie. This was so typical.

Austen eyed my new acquisition that hung around my shoulders. Dancey’s jacket didn’t exactly fit, but it kept me warm. His jaw tightened. “It’s not a total loss,” he said, “looks like you got a jacket out of it.”

I leaned my head back and groaned, then trudged over to the checkout counter, throwing my arms down over it. “Everything is ruined. He was like this regular guy. A little bit stuffy, but . . . we were actually having fun. We had this
moment
, you know.”

“Moment?”

“The moment,” I explained, feeling the pit in my stomach get deeper, “is when a guy looks into your eyes and you look into his, and something just happens between you—it’s electric.”

He frowned. “A telepathic moment? Sounds too sci-fi for you.”

I rolled my eyes. I knew he wouldn’t like
the moment
explainer—it reeked too much of cheesy romance. “It doesn’t matter now because it’s ruined. I can’t believe it! We even set up a date together.”

“You’d think the English accent would’ve tipped you off.”

I groaned. “He said he was from Massachusetts.”

“He lied?”

“No, Wiki it! I’m sure it’s true. He was just some innocent bystander dragged into my life. Maybe one of his parents came from the UK and the family moved back to the motherland when he was just a kid, I don’t know. He honestly had no idea what this crazy woman was doing to him. I don’t think that he knew I had mixed him up with someone else until . . . oh.” My eyes grew wide with the horror. “I dissed his song. It was on the radio. I can’t believe I did that!”

Austen was laughing again. “And?”

I gave him a look of disgust. For a guy who said he didn’t like girl talk, Austen was sure eating this up. “
And
he started driving really fast, and I thought he was stealing Will Dancey’s car. I practically had to threaten him with jail—he said he wanted to take me to Vegas to get hitched. And he said he wouldn’t take the car back until . . .” My sinking heart came back up to the surface and then shot into the clouds somewhere.

“Until what?” Austen prodded.

“I said I’d go out with him.”

Austen’s expression darkened. “Did you agree to that?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Wow, you’re the most stubborn girl I know and you decided to give some valet a chance because he threatened to take off with you in his stolen car?”

“It wasn’t stolen.” I smiled at the memory, seeing it all through a different perspective. Dancey had known I thought he was the valet when he asked me out.

Austen snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “But you thought it was stolen. Didn’t you think that was creepy? What happened to being suspicious of strangers?”

“Hey!” I defended myself. “It doesn’t count when an accent is involved. It’s an automatic point in his favor. And we had this moment.
A lot of moments, actually
. He showed me how to parallel park, and his hand kept touching mine. He said if anyone could pull off Taylor’s wedding, I could. It was better than ‘Roman Holiday’—I’m sure you don’t know that movie, but well, he had these walls at first and then he really opened up . . .”

I knew that I had finally lost Austen when his eyes clouded over. “You know I’m not a girl, right? I don’t want every detail.”

Oh, now he didn’t. “C’mon.” I switched to my best southern Belle accent and drawled out, “You don’t find accents attractive, sugar-lamb?”

Austen took a moment to put his jaw away, and I was proud of my ability to actually reach him. “Is that the accent you used to get him to fawn all over you out there?” he asked, looking annoyed. “It all makes sense now.” Mister meandered over the countertop, and he shoved the cat back. I noticed that Austen’s eyes had a tint of red to them, and, too late, I remembered his allergies. Maybe some of that coughing hadn’t been sniggering at my misfortunes. I almost took a moment to feel bad.

“All right, I’m sorry to mix you up in all this girl talk,” I said. “I’ll spare you the gory details in the future, but he’s British! That makes a guy a hundred times more attractive.”

“You said you didn’t know that he was British.”

I must’ve felt it—an incarnate sense found in girls everywhere. All my favorite heroes in Jane Austen movies had that accent; it was why girls everywhere couldn’t get enough of them. And when Dancey talked he sounded just like—“You know what he is?” I got excited. “He’s a total Darcy! No joke!”

“Dancey?”

I gave a little giggle when I realized the similarities in their names. There were other parallels too, like the differences in our social status and how I had misjudged him. “No, I said Darcy! He’s only the most romantic man in all of Jane Austen-ville.”

“Seriously . . .
that guy
?”

Yes. The king of all Jane Austen heroes—when Jane Austen invented him, she invented my heart. I settled onto the couch next to the silent TV. I flipped through the movies that Ann-Marie kept downstairs—most of them were romantic comedies and BBCs. “What do you know about Darcy?” I asked Austen.

He picked up his laptop and stuffed it into his backpack. “I happened to date a girl who made me watch the six hour
Pride and Prejudice
. It was traumatizing.”

“Let me guess. You broke up over it.”

He made a low groaning sound and joined me on the couch, making himself comfortable next to me. “I wasn’t Darcy.”

I smiled dreamily when I imagined Dancey’s face in front of me—he blinked dark lashes over sober eyes. I sighed. “No one is.”

“Except Dancey, it looks like.” Austen slipped out one of Ann-Marie’s movies, staring at the cover—the actress’s hair was split down the middle with two sausage curls on either side of her head. It was a horrible look. He grimaced. “I don’t get your bonnet movies. Why do you love them?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” Remembering that I had a wedding to put on, I dug my cell phone out and texted to follow up on the transportation to the rehearsal tomorrow. Freddy better show up tomorrow, or he was fired. I didn’t care if he was some fancy decorated General’s son. I glanced up at Austen, seeing that he was waiting for my explanation. “There are two kinds of people in this world. Jane fans and Jane haters. I’m a fan. You’re a hater. I get it.”

He pushed
Sense and Sensibility
back into the empty slot next to
Mansfield Park
. “I don’t know the author’s life story, but you’re right, I’m pretty sure I hate her. Because of her, guys like Willard Dancey . . .”

“Will,” I corrected quickly.

Too late, he caught on to my aversion. “Willard,” he emphasized, “is just some snob that girls romanticize to be something deeper and more interesting than he really is.”

“Girls do that for every guy,” I said. “I’m sure lots of girls do that for you.”
Me, for instance.
“You should thank Jane Austen and every other chick flick out there for making you look so good!”

I texted a reminder to our restaurant contact next. We had to make sure that our little budding performers from the wedding rehearsal were fed properly. Austen snatched my phone from me. “Did you hear me?” he asked. “The world is full of ordinary people with ordinary romance.”

I smiled when I realized that I had finally found Austen’s buttons. He seemed more bothered about this than I was. “People aren’t ordinary to the ones they love, and their love isn’t ordinary to them,” I said.

“It isn’t like what you see in the movies either,” he countered. “If you keep thinking that love will be like that, then you won’t find it. Ever.”

“You keep saying that! But you know what? I think I just proved to you today that chick flicks
can
happen.”

He mumbled something that sounded like,
“We’ll see where that goes.”

“What? You know I’m not deaf, right?” I snatched my phone back from him. “Remember our little challenge? I did my part. I’m supposed to see love staring me in the face and like it, and you’re supposed to enjoy a true romance. Your turn, Austen. I’m tired of doing all the work around here. Go find love.”

“Jane!”

I shot to my feet at the sound of Taylor’s voice. Austen stayed where he was, glowering. Taylor stalked into the room. If I ever thought Taylor looked upset before this then I was wrong—this was Taylor upset. She was shaking, and it could only mean one thing: she knew what I had done to her fiancé’s best man. I forced my voice to remain steady. “Yes, Taylor?”

“You have to help me.”

I gulped. “Right. That’s why I’m here.” I stepped around the couch and realized I was still wearing Will Dancey’s incriminating jacket. I unobtrusively peeled it off my already-burning shoulders and tried to set it on the back of the couch before Taylor looked too closely at it.

“Something is missing!” Taylor turned in a circle. “I’ve tried to ignore it, but I can’t.”

Ever since I’d started working on Taylor’s wedding, this had been the usual complaint. Though I was tired of trying to please Taylor, it was a relief that this had nothing to do with Dancey. “What’s missing?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.”

I couldn’t help it. I turned to Austen for some kind of help. He looked clueless.

“Okay.” I licked my dry lips and tried to reason with Taylor. “Does it have to do with the reception?”

Her face cleared. “Flowers.” She snapped her fingers like she had it figured out. “They had to special order the Calla lilies.”

“Lilies?” Austen asked. “You went for lilies?”

“Don’t start with me, Austen,” she said. “I have enough on my plate without hearing you get on my back for what kind of flowers I choose for my own wedding!” She turned a full circle. “We ordered the lights two weeks ago, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I just talked to the lighting guy yesterday. He’s ready to go.”

“The photographer?” she asked.

“All set. I met up with her today.”

She put her finger to her lips, muttering aloud as she thought of everything that could possibly go wrong at the reception.

“What about the T-Rex?” Austen asked.

Taylor looked confused. “A T-Rex? You mean, like a dinosaur?”

“Yeah, you forgot about scoring one of those really tough-looking dinosaurs for the party. I saw one at a reception once. I mean, not a real one, but one of those cool life-size, robotic ones. Nothing screams romance more than a big dinosaur.”

 “Are you saying that I’m overreacting, Austen?” her voice was cold.

He stood up and wrapped a comforting arm around Taylor’s shoulder. “You’re not being yourself, Taylor. You’re calm, collected, cool under pressure—that’s the Taylor we love. Stop stressing. You’re here to do bride things—like eat food and kiss Bigley.”

She stared at him, but I knew she hadn’t processed a thing he’d said when she wriggled away to mutter, “I know what’s wrong. The rehearsal tomorrow. Austen, I want you to be Chuck. Jane?”

“No.” Austen shook his head. “She will not be you. I don’t know where you’re going with this, but if you think you’re going to play dolls with us, you can forget that now.”

I shot him a warning look—I didn’t care if Taylor wanted to strap us to mini chairs and pour rank water from tiny teacups down our throats. If it got that crazed look off her face, I’d do anything. “Where do you want me, Taylor?”

“Stand here.” She pulled me to stand next to Austen and studied us, her eyebrows lifting while she mumbled like a mad scientist in the middle of an experiment. Austen stood tense beside me, and I was quickly catching on to his nervousness. “Take her hand, Austen,” Taylor ordered.

He hesitated a moment, then complied. He leaned over my ear to whisper, “She had better not make us kiss.”

I choked on a laugh, but unlike me, Taylor didn’t catch his aside. She was completely distracted. “Chuck is wearing grey with subtle pinstripes,” she said. “The flowers are pink and white. Dancey has the rings. I’m missing something!”

“Love?” Austen whispered.

I elbowed him this time. “Stop it.”

“What?” he mouthed. Then a little louder, said, “Taylor wouldn’t hear a cement truck crash through the lobby—she’s so caught up in the
romance
of the moment. Right, Taylor?”

Taylor glanced up distractedly, then pulled out a notebook and started writing furiously. She pulled open her phone and blasted the “Wedding March” over us as she paced. Before too long, she disappeared into the lounge and plunked a few notes on the piano.