Jane Bites Back (8 page)

Kelly lifted his glass and said, “To your novel. May it stay atop the bestseller lists for many weeks.”

“Indeed,” Jane agreed. “And to you for your most excellent taste in literature.”

They both laughed. Jane took a sip of wine and set her glass down. “May I ask when you’re thinking of publishing the book?”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” Kelly said. “Normally we like a long lead time in order to pull together publicity. But I want your book out much sooner, preferably by summer.”

“Summer,” Jane repeated.
That’s only five or six months from now
, she thought.

“I want to get it out in time for vacation season,” Kelly explained.
“I know it sounds crass, but it’s a reality of the industry that books for women sell best in the summer.”

Jane nodded, taking a long drink from her wineglass.

“And you’ll be selling it in your own store,” Kelly said. “When customers bring it to the register you can offer to sign it for them.”

Jane smiled broadly. She wanted to tell Kelly how many times she’d been tempted to take a customer’s copy of
Pride and Prejudice
and do exactly that. Now she could.
But what if Lucy—or anyone—notices the similarities?
she found herself thinking.
What if they discover who I am?
The thought dampened her joy.

“To get the book out so quickly, I need to get it to production immediately,” Kelly said, drawing her back to the moment. “The good news is that it needs very little editing. I know we haven’t even signed the contract, but I’ve taken the liberty of going through it and making a couple of suggestions. Nothing major. If you’re okay with my edits, then we can go right into production. We’ll do as much as we can while you’re here, and I’ll give you the manuscript to take back with you to finish up.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Jane said, speaking more to herself than to Kelly. Her worries about being found out were fading as she reassured herself that no one would possibly think to connect her to the Austen of old.

Kelly cocked his head. “Are you sure this is your first book?” he asked.

For a moment Jane panicked. Had she said too much? Had Kelly somehow seen through her act? “No,” she said hastily. “I mean yes, I’m sure. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that you’re so calm about it all,” said Kelly. “Usually first-time authors are nervous wrecks.”

“If it helps, I’m a wreck on the inside,” Jane assured him. “But I’m British. We have no visible emotions, you know. They were bred out of us centuries ago.”

Kelly laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “So now that I’ve told you our big plans, I should probably tell you what our offer is.”

Jane listened as Kelly explained the terms of the contract. In truth, she didn’t really care about the advance or the royalty percentage or the subsidiary rights. But she pretended to listen intently, nodding at the appropriate points and even hesitating long enough at one point that Kelly increased the amount of her advance by 10 percent.

“Of course, you’ll probably want to talk to your lawyer before agreeing,” he concluded. “But I hope you’ll say yes.”

“Yes,” Jane said.

Kelly seemed to be holding his breath. “You’re sure?” he asked. “You don’t want to discuss it with anyone first?”

“Are you saying I should be worried?” Jane said. “I took you for a most trustworthy man, but perhaps I should rethink my opinion.” She was teasing him, but Kelly apparently mistook her remark for hesitation.

“I’ll increase the royalty to fifteen percent,” he said. “But that’s as high as I can go. Honestly.”

Jane reached out and patted his hand. His nervousness was charming, particularly as until then he’d seemed unflappable. “Relax,” she said. “You sound like a first-time publisher.”

Kelly chuckled and shook his head. “You had me worried for a second,” he admitted.

“Just to be clear, I’ll sign the contract,” Jane said. “We have a deal.”

“Good,” said Kelly. “Now I can eat.”

Jane scanned the menu. As usual, she wasn’t hungry, but she knew she had to order something. She considered the chocolate mousse, but settled on French onion soup and a small salad. There was no sense in airing all her peculiarities to Kelly at once.

The waiter arrived, they placed their orders, and their conversation resumed. With the book talk out of the way, Kelly asked Jane questions about herself, all of which she answered with as little detail as possible. As soon as she was able to she turned the topic around to him. By the time their food arrived, she’d learned that he had grown up in Pennsylvania, attended school in Chicago, and moved to New York immediately upon graduating to work in publishing.

“My parents were very disappointed,” he told Jane. “They were hoping I’d become an investment banker or, as my father once put it, something useful. I’m afraid books are not held in much esteem in the Littlejohn house.”

Jane wanted to ask him more questions, but she felt it wasn’t fair to pry too much when she was keeping so much of herself from him. It was a situation with which she was more than familiar after two hundred years of practicing the art of evasion. Instead, she asked about the other authors Kelly worked with. She recognized several of the names he mentioned, although she had read none of their books. She made a mental note to do so as soon as she was home.

When lunch was over she and Kelly returned to the office, where Kelly presented her with four copies of a contract. After once again reminding Jane that she was free to have someone look them over, he watched anxiously as she signed the final page of each copy. When she handed them back to him, he beamed.

“Do you want to go over the manuscript?” Jane asked.

Kelly nodded. “But first I have a little surprise.” He picked up
the phone and dialed. “Joanna, I have Jane Fairfax here. Could you come in, please?”

He hung up. “I think you’ll love this,” he told Jane. “At least I hope so.”

A moment later a young woman walked into the office carrying a large piece of cardboard.

“Jane, this is Joanna Clarke. Joanna is the head of the design department.”

Joanna and Jane exchanged greetings. Then Kelly said, “I was so excited about your book that I emailed Joanna from Paris so she could work on this.”

He nodded at Joanna, who turned the piece of cardboard around, revealing a mock-up cover for Jane’s book. It featured a photograph of a farmhouse at twilight. In one of the upstairs windows a light glowed, and through the open curtains a woman was visible, her back to the window. From the lower right-hand corner of the cover a man stood looking up at her, holding a bouquet of daisies in his hand.

“Constance
,” Jane read the title. “Jane Fairfax.”

“I wasn’t sure what name you wanted to use, so I went with what you used on your letter,” Kelly said. “Do you like it?”

Jane continued to stare at the cover.
That’s my book
, she told herself. She was so used to the drab covers publishers put on her older novels—boring paintings of English cottages and girls in white dresses—that she’d expected the same thing. But this cover was different. It was modern yet timeless.

“I do like it,” she said. “I think it’s lovely.”

Joanna smiled. “I’m pretty pleased with it myself. Of course there will be some tweaking once marketing puts their two cents in, but I think this is pretty much it.”

“Would you like a copy to take home with you?” Kelly asked Jane. “We can have one printed out.”

“Really?” Jane asked. “Of course I’d love one.”

“I’ll go get one for you,” said Joanna.

“Thank you,” Jane said as Joanna left the office. “I really do love it.”

She looked at Kelly. “I can hardly believe this is happening,” she said. “It’s all a bit like a dream.”

“We’ll see if you think so once we’ve gone through my editing suggestions,” Kelly said. “Shall we begin?”

Jane hesitated only a moment before nodding. “Yes, let’s,” she said as Kelly turned over the first page.

Chapter 9

J
ANE STOOD AT THE WINDOW, LOOKING DOWN ON
T
IMES
S
QUARE
. I
T
was one in the morning, and she was not the least bit tired. She still couldn’t quite believe that her day had actually occurred. That morning she had been in Brakeston. Now she was in New York City, having signed a book contract and gone over the edits with her editor. Her handsome, funny, smart editor.

She brushed the thought from her mind. It was true that Kelly was all of those things. But thinking about him in that way was hardly professional. Still, over the dinner they’d shared following
their work on the manuscript, she had found herself behaving more and more like a besotted schoolgirl and less like a woman of 234. It was during the performance of
Gypsy
, to which Kelly had taken her after dinner, that she had realized that he reminded her very much of Richard Mansfield, the enchanting nineteenth-century actor and star of the D’Oyly Carte opera company. She had attended seventeen consecutive performances of
The Mikado
just to see Mansfield, and her devotion to him had not faltered even during the nasty Jack the Ripper business, when he was one of the prime suspects. (She’d known the Ripper, and although charming, he was not nearly as handsome as Mansfield.)

Her crush on Mansfield had eventually faded, and she suspected this one would as well. It was just the excitement of once again being a published author. She turned and looked at the cover of her book, the poster of which she had taped to the mirror above the room’s dresser. It hardly seemed possible that it was really
her
book.
“Constance
,” she said aloud. “By Jane Fairfax.” She giggled, embarrassed by how thrilling it was to say her name like that.

The title of the book, she had to admit, was not her best. She preferred something pithy. After all, could anything be better than
Pride and Prejudice
or
Sense and Sensibility
? True,
Mansfield Park
and
Northanger Abbey
were a bit drab, but that had been the fashion at the time. And at least they weren’t as bad as Scott’s
Tales of My Landlord
.

Anyway, she liked the cover. And she mostly liked being Jane Fairfax. She would have preferred to be Jane Austen, but that was of course impossible. Besides, she was used to being a Fairfax now.

Opening the minibar, she took out two Scharffen Berger dark chocolate bars and a half bottle of Shiraz. Then she lay down on
the bed, sinking into the impossibly soft mattress with a contented sigh. Pulling the wrapper from the first bar, she nibbled the corner as she turned on the television and began flipping through the channels. She watched a minute or two of several different things, but none held her interest. She had consumed half of the chocolate bar before she recognized a familiar face on one of the channels and stopped.

It was Peter Cushing. And the film, she realized shortly thereafter, was
Brides of Dracula
. It was one of her favorites, and she had not seen it in a long time. Now she settled in to enjoy it, alternately sipping from the bottle of wine and taking bites of the chocolate.

One of the infamous Hammer horror films,
Brides of Dracula
was enormously fun, particularly, Jane thought, if you were a vampire yourself. Watching the young heroine fall under the spell of the gorgeous and tragic vampire Baron Meinster (the name made her cringe) amused her, as did the generally ridiculous plot and the fact that despite the title and one brief reference in the dialogue, not once did Dracula himself actually appear in the film.

Yet as she watched the story unfold, Jane found herself growing sad. For the first time, she identified with young Marianne Danielle, the innocent schoolteacher tricked into helping Meinster escape from the room in which he was being kept prisoner by his mother the baroness. Rather than seeing her as a stupid girl who overlooks the obvious, Jane saw her as a girl in love, a girl who sees a wounded man needing her comfort.

By the end of the film she had worked her way through the bottle and most of the second chocolate bar, and felt a bit sick. And although she was happy that Marianne had escaped the fate of the other vampire brides, the scenes in which the baron is first
disfigured by holy water and then done in by a cross-shaped shadow added to her queasiness.

She couldn’t help thinking back to the time when she’d been as innocent as Marianne. She too had trusted someone who had betrayed her. Unlike Marianne, however, she had not escaped.

“No,” she said to the dark. “You’re not going to think about that. You’ve let it go.”