She looked out into the room, scanning for Aunt Ella, until she found her with Paul. “First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for coming on such short notice.”
Chase began taking pictures of her from across the room, and she hadn’t even thought of asking him to do it. For once, she wasn’t the one behind the camera.
Julian pulled up a chair for Aunt Ella, who sat down.
Vanessa smiled.
“Once in a lifetime, you meet someone—someone like my aunt Ella—who not only loves you for who you are, but”—she began tearing up—“but also loves you for who you become when the two of you are together. Someone who recognizes, even when you don’t, that together you’re infinitely better than either one of you could be on your own.” Vanessa dabbed a tear in the corner of her eye. She laughed. “I’m going off my script here. Does that make any sense?”
“Yes, yes!” quite a few shouted out. Others clapped and nodded.
“Yes, dear,” one of Aunt Ella’s lifelong friends called out.
“As it turns out, I’m not very good at improvising,” Vanessa said as she looked down. “But it makes you feel grateful to know that person, and even if you’ve only been together a short time, you know you’ve become a different, better person because of it.
“Aunt Ella is one of those people. That’s why this room is full of her friends, her family, and everyone here loves her, am I right?”
The room resounded with clapping and heads nodding. Vanessa raised her teacup. “So here’s to Aunt Ella, who took me in as a cranky, surly teenager, full of attitude and with more than a chip on my shoulder, and showed me that life could once again be elegant and good and full of hope. Thank goodness for people who can deal with sarcastic, wisecracking troublemakers! And thank you for showing me beauty and kindness and intelligence. After a lifetime of trying to resist it, I think I’ve finally come around.”
She shot a glance at Julian, who half smiled.
“Well! Happy engagement, dear aunt, and here’s to the exciting new chapter in your life with the most incredible gentleman in the room: Paul Nelson. Here’s to the happy couple!” She raised her cup, everyone in the room followed her lead, and they all took a sip.
“I’m not done—you’re not rid of me yet!”
Everyone laughed.
She held the second index card in front of her and her hand shook. She’d been on TV, radio, podcasts, video, Web streaming—still nothing had prepared her for this. The culmination of emotion, from her aunt’s illness to her impending wedding and move, to Julian’s arrival and his imminent departure, was almost too much to bear.
“I have a quote here, from one of Aunt Ella’s favorites. None other than Jane Austen herself.”
The guests nodded and smiled, knowing Austen was a favorite of Aunt Ella’s.
“In October of 1815, Jane Austen’s ten-year-old niece Caroline became an aunt herself. Jane Austen wrote in a letter to Caroline:
“‘Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence and must excite great interest whatever you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, and I am sure of your doing the same now.’
“Here’s to my aunt—and Paul!” Vanessa raised her cup again, and everybody cheered and toasted.
In a blur, not only from her teary eyes but in the rush of adrenaline, she invited anyone else to speak, and they did, and, as she made her way toward Aunt Ella to hug both her and Paul, she felt the warm presence of Julian beside Paul as her aunt whispered in her ear.
“Vanessa, darling, you are everything to me. You are my niece, my daughter, my sister—my best friend.” She hugged Vanessa, and Vanessa breathed in her Dior perfume. “Great, great things are in store for you, dear. I just know it! Thank you for this wonderful evening—thank you for everything.”
After the embrace, Vanessa stood back and held hands with her aunt, and Chase took another picture.
Aunt Ella turned to Vanessa and Julian. “I certainly hope you two have plans after this, don’t you?”
Vanessa looked at Julian.
“Yes, we do,” he said. “We’re going on a boat ride.”
“Good! I’m glad to hear it! Keep her out late. I have Paul to look out for me now. I don’t want to hear from anyone until the morning. I insist that you skip out the minute this is over.”
“Well, then, it’s settled,” Julian said as he bowed to the Dowager Countess.
* * *
Chase’s “boat” turned out to be a sailing yacht that comfortably fit about forty people, including two women who, Vanessa was convinced, were stalking Julian as he walked home with her under the midnight moon and city lights.
Julian looked back at the women dressed in their crisp, nautical blue and white outfits.
“Perhaps they just live in the same general direction as you and your aunt,” Julian said. “I fail to believe they’d stalk me, as you say.”
“Oh, they’re stalking you, all right. Must be those tight breeches of yours. You had to wear them, didn’t you?”
“I thought you liked that I stayed in costume. For PR purposes? I’m sure we sold at least forty books tonight, and it wasn’t even an official event.”
He was right. He’d made her job easy by staying in costume. Vanessa playfully nudged his elbow. “Let’s turn this way and see if they follow us.”
He locked his arm in hers and looked back.
“They turned.”
“I told you.”
“Hmmm. Let’s cross the street,” he said, clearly beginning to believe her.
Once they crossed, Vanessa pretended to stop and look in a shop window for a minute so she could look back. “They’re behind us. They’re stalking.”
Julian smiled. “Ahh, the celebrity life. I must say I’m going to miss all this.”
“I’m sure you will miss gorgeous American women swooning over you and stalking you at all hours!”
“No, I’m going to miss—everything. I’ll miss the food, the city on the beach, even the American tea. I’ll miss your valuable input on long-term fund-raising and your work on a sustainable PR plan for my estate. But most of all I’m going to miss—you.”
She slowed her pace from the sheer shock of the comment. Then she eyed his ass, picturing the British flag briefs. She didn’t want to think of missing him. She didn’t want to think of Ferris wheel rides and coffee and tea in the mornings and road trips with his suddenly endearing leather-bound books.
British. Flag. Briefs.
She knew it would be easy to get into them. But would she be able to get out?
“You’ll have another minder in New York,” she said. “And before you know it you’ll be back to things in England.”
“Yes.” He sighed.
Well, the sigh could be interpreted a hundred different ways, but she chose not to venture a guess and not to question it, either.
She looked back, remembering they weren’t alone. “Uh-oh, they’re gaining on us now,” she said. “I have an idea—we’ll lose ’em ninety-five stories up. Follow me.”
She hustled ahead of him into one of her favorite haunts, the John Hancock. Touristy and crowded enough to lose two unwanted women? Yes. Sexiest damn building in Chicago? Yes. Romantic as hell with drinks and views to melt over? Hell yes.
She pressed the up button, trying not to think beyond how dashing he looked in his cravat and coat as he dashed through the marble lobby. How many hours did they really have left together? She couldn’t stop her mind from clicking along.
The sight of him in his gorgeous Regency attire struck her as it did the people who filed in line behind him for the elevator, but the polite, upscale crowd only looked and didn’t ask a thing about the handsome gentleman.
She and Julian went into the elevator first, and a mass of people crammed in after them, crushing the two of them against each other, waistcoat to V-neck dress.
While the two women from the party walked right past the elevator, he took her
hand and squeezed it in acknowledgment. At first she pulled away, but then he interlaced his fingers in hers, and she acquiesced, because it really had been a fabulous night, and, well, essentially, the PR job was over.
The boat ride itself would’ve been fantastic, with the lake breeze and the skyline all lit up, were it not for, once again, a posse of women flocking around him. This meant she’d ended up inadvertently saddled with Chase as he manned the boat—no minor feat to raise a sail and guide a small crew on a one-hundred-and-forty-five-foot boat.
Once he’d put her to work steering, she found she couldn’t beg out of it and could only catch glimpses of Julian as he flitted about while Chase pointed out various buildings in the cityscape and laid out his itinerary for the next two months.
Not only would he be traveling to London for auctions, but he would be representing the auction house at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath as a major sponsor, while Lexi, Sherry, and Julian were all there, too.
Why her brain went down a path about Chase when Julian was leaning in and angling his strong jaw and his inviting, falling-open lips her way, she didn’t understand, except this was typically how her bait-and-switch mind worked to protect her from falling—falling for someone when things got dangerous.
But the elevator doors opened with a whoosh and a breeze on the ninety-fifth-floor lounge, and every girl looked better with a breeze blowing through her hair, didn’t she? He dropped her hand as soon as they stepped into the glittering world of clinking cocktails high above the sparkling city, sending her mind reeling with conjecture. Yet the buildings, the beaches, and even the Navy Pier Ferris wheel below seemed to glisten just for them. She showed him around all the windows just as low-hanging clouds began to roll in. The crowd thinned, a window-view table opened up, and they each had a drink while the clouds moved below them, offering peeks at the city lights.
He may have let go of her hand earlier, but now his leg brushed up against hers under the table and, despite the attractive women in their cocktail dresses at the table right next to them, he seemed to just have eyes for her. He leaned in, too, when she spoke, and, just as Lexi had taught her years ago, she looked for more body language clues to determine his interest, and she found them. He reached for his cravat and straightened it. He ran his fingers through his hair. Preening again. A clear sign of a male being attracted to a female—no matter what the species or country of origin.
Just as she raised her glass to take another sip, she saw the two women from the boat party across the room. She set down money for the drinks and tip. “Julian. Those two women are here.”
“They are?”
He almost turned around.
“Don’t turn around!”
“Absolutely right. Especially as I’m enjoying my time alone with you, and I don’t want to be interrupted. How can we escape them? How can I get you all to myself?”
Vanessa eyed them as they walked around toward the east side of the lounge.
“Come with me.” She grabbed his hand. Her plan was to take the elevator down, but when she looked back, she saw them coming toward them through the crowd, and there was nowhere to go—except the ladies’ room, which she knew had the best view in the entire lounge.
She led him into the ladies’ room, and there, as if it were meant to be, under a sink stood the neon yellow DO NOT ENTER—RESTROOM CLOSED FOR CLEANING floor sign. Without overthinking it, she took a page from Lexi’s book and set the sign right out front by the door, took a rather surprised Julian by the hand, and together they hurried, laughing, toward the stalls. As fate would have it, only one woman was at the sinks and, after raising her eyebrows at Julian, she dried her hands and left.
Vanessa laughed and leaned against the floor-to-ceiling windows in front of the stalls.
He moved closer to her, put his palms on the window above her, and, with a gaze into her eyes, asked, “What is it with you and . . . the water closet?”
She wanted him to kiss her. It seemed like he planned to kiss her, but she didn’t want to feel the sting of the letdown, so a deflection surfaced in her mind. She turned her head to look out the window. “Look, this view is better than the ones in the lounge.”
He was unimpressed by the knockout view of Michigan Avenue as a cloud broke open, revealing lights and liveliness below. Instead, he looked at her, his head cocked. She could see his face staring at her in the reflection of the window and the intensity of it made her quiver for a second.
She watched him, in the reflection, with his arms caging her, the flickering lights of the entire city below her, as he went in for her neck, the flesh just above her collarbone, her weak spot, the place only men who had known her for months would discover. He had figured it out in just a week.
He didn’t look as if he were kissing so much as confirming something, and the sensation of his lips, tongue, and even, for a moment, his teeth on her neck compelled her to lean her cheek on the window, inviting him to have more and coaxing him to let his hungry kisses move along her neck, shoulders, and back. He pressed against her in his breeches and she pressed against the window until finally she turned around and they kissed, long and hard, their reflection in the mirrors above the sinks across the room.
Though she didn’t want to break the kiss, urgency razored through her and she went for his cravat, untied it with the expertise of a Regency woman of pleasure, gave it a final snap, and cast it to the marble floor.
He lifted her entire dress over her head in one fluid movement and it slid out of his hands.
Now she stood in nothing but her lacy bra, her skimpy thong, heels, and her necklace dangling into her cleavage on the ninety-fifth-floor public restroom of a skyscraper, with her butt cheeks pressed against the window for the entire city below to see. Anyone could walk in the restroom at any time, too, really, so she had to be quick.
She couldn’t believe she was doing this, but she didn’t want to let her brain talk herself out of it. She had to work fast, racing against her own thoughts, tossing aside anything that smacked of reason or doubt.
Deftly, she stripped him of his coat, waistcoat, and billowing shirt, confident that the growing bulge in his breeches meant that yes, he wanted her as much as, or more than, she wanted him. He took pleasure in watching her strip him and he angled his body to help her remove each piece of clothing.
Julian was new, he was from far away, and exploring him felt like exploring a new continent. His Floris cologne, which he had told her had been first blended in the 1700s, spoke of musk and limes, and in her mind’s eye she saw cobblestone streets and gothic arches and centuries-old bridges over glistening water, and yes, she wanted to go there, and yes, he was the one to take her. There.
She yanked on the watch fob dangling from his waistline and looked up at him with a coy smile.
He kissed her fervently, his hands expertly moving all over her body, caressing and teasing and sliding her bra off.
He slid off his boots then cocked his hip as he brought her breasts to a new state of arousal with mere brushes of his fingertips.
“Do keep going, my lady,” he said as he kissed her more, and harder.
She unbuttoned the buttons on the sides of his breeches. When she unfurled the front flap, she realized he had no drawers on, and it both surprised and excited her; and once she’d peeled off the breeches, she went down on him with a hunger and aggressiveness she’d never known, and, pressing him between her breasts, she took him in as he rubbed his hands in her hair, tilted back his head in surrender, and breathed in and out deeply.
Then, on an exhale, he brought her up and slid off her thong in an instant. She reached for her bag and rolled a condom on him, and he took her there, pressed up against the window, because he couldn’t wait anymore. Her legs wrapped around him, the strength of his arms supporting her, and with an urgent wildness he brought her to new heights. He lifted her up and down on him—she could see it all in the mirrors, her riding him, him angling into her, both of them gasping and breathles
s.
She shot a glance toward the doorway, willing that nobody would interrupt. There would be no way now that she would stop; she couldn’t stop. She wanted him and only him, all of him, and he let go of his famous control as they came together, and he spoke, finally, in that accent, the accent that now hit notes she never knew needed reaching, and he said, with every breath, just what she wanted to hear.
“I do believe we have something here” were among the words, and a smart comeback didn’t even cross her mind.
Afterward he held her as their bodies jolted and smarted with the thrill of it all, and the slickness of their skin warmed each other, and she leaned into his chest, still heaving with little aftershocks.
With a smile she thought to herself, she had not merely undressed, but done Mr. Darcy.
Or had he undone her?
“Would you like to spend the night at my place?” she asked.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said.
The image of him and his chiseled physique in her bed seared into her brain, and she wouldn’t soon forget it.
And then the restroom door opened, and as they scrambled for their clothes and locked themselves into the wheelchair-accessible stall to dress, Vanessa realized just how vulnerable, exposed, and naked she’d allowed herself to get with this man she’d only known for a short time and who’d be leaving for good tomorrow.
She tied his cravat for him in the mathematical style, and she worried about ties. Ties to a man she might never see again.
Chapter 12
An eventful week later, at Vanessa’s condo, the doorman buzzed. “Your friend Sherry’s here,” he said.
“Send her up,” said Vanessa.
She unlocked her door and plopped back down in front of the flickering TV.
Sherry stepped in with Lexi right behind her.
“Lexi? How did you get past my doorman?” Vanessa teased.
“You know doormen are my specialty. Remember how I got up to that penthouse suite to meet George Clooney?”
Undressing Mr. Darcy Page 18