Above the very familiar TWININGS typeface in black letters on a gold bar above the doorway stood a golden family crest flanked by sculptures of two Chinese tea men and topped by a statue of a golden lion. The English truly knew how to build, decorate, and embellish. Almost everywhere she looked, both in Bath and London, her eye fell upon a gargoyle, a fan-shaped window, a pub sign so gorgeous it could be museum worthy.
Her mind turned to Aunt Ella and then, for some reason, to Chase. When she used one of her networks to pinpoint his location, she discovered he had done a check-in at the Ritz already. And he hadn’t blocked her on any of their shared social networking sites yet, either. So that, she interpreted, was a good thing.
It was three forty-five already, and she paced in front of the tantalizing doorway until Sherry came out and took her bag of tea from her.
“How does it smell?” She opened up the tin of 1706. “Mm-mm.”
“Really, Sherry? Can’t you just help me figure out where to get the next clue? We’re running out of time—”
“Hey, look, here it is!” Sherry pulled a slip of paper from the tin of loose tea leaves. “The clue!”
Vanessa read it out loud:
“‘If you need to buy a small vial of lavender water fit for a queen, a genuine badger shaving brush, and a book, all from places Jane would’ve known, there’s only one place to go: St. James’s—where you will find yourself transported to Regency London. Fetch the lavender water from Floris, the shaving brush from Dr. Harris, Chemists and Perfumers, and a book from Hatchard’s.’”
“It’s a shopping list,” Sherry said.
Vanessa did a quick search for Floris. “We’re off to Green Park tube station.”
She and Sherry emerged from the station and hurried up Piccadilly for a bit until Vanessa stopped suddenly.
“What is it?” Sherry asked.
Vanessa stood staring at the stone archway above her with the carved face of a bearded man in it, and, underneath, within black wrought iron scrollwork under the arch, were golden letters studded with lights: THE RITZ.
In an instant, she gathered herself. She was all about prioritizing and always had been. With a tap of Chase’s umbrella on the pavement and a rustle of her Twinings bag she said, “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”
“You’re beginning to scare me,” Sherry said.
“I am?”
“You really are obsessed about winning this thing, aren’t you?”
“I’m just competitive, Sherry, and I always have been.”
* * *
She wasn’t prepared, though, to fall more in love with London with every bow-windowed specialty shop in St. James’s she passed. Each store had been established in the 1600s or 1700s, and each exuded more British charm, more polished mahogany, and more mirrored glass cases than the last. The uncanny combination of quirk and elegance struck her like no American shop ever had.
The whirl of hatters, gentlemen’s shirt makers, wine merchants, and antiques shops would have made her really feel as if she were Jane Austen, had it not been for the cars in the streets and the people on the sidewalks in their modern clothes checking their phones and walking, quickly, as the rush hour approached, with their earbuds in, toward a cocktail bar, restaurant, or home. Vanessa thought for a moment, she could live here, in London, quite happily, with history and modern times brushing shoulders.
The only thing missing was—Julian. An emptiness came over her, like a spoon with nothing on it.
The apothecary jars and rows of wooden apothecary drawers the size of old library card catalogs at Dr. Harris, Chemists and Perfumers, hadn’t changed in two hundred years, and neither had the fact that they still made and packed by hand many of their perfumes, colognes, and soaps on the premises.
In the bastion of gentlemanly shops along Jermyn Street, including the clothier Thomas Pink she’d seen at Heathrow, they found the lavender water at Floris, perfumer to HRH (Her Royal Highness) and Julian.
“Jane Austen couldn’t have afforded to shop here,” Vanessa said to Sherry.
“No, but she might’ve been sent here to buy something for her rich brother Edward.”
Sherry shook her head while they waited for change from a very handsome, suited cashier. “I can’t believe we’re just a few blocks away from Almack’s, Beau Brummell’s club White’s—”
The cashier looked at Sherry while he ever-so-politely slid a velvet pad across the wooden counter toward Vanessa with her change on it.
That just about made her fall over. She couldn’t take it anymore! She’d fallen for England, and she probably would buy an I Love London mug at the airport—if she even decided to go back home!
She was ready to sign on the Anglophile dotted line.
The hot Englishman behind the mahogany counter explained that the velvet salver had been in use for centuries because it had always been more genteel to put your purchases on account and not pay with cash, but once cash had become de rigueur, Floris would polish the coins and iron the bills flat, and present your change to you, the lady, in your clean white gloves, coins gleaming and bills pressed and perfumed, on a velvet salver.
Once Vanessa had gingerly taken the change and her navy blue and gold Floris gift bag, and smiled at whatever the gorgeous English guy had been saying to her in his silky accent as she put her wallet away, she hurried out the door amid a flurry of “thank you’s” and “do come back’s” from the other salespeople and leaned against a lamppost outside the door for sheer support.
She looked up, wondering how much more of this English charm she could take without tossing her American passport into the Thames. But, as she looked up, she saw pink and white flowers blooming in the window boxes about the brass FLORIS nameplate topped with a royal coat of arms.
“Okay, I surrender!” she said to nobody in particular. “Aunt Ella was right. How can you not love England?”
“Wait till you get a whiff of this lavender water,” Sherry said, suddenly beside her.
“No! I mean, no, thank you. That would do me in.”
Sherry opened the bottle anyway and sniffed. “Oh. My. God. I could drink this stuff. By the gallon. It’s lavender. On steroids. I feel like I’m in a tampon commercial, skipping through the lavender fields—”
Vanessa laughed so hard she began to cramp up. “Sherry, I think you deserve to have dinner. And a drink. A big, tall drink.”
“And a tall drink of water, too,” Sherry joked. “But what about you?”
“I’m going to have to part ways with you for the evening because I have to take care of two men: Colin Firth and Chase. In that order.”
She couldn’t deal with having Chase disenchanted with her.
“Colin Firth?!”
“The fake Colin Firth and the real Chase. I’ll explain everything when I see you back in Bath tonight.”
* * *
Vanessa bought the life-sized Colin Firth replica just before closing time.
Now she stood in line at the London Eye ticket pavilion with him under one arm and Chase’s umbrella under the other because, according to his location social networking site, he was here at the Eye. But now she couldn’t get a signal on her phone anymore. Could the cracked screen have finally affected the phone itself?
“One ticket, please,” Vanessa said.
“Is he going with you?” the humorless ticket woman asked at a fast clip, glaring at Colin.
“Let me ask him,” Vanessa said as she stood him up and pretended to converse with the plastic replica. “Would you like to join me for a date on the London Eye, Mr. Firth?”
But the ticket woman was not amused; nor were the people in line behind her. “I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for him.”
Vanessa didn’t have the time or the energy to argue, especially with a woman who had no sense of humor and spoke too fast, and especially when she needed to get out of this line and into the one for the Eye itself. She’d looked and hadn’t seen Chase inside the ticket pavilion at all.
&nbs
p; Of course Colin needed a ticket! He was, after all, six feet two. She’d have to set him down while on the Eye, so she bought the two tickets without a fight.
By the time she stood in line to get on, the sky had turned to twilight, one of the best times to see London from above, the Australian family behind her said.
But she hadn’t come here to see an aerial view of London.
She scanned the snaking line for Chase, didn’t see him anywhere, and feared he might already be in one of the futuristic Ferris wheel capsules.
But then, as she reached the top of the line, a crowd of Asian women and a few Asian men parted, and there, in the center of them, like the spoke on a wheel, stood Chase.
“Chase!” Vanessa called out as she hurried forward. He didn’t hear her and she almost shouted again.
But one of the ticket takers grabbed her by the elbow. “You—and Colin Firth—must get back in the queue, I’m afraid, luv.”
Queue.
“But—”
“Sorry.” He firmly guided her back to her spot. She’d just missed the cutoff point for getting into Chase’s capsule by about ten people, so she ended up getting on the one behind his. Using Colin as a shield she shoved her way to the window and stood him up next to her. The people in her capsule looked at her funny, but she didn’t care.
She could see Chase from here! For a moment she put her hands on the rounded glass as she watched him laughing and chatting with the well-dressed and well-coiffed Asian women.
Vanessa looked down at herself, at what that morning had been a cute little outfit but now, after a day of literally running around London both above and underground, not to mention carting a six-foot-two plastic man across town, looked bedraggled at best.
A woman next to her stared at Colin Firth while Vanessa pulled out her phone to text Chase. She still wasn’t getting a signal.
She watched as his capsule floated up, above hers. She had to fix this rift with him. Still, she hadn’t taken the time to take care of it until she’d accomplished what she needed to for the hunt, and he was smart enough to know this.
She thought she might gain points by smoothing everything over in person instead of her usual approach, which would’ve been via text or e-mail.
People around her began taking pictures not just of London, but of themselves with Colin. She became, by default, the most popular person on the ride, even though she didn’t want the attention or the distraction.
She moved to every possible corner on the capsule to get her phone to kick in, but maybe the height had something to do with it. They were high above the city now, and she finally had to look away from her lifeless phone and marvel at Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and even the Tower Bridge far off in the distance.
She left Colin Firth with a group of American women so she could get a better look at Buckingham Palace lit up in the night. What a gorgeous, glittering, endless city London looked from above. She couldn’t believe she’d be leaving tonight without having seen any of the sights up close. Who goes to London without seeing Buckingham Palace, St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, or the Tate Modern, or touring the Tower of London?
As she looked at Buckingham Palace she had to laugh to herself at the thought of Lexi’s stories from junior year abroad as she tried to get the palace guards to crack a smile.
Lexi had tried it all, from raising her skirt to flashing her thigh to sucking very suggestively on a Popsicle, but nothing worked. It made a great rollicking story and Lexi always added the punch line that this was why she needed to go back to London: to get a guard to smile.
Lexi. The female Peter Pan. Yet despite Lexi’s emotional immaturity and the trouble she caused, Vanessa was glad to have her back in her life again. No matter what, Lexi brought life to everything, a liveliness Vanessa had been missing.
The lights of London and the grandeur of it only distracted her for a few moments, though, and taking Colin away from the American women, who laughed and made all kinds of “I get him Firth” jokes, she moved to the other side of the capsule, hoping to spot Chase again.
It had grown so dark she couldn’t distinguish the shadows of people in the capsule ahead of her anymore.
Below her the River Thames flowed dark and she realized this would be her first and last glimpse of the famed river. Rain began to fall. Great. She had no raincoat and nothing but a white T-shirt and skimpy skirt on. She did, though, have Chase’s umbrella.
As the capsule went down, she sacrificed the last glimpses of London in favor of tracking Chase and stood right by the door with Colin at her side. It rained harder now, pelting almost.
Once the doors slid open, she bolted out and without taking the time to put up the umbrella, she ran, with Colin under her arm, after the crowd that had emerged from the capsule in front of hers.
She didn’t see Chase, but once she started calling his name, people turned back at her, giving her strange looks—she was getting used to attracting unwanted attention by now. She’d spent more time running and calling after Chase today than she had spent pursuing anyone, ever. But she’d come here first and foremost to chase Julian, hadn’t she?
When she thought of the men she’d left and how she’d left them, it made her more than a little embarrassed. Her twenties were nothing more than a blur of men and public relations jobs.
In sharp contrast, Jane Austen, by the time she was twenty-four, had the better part of four novels written and high standards set for any man she would accept as a suitor or husband.
Meanwhile, Vanessa, in her early thirties, had climbed down a lattice from the second story of a house on the north side and hopped a fence just to escape a super-intense guy who seemed as if he would consume her body and soul. She couldn’t see any way out—other than the second-story bathroom window.
Would a frank conversation and a walk out the front door have done the trick? Probably. But hell, she was thirty-one.
Now, instead of escaping men, she was chasing them. The tables had turned—they had flipped over, even, with a crash of silverware, broken wineglasses, and shattered china plates never registered for.
The rain came down harder now, and it made her cold and shivery with goose bumps, but she felt convinced that the group she saw ahead in the blurry distance at the corner of Westminster Bridge and the river was Chase’s crowd, trying to hail a cab. She could see his familiar figure, even in the dark and the rain.
“Chase!”
The light turned and she ran across the street, yelling out to him, with Colin slipping and sliding in her hands as she kept her eye on the guy she was convinced was Chase. But she splashed in a puddle and tripped on the curb and, together with Colin, catapulted into a souvenir stand crammed with red, white, and blue British—everything.
The souvenir stand guy started belting out swearwords in his English accent, and never in her life had she heard such an impolite Englishman. But her elbow was stuck in a pile of toy red double-decker buses, a bunch of small British flags had toppled onto her boobs, and a rack full of Union Jack T-shirts covered her legs, while Colin lay at her feet on the wet pavement.
If a passerby didn’t know better, it looked like she had “done” London, all right.
“Vanessa? Is that you?”
It was Chase, looking down on her in more ways than one.
“It looks like you’ve reached a new low.”
“Oh, no, I’ve managed worse than this in my lifetime.”
He lifted the Union Jack T-shirts from her bare wet legs while she struggled to get up, and the souvenir stand guy reassembled the double-decker buses and flags, cursing throughout.
Chase gave her a hand and lifted both her and Colin from the ground at the same time.
He smiled so brightly it made her want to kiss him. Where that impulse came from she wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t deny it.
“I’m going to buy you a shirt. You look like you’ve been in a wet T-shirt contest.”
He pulled out his wallet while she looked
down at her shirt, which had gone translucent, and the rain and cold revealed her lacy bra and hardened nipples. She instantly crunched her shoulders together.
He held up a small gray I Love London hoodie to her, sizing it up. “Much as I like the wet T-shirt look on you, I’m not willing to share it with the men of England.” He lifted and turned Colin Firth toward the street. “Divert your eyes, Colin.”
Vanessa laughed so hard her eyes started tearing up at this reverse wet-shirt scene from the 1995 P&P. She was tired and hungry and slaphappy and cold, and Chase was funny and warm and—sexy? And not upset anymore about her sleeping with Julian?
He pushed his wet hair back, paid for the hoodie, took off his trench coat, wrapped it around her, and popped his umbrella over the two of them and Colin, too.
Vanessa noticed his clients had gone ahead—they weren’t standing in the rain. He must’ve sent them on.
“What are you doing here?” Chase looked at his watch and then at her with a twinkle in his brown eyes.
She had to state the obvious. “What do you think I’m doing here? I’m stalking you! To apologize to you. To beg you to be—friends with me again. I can’t stand having you upset with me.”
“I like the sound of that. Yes, I do. You begging me? But it’s much more like you to send a text, though, isn’t it?”
Vanessa didn’t know what to say because he put his arm around her and it felt so good, so warm, so—right.
“I was a little out of line myself. Capisce?”
“Capisce.”
He tucked Colin under his arm. “I see you’ve bought a little souvenir. You have a thing for English guys, don’t you?”
He wasn’t going to confront her directly on the whole sleeping-with-Julian thing, and she liked that about him. It made him really cool in her eyes.
Undressing Mr. Darcy Page 25