Droplets of water headed in one direction on his chest: south.
“Yes, it’s amazing.” She tried to step back, but she already was up against the pool wall. “Great recommendation. We can feel the healing power.”
“Regardless of how you feel, you look great in a bathing suit.” He eyed her dripping-wet chest. “As I knew you would. Of course, you’d look even better without it.”
Flirt.
He beamed at Lexi and held out his hand to David. “I’m Chase. Are you Lexi’s souvenir from England?”
“That I am.” David shook hands.
Chase, in his signature way, stepped forward with slight deference, a smile, and a patting of his hand on David’s arm as they shook.
“I’d like to treat everyone to a Bath bitter after this,” Chase said. “How about it?”
“Hey, I’m paying for you tonight, Chase,” Vanessa said. “You’ve been the best.”
“The best what?”
She didn’t quite know how to answer that. “Well, after traipsing all over London and Bath with me, I at least owe you a drink.”
“Hmmm. Let me think of the ways you can return the favor.”
He was flirting again, and he positioned himself next to Vanessa, their bodies brushing underwater, and rested his elbows on the pool ledge next to her, giving her an up-close-and-personal glimpse of his left bicep, brown and bulging with a small skull and crossbones tattoo on it.
Lexi had been right about Chase being a great guy. Vanessa could see them getting along very well as family and even joining forces on a project or two businesswise. The more she got to know him, the more confused about his role in her life she became.
“The water’s perfect,” he said. His nostrils flared slightly in the steam. “Ahhh.”
For the next hour she chatted with Chase in the water while Sherry, Lexi, and David moved on to the scented steam rooms and lazy river. Something about the pool made Vanessa want to stay. It could’ve been the setting sun, the fact that getting out now would be cold, or maybe she liked having Chase so close, talking. And they had the pool all to themselves now.
“Vanessa?”
She wriggled away from Chase at the sound of the familiar British accent.
It was Julian in his little blue British swimsuit.
* * *
Vanessa and Julian sat in the glass-enclosed eucalyptus mint steam room, sweat dripping from their bodies, Julian with his head in his hands. Apparently he’d found her at the spa by checking out one of her location networking sites! He had joined the site to find her, track her down, and tell her she hadn’t won the competition after all. A woman from Sweden had come in just before her with all the right answers.
“Oh, well.” She played it cool and shrugged her shoulders. “Without the hunt I never would’ve had the privilege of dragging a life-sized plastic Colin Firth all over England.”
It didn’t produce the smile she’d hoped for from him.
Through the glass walls she could see Lexi, David, Sherry, and Chase were in the lavender steam room nearby, with Chase sprawled on the cement bench.
“I have something important to say to you, Vanessa,” Julian said.
She felt her temperature rising beyond the heat of the steam room. Her head began to spin, and even eucalyptus couldn’t steady her. She hadn’t eaten anything since the Sally Lunn bun, after all.
“I should have told you eons ago—”
A young woman stepped into the steam room with them and sat across from them.
“But this may not be the right place.” He sighed and looked up at the dripping ceiling for a moment. “Perhaps I should invite you to see the house tomorrow. After all you’ve done to help my cause, I feel obligated—”
Vanessa put her hands on her hips and tried to breathe deep, tried to act like a duchess. But it was just an act, wasn’t it? “Obligated?” She stood and paced while the young woman looked at her, aghast. “Don’t feel obligated! I don’t want to go anywhere with or be with anyone who feels obligated!”
This was why she didn’t open up to men. This was why she never let them know her true feelings. It was just too painful.
“You know what?” She grabbed her towel, swung the glass door open, and shouted, “You don’t have to feel obligated anymore!”
The young woman stared. Now everyone in the dimly lit, all-glass steam rooms turned their heads and stared at her as she bolted for the changing rooms, which were, unfortunately, co-ed.
She dried off as best she could and considered changing back into her clothes, but then she heard Chase calling for her.
“Vanessa? Vanessa? Are you in here? I’ll be forced to look under changing-room doors if you don’t answer me. Who knows what I’ll be exposed to!”
So he came running after her and not Julian? That really pissed her off. She didn’t want to see Chase. Not now. She stuffed her clothes into her bag, slipped on her flip-flops, and made a beeline for the stairs and the doors that led to Hot Bath Street.
The cold evening air hit her, and people on the street ignored her, in their polite British way, in her bikini. But something compelled her to look in on the Cross Bath across the paved square. It was housed in a Georgian stone oval-shaped building, complete with columns and an ornately sculpted portico, and the lure of a glowing light emanating through the glass door drew her closer.
She pressed her hands against the warm glass to see a couple drinking champagne and kissing in an oval-shaped blue pool with steam rising all around them. The Cross Bath could be rented out privately, and apparently, these two had done it. Her hands warmed on the glass as her body grew colder.
Would she always be on the outside looking in?
She sneezed, her nose began to run again after having been fine most of the afternoon, and she loped out of the little building, dashed toward her flat, but got turned around on Trim Street. The street seemed to close in on her, and her head ached with her cold. She couldn’t remember which way on Trim she had to turn to get back to her flat.
All she could think of was Jane Austen, coming home late to this dark street, ducking the men looking for prostitutes and clutching her reticule so nobody would steal it.
Time to leave, Vanessa thought. Time to leave Bath.
Suddenly she felt a coat tossed around her shoulders, and it about gave her a heart attack. “What the—?”
“It’s just me,” said Chase. “I called your name, but you weren’t listening.”
He wrapped his sports jacket around her shoulders. “You’re frozen. I’m taking you back to your flat.”
She shivered. “I really had to give it a shot with him, Chase. I thought I had something with him.”
“I know you felt you did. I saw that.”
They stood out on her stoop, and he rummaged through her bag to find her key. He looked awfully cute digging through her purse, and it made her smile.
“But you know,” he said, “love shouldn’t be that hard.”
He found the key, unlocked the door, and held it open for her. A slice of light came down on her from the hallway.
“What do you mean? Love is always hard.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s easy. You shouldn’t have to be playing games and hiding your feelings and guessing how he feels and trying not to text him until a certain amount of time has passed and all that.”
They climbed the stairs and he opened the door to her flat.
She looked at him and she couldn’t believe what he said. She’d been playing games with men her entire life. She prided herself on being one move ahead of them. She always left them first, before they could leave her. She had her own code, her own rules that she followed, and it worked.
Or maybe her code didn’t work—at all!
“When a man really loves you, he shows you how he feels. He won’t be running hot and cold. He won’t be keeping you guessing. We’re really quite simple creatures. When it comes from the heart, we’re not able to play games. You’ll know when a ma
n truly loves you.”
“And when he doesn’t.”
She followed Chase into the kitchen, where he removed three of her animal-print thongs from the stovetop to fill the kettle. He began opening the cabinets with her bras dangling from the knobs, looking for tea or something.
“It’s usually very obvious when he doesn’t.”
He found a packet of hot chocolate and poured it into a mug.
“It’s obvious to you, maybe. You’re a man yourself.”
He sighed. “You deserve better. Every woman deserves better than some guy who tosses her feelings around, plays games with her, sleeps with her, but doesn’t want to date her or even text or call her.”
He put it all so bluntly she felt compelled to defend Julian. It was not that he never dated her or that he never called or texted her! Right? How could they date—living nearly five thousand miles apart? And, well, he never texted or called anyone.
She leaned against the doorjamb and pulled his jacket around her neck. “That’s it. I’m going to die a spinster just like Jane Austen.”
“You are not! Not you, my dear. You just need to find the right man.” He stroked her chin. Then he took and folded her bras and thongs from various points in the kitchen. “Here.” He handed her the tiny pile.
Maybe, she thought, love happens in between loads of laundry and making hot chocolate together. Maybe it’s not difficult and dramatic and cross-continental.
Why couldn’t Julian be more like Chase? Why hadn’t he run after her when she left the steam rooms?
“Much as I love seeing you in your swimsuit, I think you should change into something warmer, and I’ll treat you to dinner.”
She reached out and hugged him, crushing her neatly folded underwear against his back. “I’m treating you to dinner tonight, Chase. Thank you. For everything.”
As she changed in her room, she couldn’t help but wonder what exactly Julian had come to tell her, anyway. Why did she assume it was something she wouldn’t want to hear? A small, vulnerable part of her thought, What if it was exactly what she wanted to hear?
She knew what she had to do. She had to visit his estate and get some answers. If she only knew the questions.
Chapter 19
On her way to the train station the next morning she took the waters at the Pump Room, downing some cold meds with it. How did she come to a spa town completely healthy and manage to get sick?
Of course, running through Bath in a wet bathing suit on a September night probably didn’t help matters.
Against Lexi’s and Sherry’s unsolicited advice, Vanessa took a train to Alton, where she had only about a mile to walk to get to Julian’s estate. From there she would walk to Jane Austen’s cottage at Chawton and meet up with a festival group tour, where she would take the “barouche” (a bus) back to Bath, all in plenty of time to get ready for the ball.
Chase had set himself up in his hotel to work for the day, and she didn’t dare tell him about her plan anyway.
She figured rather than texting, e-mailing, or calling Julian, she would do things the old-fashioned way, the nineteenth-century way, and pay him a visit.
Lexi and Sherry, meanwhile, signed up for a festival tour of the Assembly Rooms, where Jane Austen would attend dances, and the Orchard Theatre, which she frequented, then the Fashion Museum and high tea at the Pump Room.
A couple of weeks earlier, seeing Jane Austen’s haunts wouldn’t have tempted Vanessa in the least. But tempting as it now was, she couldn’t imagine seeing Julian tonight at the ball without at least trying to figure things out. The visit seemed worth a shot. And something compelled her, before she left England, to see the estate that she had worked so hard for.
Sturdy walking shoes on, umbrella and raincoat in hand, once she’d walked the mile from the Alton station, she took her earbuds out as soon as she saw it in the distance. It proved impressive, made of hewn stone, and it stood tall, with three stories of windows, perfectly symmetrical with four columns and a pediment.
But iron scaffolding bookended it. It was a fixer-upper on the grandest of scales.
A blue Dumpster sat on one side of the curved driveway, filled to the brim with stone rubble. Construction truck tires had left tracks on the grass, gouged into the land. It seemed as if the construction crew had been there not too long ago, but abandoned it. A few of the windows on the second and third stories had been replaced with plywood. Cracks scissored through the front steps.
The scaffolding, the Dumpster, none of this had been in the pictures he’d shown her. She walked up the steps to the front door, where building permits had been plastered on the windows flanking the doorway. Above the permits hung a sign that read: ENGLISH HERITAGE SITE AT RISK.
She’d made the right decision in coming. When she looked back over her shoulder and saw the tombs of Julian’s ancestors clustered on a nearby hilltop, they felt like long-lost family. It filled her with a great sense of purpose to know she’d had, and could still have, any part in saving this grand old home.
She almost forgot why she had come.
With a nervous hand she raised the brass knocker and knocked as loudly as she could, but nobody answered. The door was locked.
She decided to call him after all, but couldn’t get a signal. No Wi-Fi, either.
Her instinct to take pictures kicked in, thinking she might be able to do something more to help the cause once she got home, no matter what her relationship, or lack of, with Julian. As she stood here at last, she felt for the home as if it were a living, breathing thing. She shot as much as she could, a little daunted by the amount of work that needed to be done, but able to visualize how fantastic the place could be with a lot of time, effort, and—money.
As much as it would take to whip everything back into shape, it seemed the alternative—allowing it to be condemned and torn down—would be a great loss.
Still trying to get a signal on her phone, she walked around the back, awed by the vast, overrun gardens marked by crumbling gateposts. On a backyard terrace a cloth tarp covered some furniture, and it flapped in the wind with foreboding.
Vanessa hadn’t felt this cut off from civilization in a long time—if ever. It was so quiet she could hear herself think. She had forgotten how quiet the world was without her phone.
The house stood on acres of its own land, and the clouds in the sky parted, and sun and blue sky broke through, as if to mock her and her solitude.
Still no signal on her phone. It didn’t seem as if he was here, though. But then she saw something white in the distance bouncing along the edge of the pond in front of an old gazebo surrounded by overgrown grass. She spotted someone from the back—Julian? He wore a Chintz robe and Turkish slippers, the ones he had spoken of in his show! As he stepped out of the gazebo, her heart leapt, and she ran toward him, slowly at first, then quicker, and then, she slowed again.
It wasn’t Julian. It wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman in an oversized robe, picking up a white puppy. It was the same woman she’d seen in the Bath Abbey with Julian!
She couldn’t think, but began to walk backward in the overgrown grass; her cold meds seemed to fail her as her head began to pound, her eyes began to water, and her throat ached with soreness. A cool breeze made her shudder and she all but dropped her bag and umbrella to put on her raincoat.
She turned up her collar, turned around, and went against the wind, toward Jane Austen’s cottage, forgetting to put in her earbuds, not caring about getting a signal. According to her map, the cottage stood about a half-hour walk from here, and she couldn’t get there fast enough.
For a while, she sat in a tearoom called Cassandra’s Cup, across from Austen’s adorable cottage. Convinced that both Jane and her sister Cassandra would be shocked by all this—the tearoom, the tour buses, the inevitable gift shop—Vanessa stirred her tea and honey, and ordered another scone and jam, even though, with her stuffed-up nose, she barely tasted it. She could feel the butter, though, that crazy-good British
butter.
The tearoom really exuded that English quaintness, too, even though she wanted nothing more now than to hate England, or at least be indifferent to it, rather than falling a little more in love with it at every turn. China teacups of all sizes, colors, and patterns hung from the ceiling, and from her table at the window, downing some more cold meds with her tea, Vanessa looked out at the picture-perfect redbrick cottage that Jane had moved into in 1809. The story went that Jane felt settled again and happy here at Chawton, where she revised, wrote, and published her novels.
While Chawton had brought Jane Austen so much happiness, it brought nothing but despair to Vanessa. A woman wearing his robe and frolicking with a puppy on his grounds. Well, that explained it. He had a significant other of some kind after all.
The cottage couldn’t be cuter, and this little intersection in Chawton, with the tearoom, the Greyfriar Pub next door, and even a thatched-roof cottage with flowers gushing from window boxes next to Austen’s cottage, only added to the atmosphere.
A steady stream of tourists flowed in, out, and around the house and garden. Vanessa wondered if she was really up to going inside. But then again, she had to get her mind off Julian.
Could Jane Austen save her from herself?
She pulled out her phone and got a signal here, so she texted Lexi:
Went 2 his place—he wasn’t there—was a woman on the grounds. #ampissed
She felt numb even as she walked through Austen’s lush garden and into, accidently, a portion of the cottage that housed the brick oven and where the Austen ladies’ donkey cart had been put on display. The women couldn’t afford a carriage, only a donkey cart, evidently. Donkeys. Asses. He’s an ass, Vanessa kept hearing over and over in her head in Lexi’s voice.
She didn’t want to believe it.
She finally met up with the festival tour group in the cottage. She looked at, but didn’t really see, and certainly didn’t feel—anything—even as she stared at Austen’s writing table at the very window that looked out on Cassandra’s Cup. The table, small and worn, nothing but a pedestal table really, had atop it a quill pen standing in an empty glass inkwell. Austen evidently sat here, on a simple cane chair at the window, to write, facing the door.
Undressing Mr. Darcy Page 28