The Austen Playbook

by Lucy Parker

  And they were barely touching.

  Their mouths came apart, and Freddy took a shaky breath. She tore her eyes from his and looked down as their knuckles brushed and hooked. They brought their arms up, interlocking their hands. The fingers of his right hand played with the fingers of her left. Then her gaze returned to his.

  A muscle jumped in his jaw.

  The second kiss was a rush of heat, urgent and hard, his tongue in her mouth, hers in his, wetness and fire. His hands had left hers and were tangled in her hair, holding her head; her arms were around him, sliding up his back. She could feel his skin, smooth and warm. Muscles moving and shifting. Breaths jagged and snatched.

  They stumbled against the desk and it knocked her away from him, so abruptly it was like tearing a page from a book, thrust from one scene into the next, a shock to the system. Gripping the wood, Freddy stood staring at Griff, breathing heavily.

  His hair was a ruffled mess and his shirt had been yanked out of his belt, baring a slice of skin up his abdomen. One of her dress straps had fallen down her arm, and she didn’t like to think what her own hair looked like. When she lifted a hand to smooth it, her fingers were shaking.

  “Holy shit,” she said, blankly.

  It must have been a stunner of a kiss—the hardened critic was temporarily lost for words. He managed a sort of grunt. As he put his own clothing back to rights, Freddy was almost frightened to see that his hands weren’t totally steady either.

  “Results of the experiment?” A rasp in the words.

  Freddy still felt jumpy, like she was darting about on molten coals even as she remained frozen to the spot by the desk. Her response was fervent. “Explosive.”

  Her lips felt tender, bruised from the hard pressure of his, and she rested her fingertips on them.

  “I don’t know why I find you so beautiful now.” He’d regained control over his pitch and he said it like he was commenting on the weather, but the words fell into the silence between them with the impact of a heavy weight shattering a piece of glass.

  Freddy dropped her hand and stared at him, and he turned his head. As compliments went, it was a bit backhanded, but somehow it didn’t come across that way.

  There was a moment of quiet breath and assessing eyes.

  “I don’t know why I fancy you so much,” she said, with equal frankness.

  “I would have thought Charlie was more your type.” It was still like talking to the ice sculpture his mother had once tossed out as a comparison, but Freddy didn’t make the mistake of looking at the surface.

  She felt like she’d lied by omission to everyone lately, keeping so much of what she was thinking and feeling about her career to herself, but she’d at least always tried to be honest in her private life. She might be a flirt, but guile was not a weapon in her romantic arsenal. “I don’t think there is a type.” She swallowed and looked blindly at the surface of the desk, where the earrings were still glinting suggestively under the glow of the ring light. “Right now, I think...there’s just you.”

  In the silence that followed, her hand clenched into a fist against the desk.

  Then Griff touched her bare arm, and her cheek, just two light touches. Freddy breathed in, a long, slow inhale.

  “I promised not to interrupt your work,” she said on the exhale.

  “Yes.” A familiar note of the sardonic, which was actually a relief in the current tension. “That lasted about as long as I expected.”

  She cast him a look over her shoulder. “Foresaw this, did you?”

  “No. This definitely wasn’t the scenario I imagined.”

  “I expect not. After all the very gallant things you’ve said about me over the years. Just think, if this had happened earlier, you might have given me a better review for Masquerade.” She reflected on that for about two seconds. “No, you wouldn’t.”

  He snorted and said at the same moment, “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Perversely, that made her laugh. That wash of unexpected gladness suddenly wrapped around her again, and she smiled at him. It was a bright, instinctive gesture, and it made something change in his face. “Isn’t it great?”

  The question just bubbled up spontaneously from that pool of happiness, and he shook his head. It wasn’t a negative action. More like someone recovering from a sharp punch to the nose, actually, which she chose not to read too much into.

  There was a faint smile on his usually tense mouth, and when she couldn’t resist lifting up to dust another feathery kiss there, just because he felt good to touch and right now he made her feel good, one of his hands came up to the back of her head.

  And when the door opened with only a cursory knock and his brother sailed in holding two mugs, Griff didn’t behave as Freddy might have anticipated, with an instant retreat and an invisible gate slamming shut. He did lift his head and step away from her, but with no haste, and it was several seconds before his hand fell away from her hip.

  Charlie was doing a deer-in-the-headlights in the doorway, gaping at them with almost ludicrous surprise.

  “Is one of those for me?” Griff asked calmly, when no words seemed to be forthcoming.

  Charlie looked blankly down at the mugs. “Oh. Yeah. Dad said he saw you heading outside at the arse-crack of dawn and I thought you might be ready for a coffee.” He seemed to get a grip on himself and offered the other one to Freddy. “Coffee, Freddy? I haven’t touched it, and I already had two cups of tea at the house. It’s got milk and sugar. I don’t know how you like it.”

  “Like that. Thanks, if you’re sure.” Freddy took the mug and blew on the surface, eyeing both brothers through the steam.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Charlie said, a note of amusement creeping in. “I thought you’d be buried in work, not snogging the houseguests.”

  “Things often take surprising turns.” Freddy smiled at him. “I love life.”

  Creases appeared at the corners of Charlie’s eyes then, and the lurking humour at their expense turned into something softer. “Yeah, I reckon you do. It’s nice.” His attention slid pointedly to the side. “Be nice if it rubbed off on other people, too.”

  “Thanks for the coffee, Charlie. Don’t let us keep you.”

  Ignoring his brother’s acerbic response, Charlie rested his hands low on his lean hips and looked around. “I haven’t been in here for years.” His nose wrinkled. “It smells.”

  “It’s called dust.” Somehow Griff knocked back the rest of his coffee in one go without incinerating his tongue. He put the cup aside. “It appears on surfaces when you don’t have staff or your unfortunate girlfriends cleaning up after you.”

  “I thought the studio crew were polishing this place to a high shine to look good on camera.”

  “The studio crew will be keeping their tramping feet and prying eyes out of the back rooms,” Griff muttered as he flipped up the camera screen and started checking through frames. “They’re hardly going to include Henrietta’s office in the show.”

  “You could have whisked around with a duster, since you’ll be at least replicating the space for the film. The infamous four walls where she wrote the great epic.”

  There were yet more aged photographs scattered across the surface of the desk. Freddy bent over them. “Who’s the lady with the bobbed hair? She’s in a lot of these pictures.”

  Charlie looked over her shoulder. “Great-Aunty Violet. Our grandfather’s sister. The family black sheep. Of that generation, anyway.”

  “Wow,” Freddy said. “Her brother had bondage statues in his strawberry patch and she was the family black sheep. A-plus for effort, Violet. Or did black-sheep behaviour in that generation mean she dressed in tweeds and joined the Women’s Institute?”

  “She had the temerity to run off to be on the stage.” Charlie invested the word with all the old-school connotations of immorality. “And made a pis
s-poor job of it, by all accounts. The men in the family could have their fun but the women were expected to be good little girls. Our great-aunty had a habit of throwing drunken tantrums at village events, according to the old lady who used to run the sweet shop.”

  Griff rolled his eyes. “Which probably means she had an extra glass of mulled wine at the Christmas fête one year and refused to join in the sing-a-long. Highbrook has a history of taking dull anecdotes and inflating them into secrets that would make Bluebeard feel comparatively virtuous.”

  “Then she committed the ultimate blackening of the family name when she smashed her car into Tower Bridge and didn’t survive to pay the damages.” Charlie picked up the photo of the woman with the defiant face. “Poor Violet,” he said more soberly.

  “She has sad eyes,” Freddy murmured.

  “She was an unwanted daughter in a family that wanted another son, never had many friends, and invested everything into becoming an actor. And failed miserably at it.” Griff finished organising his new shots. “She lived a short, unfulfilled life, and when she died, I suspect it was considered an inconvenience rather than a loss.”

  “God.” Appalled, Freddy took the photograph from Charlie. “She was an actor?”

  “A minor member of the Wythburn Group.” Griff came to stand at her shoulder. “Very minor. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of her. Most people have either forgotten she existed, or never knew her name in the first place.”

  Freddy looked into Violet Ford’s unhappy eyes. “I hope you’re including her in your film. As a person, not a failure,” she added, with a burst of fierceness, twisting so she could see him.

  He was studying her rather than the photo. She couldn’t read his expression at all now. “I am” was all he said.

  After a moment, she turned and let her weight rest against him—and after another few breaths, she felt the stroke of his thumb against her forearm.

  Chapter Seven

  The worst thing about cell phones was that it was impossible to bang the receiver down on someone, a lack Sabrina was probably cursing right now. Hitting the End button really hard would just break a nail and potentially the screen. Freddy watched as the call timer stopped and her home screen reappeared. With a silent f-bomb herself, she returned the phone to her bag.

  As expected, Sabrina and Ferren had progressed rapidly from “talking” to reigniting their disaster of a relationship. He’d shown up at Sabs’s flat with jewellery boxes and some rehearsed speech, and her otherwise smart sister had fallen for it.

  Freddy’s own building stress, not aided by the fact that she still couldn’t keep her lines straight, had left her more tactless than usual, and Sabrina had not appreciated her candour.

  Her sister had finally lost her temper completely and snapped, “When you’ve had a relationship that lasts longer than an orgasm, Fred, get back to me and I might take your advice.” And hung up. For a sophisticated thirty-year-old woman, who had a bad habit of still treating Freddy like a child, she could do a good impression of a door-slamming teenager.

  Freddy rubbed at her leg as she stood up from the low brick wall in the Highbrook rose garden, where she was taking her lunch break. Two days post-screwdriver, she must be starting to heal, because the stitches were itching. She threw the rest of her sandwich on the grass for the resident peacock to find on his rounds—the feathered one, not Dylan, who had been flirting with her all morning and getting increasingly handsy. He was more likely to get a knee in his dick than a bite of her ham and cheese.

  A production assistant rushed past, holding a clipboard. “Five more minutes,” the harried-looking man said. He jerked his chin back in the direction of the theatre, with an exaggerated grimace. “I’d stay out here in the peace and quiet as long as possible if I were you. It’s all kicking off back there.”

  “Oh God. What now?” The morning rehearsal had been a flat-out disaster. They’d had their first attempt at the random scene selection, with Maf acting as the voice of the viewing public and giving them four minutes’ warning which version they were enacting. The whole thing had collapsed in seconds. Half the cast couldn’t find their place even with their scripts right in front of their faces, and Dylan had combined the lines from two different scene variants, which had thrown everybody off completely. Freddy had delivered a very dramatic, affecting line about the death of a character who then entered from stage left, alive and well.

  This was the point in rehearsals where the production always looked like an ugly old patchwork quilt, random bits thrown together and coming apart at the seams. It was usually a smoothly oiled machine by opening night, but the words “live TV” were hovering in the air like a disaster beacon. And the advent of Fiona Gallagher was hanging over the night for Freddy like a spectre. A very influential, potentially career-changing spectre.

  The crew guy rolled his eyes. “The understudies have arrived and nobody knows where to put them, the Wicked Baron’s people are traipsing about taking location shots for some film—” Freddy tried not to be amused “—and Greg Stirling’s done a runner.”

  Freddy stopped casually peering around for a glimpse of the Wicked Baron, and turned sharply. “What?”

  “Ostensibly,” her informant said, making significant movements with his eyebrows, “he’s been paged back to the soap sets in London. But—” he made a meal of looking around in all directions, and Freddy caught herself doing the same thing “—I heard that he’s fed up working with Lady Muck over there and her demands, and can’t stick it any longer.”

  On the terrace Sadie was sunning herself and smilingly ordering the catering staff about.

  “I see.”

  Well, she couldn’t honestly blame Greg. Sadie was in top form with this show. Freddy had been relieved that none of their scenes crossed paths this morning, but Sadie had snuck in another of her cryptic digs over morning tea. She was starting to mess with Freddy’s head, making her wonder if she’d accidentally shoplifted or buried a body, or whatever dirty little secret Sadie was gleefully stroking. Ten to one, that was the whole point—just pretend you know something, and the other person winds themselves into a nervous breakdown imagining what it could be.

  Anyway, Greg hadn’t been the most effectual member of the cast. It was lucky he’d done a bolt with enough time for a replacement to come in and integrate properly. Fingers crossed for someone who didn’t keep missing his comedic timing because he was looking into a hand mirror.

  As she rounded the house, a door opened, and Griff and Charlie’s father almost knocked her over.

  “Oh! Heavens. So sorry.” James Ford steadied them both, then smiled vaguely at her. His greying red hair was a dishevelled halo around his head, and his hands were covered with ink stains. “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?”

  “Very. Although I think it’s going to rain later.”

  “Oh, well. The sun always comes back out eventually, doesn’t it?” James was hopping from one foot to another. He winked at her and actually tapped one finger to the side of his nose. “Exciting things are afoot.”

  He continued busily on his way, and Freddy was left blinking after him, feeling just the teensiest bit like Alice after an encounter with the Mad Hatter.

  She didn’t know where the genes had come from that had created Griff, but they were obviously all recessive in James Ford.

  Near the busy main entrance to The Henry, Maya was sitting at the base of a large oak tree, her knees drawn up to her chest and her headphones on. Not wanting to interrupt her recharging time, Freddy lifted a hand and was going to walk around her, but Maya pushed the headphones back to hang around her neck and stood.

  “Did you hear that Greg’s out?”

  “One of the crew just filled me in. I hope they cast a decent understudy.”

  Maya pursed her lips. “I don’t like gossip.”

  Freddy dropped her bag. “Of course not. Bu
t?”

  “First of all—my flatmate worked with Sadie recently, and apparently she’s in a relationship with Lionel Grimes.”

  One of the most influential men in the London entertainment industry, and the other main investor bankrolling this production.

  “True love, I’m sure,” Freddy said, and Maya snorted.

  “Especially since Sadie’s also been blatantly chasing Joe Ferren for months.”

  When it metaphorically rained, it freaking poured, didn’t it?

  “For God’s sake. What is it about Ferren? Three minutes in his company and I’d like to shove him off the nearest bridge, but half the women in London go crackers over him.”

  “Sadie’s doing her Queen of Hearts act with this show, manoeuvring players around the board where she wants them,” Maya said, obliviously continuing Freddy’s Alice metaphor. “With the proviso that this is totally hearsay, and I didn’t mean to overhear it, Dylan Waitely told one of the makeup girls that Sadie drove Greg out of the show.”

  “So I’ve heard. I can’t say I blame him. She’s annoying as shit at the best of times, even when you’re not having to live with her.”

  “No, I mean, she, like, had something on him.” Maya looked uncomfortable. “Dylan suggested that she was threatening him. Blackmailing him out. It sounds a bit farfetched—”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Freddy said grimly. “Why would she want Greg out?”

  “They had a thing a few years back. He broke things off, and she’s hated him ever since.”

  “God, you just about need a labelled chart to keep track of who’s slept with whom in this business.”

  “And you know what Sadie’s like. Everyone has to dance to her tune. You just missed Maf’s announcement—guess who’s arriving tomorrow to be our new Mr. Knightley?”