A Novel Seduction

by Gwyn Cready

  “Not a problem,” the older woman said. “You have notes to take.”

  Ellery looked at her notebook, where she’d written exactly four words: “Shakespeare,” “soccer” and “Axel’s eyes.”

  “Right.” She crossed out that last entry.

  A large pot of broth was simmering on the stove, and the waves of garlic and onion scent were filling the kitchen. Ellery shoved her hunger aside, and as she considered what to ask next, she let her gaze drift to the kitchen window and down the winding road that had led them here.

  “Are you aware that a scene from a very popular romance novel takes place no more than a quarter mile from your house?”

  Dr. Albrecht’s face broke into a wide grin. “Kiltlander. Oh, yes.”

  “You read them too? I mean, not just for research?”

  She laughed. “Vell, I’ve certainly read Kiltlander. Could hardly put it down.”

  Ellery leaned over, knocking her notebook on the floor and speaking low and fast. “So, does she leave or doesn’t she? They were just within sight of the mound twenty pages ago, when Jemmie’s nemesis arrived and then it was an escape on horseback till they were cornered in an empty church, and someone now has taken Cara hostage and Jemmie is offering his life in exchange for hers.”

  “Oh, I remember that scene. It gets vurse before it gets better,” Dr. Albrecht said apologetically.

  “But they’re not going to hurt Jemmie, are they? I mean, the man’s been after him since the start of the book—earlier, even.” Ellery caught a quick breath and felt the words tumbling even faster from her mouth. “This cannot be how it ends. Is Cara going to pick to stay and try to rescue Jemmie, or is she going to go? The women in the Rosemary Readers said there’s more to happily-ever-after than ‘happy’ and then their eyebrows got all weird and they wouldn’t say anything more. If Jemmie dies for her, I’ll kill him.”

  “I don’t know,” the sociologist said with a waggish lift of her brow. “They did sacrifice a lot of people on the top of that hill.”

  Ellery moaned, and her hostess laughed. “I don’t think you need to vurry about Jemmie dying. But Cara and Jemmie have other pretty big hurdles to get across—vun in particular.”

  “What?”

  Dr. Albrecht’s face grew serious. “There’s a child.”

  Ellery’s head split like an atom in a thousand directions. Where do they have a child? In the future? In the past? Is it Jemmie’s? Was Cara pregnant when she arrived? Or is it Jemmie’s by another woman? Had he lied about his virginity? Ellery fought every instinct to grab the book and run for the bathroom right now.

  “What happens? C’mon, you have to tell me.”

  “I can’t tell you, or rather, I shall not. The pleasure in any romance comes from the not knowing.”

  Ellery considered the unhappiness she’d been feeling since Axel threw their relationship into question. Nope, she thought. Not a single iota of pleasure. Dr. Albrecht might be an expert on love stories, but she was no expert on love.

  “Oh, pleeeeeease,” Ellery begged. “Just a hint.”

  “A hint, aye?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Albrecht held the knife in the air, considering. “How about this: Vithout forgiveness, there is no love. And in the end, it is vurth every hardship.”

  “What? No! That’s not a hint.”

  “It’s better than a hint. It’s the whole story in a nutshell.”

  “Gah!”

  Wiping her hands on her apron, Dr. Albrecht smiled. “Here. Let me get you that tea I promised.” She found the teakettle and plugged it in, and Ellery went to the window to see if the rise of Cairnpapple was visible beyond the sun-dappled fields.

  “Vhere are you staying?”

  “I can’t remember. It’s in Bathgate, though. We haven’t checked in yet.” She found if she edged to the side and ducked a little, she could just make out the top. She wondered what it would be like to live close to something that had played such a critical part in a beloved book like Kiltlander.

  “You know,” the older woman said, “it’s a common misconception that romance readers are unhappy in love. The readers I see most inflamed by Kiltlander are the vuns who are just falling in love.”

  She met Ellery’s eyes and Ellery flushed. “That wouldn’t be me,” Ellery said, at which point Axel appeared in the window, gave Ellery a big smile and continued toward the front door. She flushed harder.

  “Mm-mm,” the sociologist said, making that uniquely Scottish sound that seemed to mean anything from Interesting to I don’t believe you to I think I may have left my iron on. The woman at the newsstand in the train station had made the same sound when Ellery had told her they appeared to be sold out of the New York Times.

  Ellery crossed her arms. “You know, you give off a distinctly Scottish vibe for someone who’s clearly German.”

  “I don’t think vun can avoid it.” She gave Ellery a sly smile. “Perhaps it’s Cairnpapple.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Vee moved here ten years ago.”

  “Is your husband a professor too?”

  “Vuz,” the older woman said. “He passed away the year before last. That’s him, in the picture.” Ellery looked at the frame, nestled between the flour and sugar canisters. It was the two of them, somewhere in a field. The man was tall, with red-blonde hair, and he had his arm wrapped protectively around his petite wife. Ellery smiled.

  There was a soft knock at the door. “There’s your young man now.”

  “He’s my photographer.”

  Dr. Albrecht was already running to the entryway. “Come in, come in. velcome. Vee vere just sitting down to tea.”

  “Fantastic barn,” Axel said, greeting his hostess and ducking under the lintel. “And there’s a distillery next to it! That’s what I call hospitality.” He stopped, gave Ellery a quick look and lifted his nose to the air. “My stomach’s growling. Is that bacon I smell?”

  “No, but, goodness me, let me make you some,” Dr. Albrecht said. “You two probably haven’t eaten, have you? You just took the train up this morning. I’m so sorry. This party tonight has me all a-hoo.”

  “Oh, no,” Axel said. “Please don’t go to any trouble. It’s just when I opened the door, it brought back memories of my grandma making me one of those marvelous English breakfasts.”

  “Bacon? Fried eggs? Mushrooms?” Dr. Albrecht inquired. “I can make vun for you right now if you’d like.”

  “That would be great.” Axel gave Ellery a canny smile.

  “Miss Sharpe, you too?”

  “Please call me Ellery. And, yes, me too. Dr. Albrecht, let me introduce the photographer working with me. Axel Mackenzie, this is Dr. Gertrude Albrecht.”

  He held out his hand and Dr. Albrecht shook it. He outscaled her by a good fifteen inches, so it looked a little bit like she was shaking the hand of the Popeye float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  “Mackenzie,” the professor repeated. “You’re Scottish?”

  He dropped into his father’s voice. “From the great kingdom of Fife, aye. My father, eh?” he added, switching back to his own laid-back Canadian accent. “I’m from Toronto.”

  “Oh my God,” Dr. Albrecht cried. “Are you a forty long?”

  Axel blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “A forty long? Do you vear a forty long suit?”

  He gave Ellery a slightly alarmed look. “Yes, actually, I do.”

  “Forget the hotel. You two can stay here. I need a man in a kilt tonight.”

  Now it was Ellery’s turn to blink.

  “I rent the barn out for céilidhs—parties,” Dr. Albrecht explained. “There’s a business conference over in Livingston. Tonight is their big event. They bus over to the distillery for a vhiskey tasting, then adjourn here for supper and music. It’s the damned Americans—pardon me, Ms. Sharpe—they love a man in a kilt, and part of the deal is I’m supposed to supply them by the handful.” vivid image, Ellery th
ought, choking a little on her carrot. Then the image of Axel in a kilt danced into her head, and she swallowed hard. The vivid images were raining down like fireworks in July.

  “But I’m three shy of my usual six,” Dr. Albrecht continued, “and I have Angus’s kilt here from the cleaners—Angus is my postman—but he’s got the flu. Four would be so much better than three. Please say yes. The rooms are on me.”

  Axel looked at Ellery and shrugged. Ellery hoped the insane desire to see Axel in Jemmie-wear wasn’t written all over her face. She felt like a kid who’d just been handed the key to FAO Schwarz. “Sure,” she said nonchalantly. “Why not?”

  “Do I have to do anything?” Axel asked.

  “Have you ever poured a beer?”

  “Oh, once or twice. But I’m a very quick study.”

  “Excellent. Vhy don’t you carry the bags upstairs vhile I start breakfast?” She went to the tiny check-in desk at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the rack of keys. “Vill you be vanting one room or two?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Ellery would have preferred if Axel’s answer hadn’t been so swift or unequivocal. He had softened it with a regretful shrug in her direction, leaving her to imagine… what? That he was sorry it had come to that?

  She looked from the book in her lap to the phone lying on the chintz comforter. She had adjourned to her room after their fry-up and the conclusion of the interview. There, she’d tried to call Black, but she’d had to leave a message. At this point she just wished she could get it all over with, Axel included, and get back to New York. The waiting left Dr. Albrecht’s wonderful breakfast sitting heavy in her stomach.

  She could hear Axel on the other side of the wall, and—despite the fact that Jemmie had Cara pinned underneath him in the first clean, warm and unsupervised bed of their marriage—the sound left her feeling decidedly blue. For the last few years she had thought of Axel like she did a writing deadline: You knew it was out there, but you didn’t want to think too much about it. But apparently he was more like a deadline than she’d imagined, for the only thing worse than having an Axel was having no Axel at all.

  He was unpacking his duffel. She could hear the drawers squeaking. He’d always packed his clothes neatly in drawers, even at a hotel. She supposed it had been part of his upbringing, with four sisters and a well-organized mother supervising his every move. She remembered the way he would change around his sisters, transforming into this boyish, put-upon charmer, angling for a fair share of attention in his mile-a-minute family. It was a side of him she had loved, and the thought of it sent a twinge of sadness through her.

  She thought of what Dr. Albrecht had said about the evolving mind-sets of women.…

  She stopped. What Dr. Albrecht had said! That was it! Her way into the article!

  “Hold that position, you two,” she whispered to Kiltlander. “I’ll be back.” Then she picked up her laptop, turned it on and fired up Word.

  Her fingers were just above the keyboard when she caught sight of her e-mail icon blinking and decided she should probably at least scan her messages first. Who knew? Maybe they had run out of space for the article. Maybe Black had retired. Maybe aliens were planning to take over the Vanity Place building.

  There were dozens of messages in her in-box, but none with an intriguing subject line like “Alien Readiness Plan” or “Buhl Martin Black: The End of an Era.” There was a Facebook message from Jill saying that, based on the picture Axel had sent of Ellery in the Monkey Bar, the trip seemed to be turning out to be even more interesting than Jill had hoped and that she was curious as to whether the wardrobe selections had had any influence on the proceedings.

  “Ha-ha.” Ellery considered digging in her hard drive to find the video of Jill lip-synching to Britney Spears’s “Oops!… I Did It Again” during her sixth-grade talent show and post it in response, but relented. However, the image of that god-awful red leotard and fishnets did remind Ellery that she was going to need an outfit for the party tonight.

  The halter dress Kate and Jill had packed—emerald green, silky and cut to her navel in the front and even lower in the back—would probably be okay if she could borrow a safety pin and a wrap from Dr. Albrecht. It might be a warm November day, but she wasn’t going to sashay around a Scottish hoedown with a dress whose back fell into what Jill liked to call “the ass headlands.”

  There were a few e-mails from Kate, most of them work-related, which Ellery scanned, but one had a subject line that made her sit up: “Jill?” it read. Kate had just sent it an hour earlier.

  Ellery opened the e-mail.

  Hey, girl. Would love to hear how things are going on that special project—oh, and the article too. Ha! Hopefully, the Whopper turned out as hard as you usually like them.

  I enjoyed spending time with Jill. She left for school this morning. I hesitated to write because I didn’t want you to worry, but I noticed that she seemed quieter than usual. The only time she washer regular self was when we were gossiping about you and Axel, and, of course, that didn’t take up more than five or six hours. I asked if school was going okay, and she said she thought she’d be on the dean’s list this semester, so there doesn’t seem to be any trouble there. Her roommates are fine and so is her work-study job, but there was a definite change in her demeanor when I asked about boys. I don’t know if you know anything, but I thought it might be worthwhile to mention to you. I tried subtle and overt. All I got was “Everything’s good.”

  Kate

  Unsettled, Ellery reached for her phone and dialed Jill. She didn’t answer. Ellery looked at the clock. It was ten a.m. in New York. She left a message asking her to call if she got a chance and added, “Nothing important” before hanging up.

  Jill had had a couple of on-again, off-again boyfriends her sophomore year of college and another guy she’d dated through most of the winter last year. She hadn’t mentioned anyone this year, but that wasn’t unusual. Jill played things pretty close to the vest until she was ready to go public. Ellery supposed this was a natural reaction to having had a father who had high-tailed it out of the family as soon as he could, and she tried to respect her younger sister’s guardedness.

  Ellery returned to the keyboard, more distracted than she would have wished, to try to explain why women like romance.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Like Jemmie, Axel was coming to the firm conclusion that women were impossible to understand, and that what they liked, clear and immutable one day, turned into formless mist the next.

  On the train, Axel had followed Jemmie and Cara through their near return to Cairnpapple, their capture, their escape and several sex scenes eye-opening enough to reaffirm his belief that a woman’s imagination could be a very frightening thing. And now, after having downloaded the e-book to his phone, he found himself totally bewildered by Cara’s incandescent fury at Jemmie for his determination to chase down the villain and exact his revenge for their mistreatment of her.

  Foolish man! she had cried. If I wanted you to die for me, I’d have killed you myself.

  This to the man who had saved her life? Inexplicable.

  Axel laid down the phone and paced to the window. He could hear Ellery tapping at her keyboard in the next room. Writing? After all her protestations, was he to believe she was now sitting in a bed-and-breakfast in Bathgate, Scotland, writing an article on romance novels? Doubtful. She was probably finishing the piece on John Irving.

  Did women ever make sense?

  His phone buzzed. He reached for it and groaned.

  “Hey, Brendan. What’s up?”

  “Look, the guy who made the counteroffer? He’s raised the bid another six grand. I don’t want to be a jerk, Axel. I’m going to sell the brewery to you, but I really need to know if you’re going to buy it, because if you’re not, I don’t want to miss this.”

  Axel took a deep breath. It was hard letting go. “Take the offer. I won’t have the money.”

  “Seriously?”
/>   “Yep. I took a bet on something that’s not going to pay off. I was going to call you today anyway.”

  “Aw, man. That sucks. You would have been great.”

  Yeah, I would have. “Thanks. The stars weren’t aligned, I guess.” The phone beeped in his ear. “Hang on, will you?” Axel checked the display. It was Jill, whose name hadn’t appeared there in years, a fact that fanned a spark of curiosity in him as well as one of concern.

  “Listen, I’ll call you back,” he said to Brendan. “I gotta take this.”

  “No need. I’ll tell the guy we’re a go.”

  Axel switched lines. “Jill, hey.” He couldn’t remember the last time Jill had called him. She had reached out a few times after he and Ellery had broken up, and he’d always been glad to hear from her; but he knew it wouldn’t have been proper to maintain a friendship with her without Ellery’s involvement, and in any case Ellery had made it clear she didn’t want him in their lives, even on the periphery.

  “You busy?”

  There was something in her voice that made him straighten. “Nope. What’s up?”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  By “in trouble” she meant just that. Facing a slate of upcoming finals and ruing a boyfriend who wasn’t returning her calls, she was between two positive at-home pregnancy tests yesterday and an appointment to talk about next steps at the college clinic on Monday. Axel would have liked to get his hands on the so-called boyfriend, but he knew that wasn’t the relevant point at the moment. She was angry, upset, buckling under the pressure of her senior year and terrified of telling her sister.

  She only cried once during the call, and he knew that only because she was silent for a full minute before answering when he asked her what she wanted to do.

  The amazing self-control of the Sharpe sisters. Sometimes he wished he could grab them by the shoulders and shake some honest-to-God emotion out of them. But that, he thought with a sigh, wasn’t the point, either.