Undressing Mr. Darcy (28 page)

“Wow.”

Jane Austen did not lead a quiet, uneventful life.

“Okay Auntie E, we’re heading downhill now, on Gay Street, and can see Queen Square.”

“We?”

“Chase came to Bath today.” She eyed Chase, who smiled.

“I see . . . The only thing better than one man in a woman’s life is—two.”

Vanessa chose to change the subject.

“I’ve already seen the Queen Square town house. It’s a great location.”

“Queen Square was new and a very fashionable part of town when they stayed there in 1799,” said Aunt Ella. “But just a few years later it fell out of favor to the newer crescents on higher ground. Austen even had one of the Musgrove girls in
Persuasion
say to her father, ‘We must be in a good situation: none of your Queen Squares for us!’”

Aunt Ella gave her the rest of Austen’s addresses and Vanessa scribbled them down, as well as some information required on the timeline, then she hung up, saying she’d call again. It felt good, really good, to be sharing in her aunt’s enthusiasm for Austen. She’d missed out on a lifetime of it and had a lot of catching up to do.

She stood in front of the house and Chase diligently took her picture.

“Did it turn out?” Vanessa asked.

He checked the camera. “I need to see a little more leg. Could you hike up your skirt? Or maybe open a few more buttons on your blouse?”

Vanessa smirked as she descended the stairs to pinch his cheek, which happened to have that just-shaved feel that she loved on a man. She quickly pulled her hand away and looked at her notes from Aunt Ella.

“Off we go to Number 4 Sydney Place, where Jane stayed from 1801 to 1805.” She took a sharp turn north, and, if she’d packed her running shoes, she would’ve run it. “I guess the house can be rented for short-term stays through Bath Boutique Stays,” she told Chase in between breaths.

“Do they rent by the hour?” he asked with a smile.

Chase knew what he was doing. Thanks to that comment, she couldn’t help it. The image of him on top of her on a four-poster bed in a Georgian town house popped into her head. She imagined herself tucking his hair behind his ears, running her hands down his bare chest—and why? He was her friend, come on!

“Is sex all you think about?” she joked. She knew he thought about lots of other things, and she enjoyed getting to know how his mind worked. She enjoyed both his playfulness and his intellect, and she might not have gotten to know him at all if she hadn’t come to England.

“No, sex isn’t the only thing I think about. I think about you, too. You. And sex. And a few other things.”

Vanessa laughed. If only Julian could think that way!

“I’ll prove to you I think of other things. Look at the cat up there.” He pointed to a stone sculpture of a cat sitting outside a second-story window just above where
SYDNEY PLACE
had been etched in the stone building.

She looked at him suspiciously. “What man notices a cat?”

“This man does. I have three of them.”

“You have three cats?” Maybe, just maybe, she could safely tell him about her work with the cat shelter. “I expected you to have a talking parrot.”

“Oh, I have two talking parrots.”

“Cats and birds?”

“It all works out.”

Despite Chase continually trying to distract her with his talk of climbing to the top of Bath Abbey or visiting the Roman Baths or dashing off to Prior Park to see one of only four Palladian bridges of its kind, Vanessa stayed on task.

The house at Sydney Place stood advantageously across from Sydney Gardens, a large public pleasure garden that during Austen’s time had swings and a labyrinth, her aunt had said.

HERE LIVED JANE AUSTEN 1801–1805,
read the plaque above the number 4 on the house, and it struck her, jaded Vanessa, with certainty and importance. According to her aunt, Austen was happiest at this lodging in Bath and might have been happier than ever to return here on Tuesday, December 4, 1802.

Jane had accepted a marriage proposal from the wealthy Harris Bigg-Wither on December second, only to rescind it the very next day while staying at the Bigg-Wither home in her beloved Hampshire. Marrying him would’ve secured her future, as well as her sister’s and her mother’s, and it would’ve guaranteed a lifetime in her countryside home of Hampshire.

“She was engaged for one night?” Vanessa asked Aunt Ella while Chase looked on with a smile.

“I thought you knew that. See? You have more in common with her than you thought.”

“She was engaged for one night, just like me,” Vanessa repeated. “Wow.”

“You were engaged?” Chase asked. “To whom?”

Vanessa shot him a smile. “Why did Jane change her mind?”

“We’ll never know. But if she’d gotten married at twenty-three and had a succession of children, she might never have finished her novels. You and Jane Austen. Breaking men’s hearts!” Aunt Ella said before they hung up.

The not-so-funny flip side of that remark: You and Jane Austen. Spinsters!

The house was gorgeous, attached at both sides to other town houses like all the buildings in Bath, with a garden in the back. It overlooked the entrance to the gardens and a stunning columned mansion made of Bath stone that now housed the Holburne Museum.

“No, we’re not checking out Sydney Gardens,” she told Chase as they crossed the street. “However, I do have to go to the ladies’ room, and I’m hoping the museum here will oblige.” Had she just said
oblige
?

“It’s a fantastic art museum,” Chase said. “And I don’t dare go inside. You’ll never get me out, so I’ll stay here.” He headed toward a table of used books and prints for sale on the grass and picked up a book and gently opened it. “I’ll be waiting for you,” he said.

First, the words stopped her. Then she took a mental snapshot she wouldn’t soon forget. Him, the blue book with the tattered cover, the green English grass, Jane Austen’s house in the background. Oh, and back to the “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Something every woman should hear at least once in her lifetime.

In the museum, she did feel the pull of the place, the paintings, and even the gift shop, but what grabbed her attention was a simple sentence etched across the width of two floor-to-ceiling windows in the new addition of the museum overlooking Sydney Gardens:

My dearest Cassandra
, read the quote in frosted letters set against the greenery of the trees,
there is a public breakfast in Sydney Gardens every morning, so that we shall not be wholly starved.

Jane Austen, May 1799

The windows led to the museum café, where wafts of coffee and toasted sandwiches floated about and the polite clinking of silverware could be heard. People sat with their families, their children, their lovers, their friends.

Vanessa, with the tip of her finger, traced the word “starved.”

Starved for food? Starved for company? Companionship? Or all three? Staving off loneliness was a kind of starvation.

She wanted to know what the rest of that letter said.

“Vanessa.” Chase walked right up to her and linked his arm in hers. Under his other arm he carried a very thick book. “It’s starting to drizzle. Are you ready?”

“Yes—I’m ready.” She looked back at the quote as they walked toward the open front doors and stopped for a moment under the portico while he popped open his umbrella for the two of them.

“Let’s finish this up so I can treat you to lunch. I’m starved, aren’t you?”

Funny, but she never felt hungry around him. Yet he kept offering her sustenance. “I could stand to eat something, sure. But right now I have to make my way to Green Park Buildings across town. Are you in?”

“Of course.”

She steered them back across the Pulteney Bridge, where even she had trouble resisting the shops that lined the bridge on either side. They both lingered at the Antique Map Shop long enough to listen to the very friendly proprietor tell them that during Jane Austen’s time certain expansions of Bath were planned, and the maps were drawn ahead of the construction, but not all the plans had come to fruition.

Vanessa had never known till now what it meant for plans never to come to fruition. She saw; she planned; she achieved. Why couldn’t she land Julian?

“I bought you something,” Chase said as they picked up the pace after crossing the River Avon.

“You did? You shouldn’t have—”

Under the umbrella, in the steady drizzle, he showed her the powder blue cover of the book he had tucked under his arm:
Jane Austen’s Letters
by Deirdre Le Faye.

“Thank you, Chase.” She didn’t know what else to say. Julian hadn’t bought her—anything. Much less anything thoughtful.

She wasn’t good at this kind of thing, at accepting gifts, compliments, or . . . affection. Why this hit her now she had no idea.

Here was a man, a very attractive man, who had rearranged his schedule and traveled to spend the day with her, and now he had bought her a gift.

Yet he knew she was here for Julian.

She pulled out her phone. Her phone would save her! And lo and behold, Aunt Ella answered again.

“I have looked everything up, Vanessa, and I’m surrounded by my books! Where are you now?”

Vanessa smiled at how happy this had made her aunt, and she beamed at Chase, who seemed to understand. “We’re heading toward Number 3 Green Park Buildings East.”

“Oooh! Remember,” said Aunt Ella, “the house you’ll be looking at is not the actual one she lived in. That was bombed during World War Two.”

Vanessa felt the pang of such a loss.

“We’re on James Street West—”

“Right now you’re very close to what was considered to be a slum in Austen’s time. The Lower Town happened to be rife with disease, crime, and prostitution, and evidently it reeked of dead animals and raw sewage from the river.”

Vanessa found it hard to reconcile this with the upscale shops and restaurants all around her, many housed in Bath stone architecture. It occurred to her that cities could have complex histories just like people, and that places could go through tough times and great times, too.

“If it was so close to the slum, why did they move here, then?”

“Green Park Buildings were known to be affordable but respectable lodgings for the hard-up gentry. The house that she lived in was gorgeous, with iron balconies and fanlights above the doors, tall windows, and it was big.”

Vanessa scribbled notes as best she could as she stood in front of the buildings.

Chase took the pictures.

“Jane’s father died in Green Park Buildings in 1805. Once a retired man died, his retirement fund ended, so she, her mother, and Cassandra suddenly had no money and had to move.”

“Again?”

“There are two more addresses on your list, Vanessa. The next one is 25 Gay Street, a much smaller home, on a noisy street.”

They walked by the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, an entire house dedicated to . . . Jane Austen! The impoverished and mourning Jane Austen. Certainly she would appreciate the irony of a museum dedicated to her on Gay Street.

Chase took a photo of Vanessa in front of Jane’s old house farther up the street, which happened to be a dentist’s office, and from there they went just a few blocks south to Trim Street, the Austen ladies’ last lodgings in Bath.

Even the name of the street suggested trimming the budget. The street seemed darker than most and hemmed in, without any greenery to be seen.

“We don’t know which number house she lived in on Trim, but we do know that the street housed prostitutes and criminals. The Austens moved out of Bath in 1806, and I don’t think it happened soon enough for Jane.”

Vanessa hung up with her aunt, offering up quite a few “I love yous,” suddenly feeling as if her aunt had really been with her.

Vanessa turned to Chase. “No wonder she didn’t write much in Bath. Who could with all of these moves and her father’s death?”

Chase smiled. “It sounds like you’re a British-flag-waving member of the Jane Austen fan club now.”

Vanessa laughed. “Hey, let’s drop the book you bought me at my flat.”

“I like that idea.”

She laughed.

“The flat’s just a street away from here.”

“I wonder if your street is rife with the vices of prostitutes and pimps.”

Once in the flat, he went to the kitchenette for a glass of water while she put the finishing touches on her timeline.

He sauntered out of the kitchen with his water in a wineglass and one of her lacy black bras dangling from his index finger.

“Is this a setup or are you just trying to torture me?”

Vanessa had forgotten about the underwear she’d hung all over the kitchen, but she had to admit Chase looked awfully hot holding her bra like that.

“Hawt,” as Sherry would say.

Ch
apter 18

B
ut that was nothing compared to seeing him in his swim trunks at the spa session he’d arranged for everyone at the end of the day. As the sun hovered seemingly right at the roof deck’s level, Vanessa, Lexi, and David, whom Lexi still hadn’t slept with, soaked in the heated mineral water pool on the roof deck of the Thermae Bath Spa, surrounded by the abbey spires, kelly green hills, and stately crescents. Sherry bobbed in the water across the pool with some festival friends she’d met.

Water from the original hot spring was pumped up here for modern-day spa goers to partake.

Lexi lounged in the water next to Vanessa. “The only thing that could make this spa experience better would be if we’d been carried here in sedan chairs by gorgeous footmen just like they did during the Regency era.”

Vanessa could picture this in Lexi’s case, but it took some doing to imagine herself being carried—anywhere. She rested the back of her head and elbows on the ledge of the pool and kicked her legs lazily in front of her, thrilled at the trifecta of warm water, a now sunny sky, and a day well spent, when Chase strolled through the glass doors in his sunglasses, looking very tan in his rented white fluffy bathrobe and slippers. A woman in a bikini followed him, trying to get his attention.

Chase spotted Vanessa and gave a big, goofy grin that prompted her to smile. His happy-go-lucky demeanor and playfulness were nothing short of infectious. Nobody, it seemed, had ever been so happy to see her—every time.

Her eyes followed him as he stepped out of his slippers, pulled off his sunglasses, slid out of his robe, and slung it on a chair.

“Will you look at the tight ass on that guy?” Lexi whispered. “You could easily get yourself a piece of that tonight.”

Vanessa sighed—out of agreeing with Lexi on Chase’s nice ass or in exasperation at Lexi always being on the make, she wasn’t sure.

“Chase and I are just friends.”

“Call it what you will. You know I don’t think men and women are friends without an ulterior motive.”

Vanessa steered her thoughts to Julian as she squinted into the sunlight. “Julian’s got a great ass, too, you know.” She closed her eyes.

“But does he have Chase’s broad shoulders? That chest? Those abs? Jane Austen never got to see shit like this, you know, poor thing.”

Vanessa laughed. “True.”

She couldn’t help herself. She opened her eyes and watched Chase as he stood on the side of the pool, steam rising appropriately in the air all around him. He breathed in and his chest, his admittedly chiseled and tanned chest, expanded just before he jumped in with a smile. Sun sparkled around him, and droplets of water glistened on his shoulders.

Vanessa tried to look away.

“You spent all day with that man? And nothing happened?”

“A lot happened. We had the hunt to finish off, for one thing.”

“I’ll tell you what you should’ve been hunting!”

“And after that we had Bath buns in the Jane Austen Room at Sally Lunn’s.”

“Sounds scintillating.”

“Sally Lunn’s happens to be one of the oldest houses in Bath, built in 1482. I mean—the 1400s, before Columbus discovered America? Sally Lunn invented the Bath bun, and I’m telling you it was as big as a plate, and fluffy! I had mine with butter and jam while he had his with bacon. The butter tastes so much better here. Why is that?”

“You resisted him
and
bacon?”

Vanessa laughed. “No, he gave me a forkful or two. Do you realize that at this very moment I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the world? I haven’t watched the news in days. It feels good, actually. Maybe there is something to the healing powers of Bath.”

“It’s called ‘vacation,’ honey. Wait. He shared his food with you?”

“So what?”

“He’s into you, all right. Men don’t share their food. You’ve always been so clueless about the signals men give. I can’t imagine the number of men you’ve glossed over just because you don’t know how to read them.”

“Come on.” Vanessa leaned in to Lexi’s ear. “Anyway, I think you’re losing your mojo. Still haven’t slept with Mr. Lancashire here?”

David seemed practically asleep with his head leaned back on the ledge and his eyes closed.

“We’re taking it slow. Someday a guy will turn you all around, too.”

Vanessa smiled. “Yeah. Julian already has.”

“You just think he has. What else did you and Chase do today?”

“He gave me a tour of the Roman Baths, something he happens to know a lot about.”

“Now,
that
is sexy, and we’ve always agreed that we just love a man we can learn a thing or two from, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” Vanessa acquiesced. “But Julian taught me a lot, too, you know. The Roman Baths make Sally Lunn’s seem positively modern. Did you know the Romans called the city Aquae Sulis, meaning ‘waters of Sulis,’ the Celtic goddess of healing?”

Lexi bobbed underwater to get her hair wet. “Hydrotherapy. The only therapies that can beat it are massage therapy and sex therapy, of course.”

Even as Vanessa laughed, she had to wonder if all of them—she, Lexi, Sherry, Chase, Julian, and maybe even Jane Austen herself—had been brought here to heal in some way. Granted, they didn’t have gout or melancholia, but didn’t they each have their own affliction to recover from? Didn’t everyone?

“The baths were amazing,” she continued. “But then he had to work, and I went to a Regency dance workshop. I think I’m ready for the ball with Julian!”

“It’s just like you, Vanessa, to be ignoring something spectacular right in front of your face. Chase is not going to hang around waiting for you forever, you know. Look, there’s someone after him already.”

Chase smiled at the woman in the bikini, who had followed him into the pool, finished up the chat with her, held his breath, and dove underwater. The sunlight danced on the pool now and, combined with the steam, temporarily blinded Vanessa.

Someone grabbed at her ankles, and she knew in an instant it was Chase. He then raised her up out of the water and they stood face-to-face.

He pushed back his wet brown hair.

For some reason she thought,
So, this is what he looks like when he steps out of the shower.
Huh? She felt some kind of gravitational pull toward him; then again, it could’ve just been the energy lines that crisscrossed Bath, especially here, at the sacred, and some might say mystical, hot spring.

But she didn’t believe in that crap, did she?

“Isn’t this place fantastic?” he asked.

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.

* * *

V
anessa 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.”