Definitely Not Mr. Darcy (5 page)

S
he knew she couldn't possibly bring such contraband with her, and as if she read her mind, Fiona made it clear.

“The crew searched all your bags and suitcases, Miss Parker, and only one item qualifies to go with you; everything else will go under lock and key for three weeks.”

Was she more shocked by the fact that they searched her bags or that she could only bring one thing? It was hard to tell.

“You can bring this.” Fiona held up a red velvet bag and pulled out Chloe's diamond tiara, a family heirloom and her good-luck charm. “It'll be perfect for the ball.”

“So there will be a ball?”

“Yes, of course.”

Fiona handed the velvet bag to Chloe.

“My grandmother gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday.” Chloe had worn it in the audition video, as well as the Jane Austen Society balls she'd attended, but she'd never danced in it.

“It's beautiful, and will fit in your reticule. Now, if you will simply hand me your purse.”

Chloe handed over her purse, minus her phone and charger.

Fiona held out her palm.

“What?”

“Everything is historically accurate, Miss Parker. You know you can't bring your phone. Regardless, there isn't any electricity.”

Chloe couldn't even process the thought of no electricity. “No phone? Not even just for texting or e-mailing?”

Fiona put a hand on her hip, or what would've been her hip if she had any. “It'll be here, safe under lock and key.”

Chloe sank down on the chaise, but the busk kept her from slumping over. “I can't do this. I need to talk with Abigail.”

Fiona smiled. “Not to worry. Everyone has a direct line of communication through George for any emergency, day or night. Your family has George's phone numbers. Send her a text that you'll write. You said yourself you're keen on writing by hand. She can write you back. It'll be—sweet.”

Chloe keyed in a last message to Abigail: “Will snail mail u. Snail back. Can't take phone. Call George Maxton in emergency. Love u. B good.”

She hadn't felt it till now, but she really was across the ocean, thousands of miles from home.

Fiona zipped the phone in a plastic bag, just like all the rest of her things, as if Chloe were going to jail. The zip sliced through the air and the sudden silence of the room closed in as Fiona whisked the bag away.

Then the phone rang inside the bag, breaking the silence.

Chloe got goose bumps. What if it was Abigail and what if she couldn't bear not to be in touch with her mom and what if she wanted her to come home—

“Wait! Stop!” Chloe hustled after Fiona, her boobs jostling in her stays and the cameramen jostling after her.

Fiona stood at a metal safe, closing the door, turning the key.

“Stop, Fiona! I need my phone! Give me my phone!!”

M
iss Parker,” George said as he raked his auburn hair with his hand, “A call from your daughter asking if she can go to a pop concert does not constitute an emergency.”

Chloe had hunted George down and found him in his production trailer, which was set up in a green behind the inn. Thankfully, he'd instructed Fiona to retrieve Chloe's phone, and he allowed her to return the missed call from Abigail. Abigail had called merely to ask if she could go to a concert with Winthrop and Marcia, and reluctantly Chloe acquiesced. The competition for Abigail's affections had begun in earnest with Chloe half a world away and incommunicado.

Coffee permeated the air of George's trailer, good coffee, the kind Chloe didn't get on the eight-hour flight.

George stood in front of three high-def TVs mounted to the wall, dividing his attention between Chloe and his iPhone.

“It's not an emergency to you, George,” Chloe said. She covered his iPhone screen with her hand for a moment. “She's not your daughter. At her age I was reading
The Secret Garden.
I didn't go to my first concert until I was a teenager. It took a lot of thought for me to say yes.”

Chloe, still shaken, and stirred, propped herself up against the floor-to-ceiling wine refrigerator. “I guess I overreacted to having my cell phone confiscated for three weeks. I've never been out of touch with her like this. I'm a single mom—” She looked straight into the camera filming her, sucked in her cheeks, and edited herself to become more restrained and guarded as a single woman of the era should be.

“Are you sure you're strong enough to forgo modern technology for more than a fortnight?” George asked.

Fortnight
. She loved that word.

She was happy to leave everything but her cell phone. Her pantalets, she noticed, were sticking to her thighs. “Of course.”

“Did you really read all the fine print in the contract you signed? Because this shouldn't be such a surprise to you.”

The lemon deodorant failed as a bead of sweat dribbled down her side. She was so thrilled to have won the audition that she really didn't take the time to read every single word in that giant stack of paperwork they'd sent, and couldn't afford to pay a lawyer to go through it with her. Had she once again donned her rose-colored glasses and seen only what she wanted to see in the contract? Legalese, math, science—these were not her forte; she was much more of a big-picture person.

“You are aware, for example, that you agreed we could film you twenty-four/seven upon arrival, and that anything you do is fair game not only for the final program but for any social networking site, Twitter, or blog entry, or any streaming video on the website and any YouTube video we produce?”

Chloe sucked on her lower lip to keep herself from saying anything a lady might regret, but her stomach churned. She'd signed up for a rock-bottom reality show in period costume and she would've been better off in Vegas sunbathing topless, guzzling pink martinis, and gambling her last dollar in hopes of winning it big.

“Your antics, such as storming my trailer, will be posted on YouTube,” George said. “We're going for heaving bosoms and bulging breeches here, not ladies lunching.”

Chloe buried her head in her hands.

“Throw in an eligible, handsome, and rich bachelor for good measure.”

“What do you mean ‘an' eligible bachelor? There's only one? I thought this was a dating show.”

“It is! There are two bachelors, really, one infinitely wealthier than the other, so he is more desirable, naturally—”

“And how many women are there?”

“Several.”

Chloe couldn't take it anymore. “Jane Austen would be horrified. This is a mockery of everything women have accomplished in the past two centuries!”

“Some people find true love on these kinds of shows, and I think Jane Austen would approve of
that
. Besides, during the Regency, women outnumbered men because so many men had died in the Napoleonic Wars or were on active duty. Many others were out in the East Indies, trying to make their fortune.”

He folded his arms. “Do you realize how many women were competing for the same country squire? It would be historically inaccurate to arrange a party of, let's say, ten men and ten women. Surely a stickler for historical detail such as yourself can't argue that point.”

He handed her a piece of paper. “Here's Mr. Wrightman's bio. I'm sure they e-mailed this to you in Chicago. Did you read it? He's our most eligible bachelor.”

She'd read it more than once. Now it made sense that they only sent one man's biography instead of the entire cast or an array of bios of other possible suitors. It would be her and a gaggle of other women pitted against one another to snare the wealthy Mr. Wrightman.

At least he looked good on paper. If Chloe could believe the bio, the Oxford-educated Jane Austen fan valued honesty, was ready to start a family, but also loved to travel. She and he seemed compatible in every way, but her hopes had been crushed before.

“Yes, I read it.” She turned her back on the TVs, handed George the bio without even looking at it, and paced the floor. The camera followed.

A gangly girl dressed in black sauntered out of a room in the back of the trailer to the Miele espresso maker.

George checked his iPhone again. “Chin up, Miss Parker. You're an American heiress come to summer here in the English countryside. I fully expect you to take on that role.”

Did he say “heiress”?

“Heiresses don't need to win a man.” She walked back over to him.

He handed her a thick black hand-bound book with
Miss Parker's Rulebook
embossed in gold script on the cover. “Tell Janey what kind of coffee you take.”

“Double espresso skinny latte, please. If you can't, then just a regular—”

George interrupted. “An heiress would not concern herself with whether the hired help can or can't do her bidding. It's not her problem.” He finally set his iPhone aside, picked up a remote, and aimed it at the three TV screens. “You're going to love doing this show. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Check it out. Here's what's going on throughout the estate.”

A young woman in a bonnet fed chickens on one screen, on another a cook chopped herbs. And, on screen three, a dark-haired guy paused near a copper bathtub, untying his cravat while light from a window behind the tub gave him a silhouette quality. A butler removed his waistcoat and pulled the loose linen shirt over his head. The guy's shoulder blades popped. Was that him? The Mr. Wrightman she was supposed to win over?

She pretended to fan herself. “Be still, my beating heart. Oh, George, is that my future husband?”

George eyed the young woman feeding the chickens while he talked. The swooshing of the milk frother on the espresso machine almost drowned out his voice. “Rule number one. Sarcasm will not be tolerated. Rule number two. You don't have a daughter on this program. Not a word of it, and Fiona's been instructed not to speak of her with you, nor to say anything about it to the rest of the cast.”

Janey gave George his coffee in a black mug and handed Chloe her latte in a white paper cup, complete with plastic lid and cardboard sleeve. “Thank you,” Chloe said, noting the significance of the fact that hers was a to-go cup.

Without a word, Janey slunk back to wherever she came from.

Even through the cardboard sleeve, the coffee burned Chloe's hand and she set it down on the table littered with gossip magazines.

George finished off his coffee. “It's all very celeb of you, being a single mum in the twenty-first century, but you don't have a daughter here. That would be very uncool unless you're a widow, and that just wasn't sexy enough for us, quite frankly. Here you're an American heiress eager to secure a place in society—and fast. This may be your last chance, considering your age.”

Chloe said nothing.

“You need to marry a man of society and save your American family from ruin. They can only afford to keep you here for three weeks.”

Chloe turned her back to the camera. “Why would an heiress need to marry up?” She whispered, “It sounds a little desperate.”

“We do our best to base everyone's stories on their current circumstances.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He looked at the camera then turned away from it, lowering his voice. “You come from a blue-blood English family on your mother's side, but you've fallen on hard times. Your business is about to go belly-up and you can't rally the cash to afford your home or your daughter's private school. You depleted your savings just to fly over here. Am I right?”

The air conditioner blew cold air on her bare back. The camera panned around her. The trailer closed in and felt too small for four people. He sure did his homework. She was a girl without a fortune, a damsel in financial distress. She gravitated to the wine refrigerator. She needed a drink. Or two. “Miss Parker may need financial security by marrying a certain gentleman, but
I
don't. I've got lots of irons in the fire.”

“I'm sure you do.” George smirked. “Think of this as another iron. Get him to propose and you've won our little Regency love match. A hundred thousand dollars. How can you resist?”

“Ugh. I have to get him to propose to win the money? Please.”

“Certainly you, of all contestants, would know that the only way a Regency woman of your stature could acquire such a sum would be to marry into it. Women couldn't work to amass their fortune, you know that.”

Chloe sighed. “This might be more realistic than I'd bargained for.”

“Who knows? Perhaps you'll fall in love with Mr. Wrightman.”