Hiring Mr. Darcy - Valerie Bowman Page 0,5
a silver vase with fresh flowers, too. This time of year, I preferred sunflowers, but the ones that greeted me were half-dead from not having been cared for all week by my brother, Luke.
Aside from the dead flowers, the first thing I noticed was the smell. The next was the mail scattered all over the dark wood floor from where the mail carrier had pushed it through the slot.
“Luke!” I yelled. “Luuuuke!”
“Whaa?” His voice came from the living room, not nearly as far away as it should have been if he wanted to avoid serious bodily harm...or at least a severe talking-to. I kicked off my sensible flats—Lacey had been wearing shiny red heels—and pulled my suitcase behind me into the living room on my fat little hobbit feet. The ones that kept me from ever wearing heels because they felt like medieval torture devices on such ungainly hooves.
The sight that greeted me in the living room was my older brother, lying on the sofa reading a book, wearing his usual garb: boxers and a T-shirt. Old pizza boxes and half-empty beer bottles were strewn everywhere.
“Luke, what the hell are you doing? This place smells like an armpit and it’s a bloody mess!” Leaving the suitcase to its own devices, I splayed my hands wide and swept them out to the sides to demonstrate said mess. I knew I was being a control freak, but I couldn’t take my frustration out on Harrison, and Luke was the only one available.
“Calm down,” Luke said, not looking up from War and Peace. “I’ll clean it up.” He took a swig of beer. Only my brother would drink beer while reading War and Peace. He pushed up his T-shirt and scratched his flat belly. His unfairly completely flat belly. If I so much as glanced at pizza, my pot belly swelled. Apparently, Luke had been subsisting on the stuff for a week with no repercussions or puffery.
I trudged into the kitchen to get a trash bag out of the pantry and then trudged back with the lilac-scented bag (cuz that’s how I roll) and began shoving every disgusting thing into it. I am a solid feminist and the idea of cleaning up after a man makes my head want to explode, but I am also a complete OCD clean freak and my head would explode faster if I had to sit around in this mess. Hence, the trash bag.
Luke jumped up and pulled the bag from my hand. He took over while I stood there, nearly shaking with righteous indignation, and glared at him with my hands on my hips. If you’re thinking I had a lot of righteous indignation on this particular day, you are correct.
“Sorry,” he said, sweeping waded napkins and pizza crusts into the bag. “I didn’t think you’d be home so early. Weren’t you and Dr. Strangelove supposed to go on a date tonight?”
“His name isn’t Dr. Strangelove, and this is my house. I’m bloody well allowed to arrive whenever I please.”
He stopped shoving pizza boxes into the bag and lifted an eyebrow at me. “What’s wrong?”
“You’ve made a mess in my house and as you’ve often told me, I’m a crazy control freak, obsessive-compulsive person. What do you think is wrong?”
“No. Something else is wrong. You don’t use British cuss words and get all controlling unless you’re really mad. Pizza boxes don’t make you that mad.”
Why did my bloody brother have to know me so bloody well?
“I’m fine,” I insisted, fixing my unreliable, dead-giveaway eyes on the wall behind him.
“I heard you call me a ne’er-do-well when you were in the kitchen,” Luke countered in a singsong voice.
Busted.
“Fine. Harrison dumped me.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
Luke let the trash bag drop to the rug. He shuffled over and gave me a hug. I didn’t open my arms. My cold little nose, pressed to his chest, stung with self-pity. Luke was a foot taller than me. He smelled like soap and maybe pizza.
“Oh, Meggie,” he said. “I’m sorry. What happened? Had a falling out over the difference between top boots and Hessians?”
I wish. I at least could have won that argument.
“No,” I snorted.
“What is it? What did Dr. Strange—er, Harrison, do?” Luke always pronounced Harrison in a fake English accent.
“We...” What exactly had happened? I had to think about it for a sec. “He’s taking Lewis to the Jane Austen Festival instead of me.”
Luke pulled away from me and slapped his palm against his thigh. “I knew