Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,20

through the crosswalk. He’d been apprehended and ended up in jail without much effort. I remembered getting Georgie home, the two of us sitting silently in the living room until the sun came up. And then it was a different kind of blur.

Lawyers and funeral plans, informing distant relatives and friends. And I’d done it all without blinking, without thinking, without feeling. Georgie felt enough for both of us.

Neither of us wanted to be alone, so we took to sleeping in the living room without ever agreeing to it. It was a month before we slept in our beds and well over a year before we touched their room. It was Georgie who suggested it was time, and though it was unbearable, I helped her go through their clothes and things. We packed things away, stripped it of linens and furniture, spreading pieces throughout the house and putting the decor in places where we could admire them and remember. And then Georgie redecorated it for me, moved me in, and claimed my old room.

Their empty room had been a void in the house to reflect the void in our lives until then. And when we filled it, we were finally able to move on. Or start to.

So I finished college and started at De Bourgh. Georgie finished high school and started at NYU, joining me when she’d gotten her bachelor’s. And that, as they said, was that.

I knocked back the end of my drink and poured another, taking it upstairs with me as I pulled at my tie. Laney Bennet appeared in my mind without preamble or warning, as she was in the habit of doing. Georgie had given me the final directive before what I was sure would be an ultimatum, and she was right. I had to figure myself out before it was too late.

But when I stopped and looked for the why of it all, I knew.

Laney was one of very few people who called me out with such ferocious truth. She was unafraid of me, unaffected by me, unlike most people, who sputtered and stammered in my presence. Georgie said I had two expressions—frowning and scowling—and the result didn’t endear me to many people. I’d told her not to take me to that mixer at Wasted Words. Because if there was one thing I couldn’t do, it was fake it. I couldn’t pretend to be amused by their party or even to understand it. I couldn’t feign a good time and drink and laugh with a bunch of strangers in a hot, crammed bar. I couldn’t take a bartender seriously who wore a loincloth any more than I could give my blessing to a shirtless bookstore manager who had his eye—and hands—on my sister.

But there was something else about Laney. I saw something in her that I’d never seen before, some spark of rarity beneath her hard exterior. And I supposed Georgie was right again. Laney and I were much more alike than I wanted to admit. But rather than contain herself like I did, she bared it, exposed herself in a way that although was defensive, was vulnerable too.

It was foreign to me. And a quality I found not only merit in, but envy. I only wished I could be so free. But I was incapable. Ask anyone who knew me, and they’d agree without hesitating.

I left the lights off in my room, crossing the space to stand in front of the tall windows overlooking the park as a thought dawned on me with such heat, it burned through the fog of unfamiliar feelings she evoked.

I admired her. Inexplicably, she roused something in me, like a beast asleep for a thousand years, shaking off the dust of time. She saw me, and though she didn’t like what she’d found, she challenged me to answer. To rise to the occasion and meet her as an equal. Because despite our many differences, when it came to the fabric of our characters, I had a suspicion we were much the same.

And though I didn’t know what exactly that meant, I gathered a plan to find out.

8

Party Like It's 1813

LANEY

Regency nights were my favorite.

Two or three nights a year, we partied like it was 1813. And our regulars went all out.

Five-dollar wells for everyone in costume inspired people to participate, and it expanded our regulars to reenactment groups, of which there were far more than I imagined there would ever be in Manhattan. Ruby sewed as a hobby, and