Hiring Mr. Darcy - Valerie Bowman Page 0,1

things like eat jelly donuts. My belly was also the reason I was wearing granny panties, by the way. They weren’t just any granny panties, they were form-fitting, stomach-control granny panties that were supposed to make my pencil skirt look sleek and pencily, at least as sleek and pencily as one could look when one was vertically challenged and a bit of a pudge.

I stared at tall, leggy Lacey Lewis and decided that she’d never scarfed down a donut or been an anxious flyer in her whole perfect life. I needed to stand away from her. No good could come of my being next to her. We were sure to look like Barbie and Hobbit Skipper.

Harrison and Lacey were chatting animatedly, caught up in their conversation. When I reached them, I had to clear my throat to get their attention. Lacey placed her manicured hand on Harrison’s sleeve. “Oh, Dr. Knightley,” she said to me, blinking. “There you are.”

“Hi, you two,” I said in as cheerful a voice as I could muster.

“Meg, I didn’t see you there.” Harrison leaned down and kissed me awkwardly on the cheek. It made me suspicious, because he wasn’t a fan of PDAs. Neither was I. “Welcome back. How was your flight?” He handed me his handkerchief and pointed at the side of my mouth, “It’s seems you’ve got a bit of…something.”

“Oh, it’s probably jelly.” I took the handkerchief from him and scrubbed my mouth. “As for the flight, I had to sit in the middle seat,” I offered, handing Harrison’s handkerchief back to him.

Harrison winced. “Ooh, that’s too bad.”

“That’s why I love first class so much,” Lacey said. “No middle seats. Don’t you love first class?” Her hand had returned to Harrison’s sleeve. I eyed it. Resentment gnawed at my insides like a Midwesterner on a corncob. Lacey must have realized I was staring, because her hand moved slowly back to her side.

“I’ve never flown first class,” Harrison told her.

She blinked at him and cocked her head to the side as if he hadn’t spoken English.

I took a deep breath. Really. What was I so worried about? Harrison was a dorky history professor from Milwaukee who, like me, had never flown first class, and Lacey was a jet-setting starlet. Harrison didn’t even know what a spray tan was. Lacey had probably majored in spray tan. Surely, she wasn’t interested in my nerdy boyfriend, when she could catch the eye of someone super-hot, rich, and famous, like Henry Cavill.

I pushed my glasses up my nose with one free finger and stared at Lacey in fascination. She was too pretty and too perfect. She also seemed too calculating. How would she ever pull off naïve, flighty fifteen-year-old Lydia Bennet?

“Shall we go?” I asked, still staring at Lacey.

“Oh, right. Of course,” Harrison said. “My car’s in the shop and Lacey was kind enough to offer us both a ride.”

“Oh.” That explained why Lacey was here. It struck me, however, that he’d called her Lacey, not “Lewis,” as he’d been fond of doing before I left. He’d called her Lewis, sometimes Lew, and she called him “Dr. M.” It was not adorable. Great. They’d obviously fallen in love and I was about to get dumped. The thought had plagued me the entire five days I’d been in Connecticut.

I was about to ask what had happened to Harrison’s car, but his next question quickly diverted my attention.

His eyes narrowed on my chest. “What’s that on your sweater?”

I cringed and tugged at my sweater. “Jelly.” I felt like I was ten years old and in the confessional again. “From a donut.”

“Oh, I love donuts,” Lacey gushed, blinking her false lashes at me.

I eyed her up and down. Fine. She ate donuts—or at least claimed to—but I bet she never dripped any on her suit. And she’d clearly made a deal with the devil to avoid gaining weight from donut consumption. Heat crept up my back and burned my neck, mostly born of disgust, although whether more for her or for myself, I couldn’t say.

We left the airport, made our way into the parking garage, and climbed into Lacey’s car. An Audi. A black one. The kind of car a gorgeous starlet would drive. I drive a Jetta. A little silver Jetta with a Herstory sticker on the bumper that Harrison hated, a trash bag in the back seat, and a window that didn’t always roll down correctly, causing many an embarrassing moment at a variety of drive-thrus.

We drove to campus,