Hiring Mr. Darcy - Valerie Bowman Page 0,48

and not a bad actor, I’d discovered. Jeremy Remington had depths to him. Depths I’d brushed off when I’d assumed he was merely a deadbeat. Because...I was Mr. Darcy.

“Yep, plus I played Jack in the high school version of The Importance of Being Earnest when I was a sophomore, and Mrs. Randall insisted we use English accents. This isn’t my first time at the English-accent rodeo.”

“Oh, right, Drama Club in high school.” His sophomore year, I would have been in the eighth grade. “Am I forgetting anything else?” I asked, only half-joking. “Like did we play Cinderella and Prince Charming together and I’m not remembering it?”

He laughed at that. “If that happened, I don’t remember either.” He took a sip of his beer, then wiped his mouth with his napkin. I had a weakness for men who used napkins correctly. His was also correctly placed in his lap. Sigh.

“You were in writing club too, weren’t you?” he asked.

Wow. Yes. I had been in the creative writing club in high school. “You remembered I was in the writing club?” The man had an even better memory than he’d given himself credit for. He’d learned most of a huge set of lines in one day, and remembered that I got car sick, and had been in the creative writing club in high school.

“Yeah, which reminds me.” The candlelight gilded the right side of his features. “You’ve obviously wanted to write for a while now. Tell me again why you think you can’t write a romance novel.”

I stared past Jeremy at the buffalo skull on the nearby wall. Why did I think I couldn’t do it? Lots of reasons. I’d tried to bring it up to Harrison once. Only once. We’d been at a Barnes & Noble, and I’d slyly steered us to the romance section. I’d picked up a book by Lisa Kleypas, one of my favorite authors...who also went to Wellesley. She was the one who’d made me think that maybe, just maybe, I could write one, too. The cover had an obviously historical couple in a state of undress on it. “What do you think?” I’d asked Harrison. “It’s written in our time period.”

“What do I think?” he’d echoed, crossing his arms over his chest and staring down his nose at the book. “I think that’s trash. The real historical section is over there, you know?” He’d pointed to the history books, which of course I also loved, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed at his obvious dismissal. Since then, I kept my historical romance reading habit on the down low. e-Readers made it easy. No one had to see the cover of the book I was reading.

“Because people say they’re trash,” I offered lamely.

Jeremy crossed his arms over his chest and looked down the length of his nose at me. “Do you think they’re trash?”

“Not at all. I think they’re glorious. I’m always happiest when I’m reading one.”

“Then what makes you give a damn what other people say?” he asked as the waiter filled our glasses with more water.

My tenth-grade encounter with Mrs. Neilson flashed through my mind. At least I remembered something. I’d never forget that.

I was sixteen when I began hating my mom for getting me hooked on romance novels. The books with the steamy covers and silly names had been stacked eye-level-high in mom’s bedroom. One night, when I’d had another stupid fight with my high school boyfriend, mom had suggested I read a romance novel to make me feel better. “They always have happy endings,” she had said with a sigh and a dreamy look in her eye. That was mom’s problem. She was always thinking about what could be, not what was. She was completely unrealistic.

Happy endings? So completely unlike life. My mom and dad had finally gotten divorced when I was fourteen, after years of fights over money and my dad’s gambling habits. Mom had started reading romance novels way before she kicked Dad out, but after he’d gone, she’d really gotten into them. Like she read multiple books a week. She had a customer at the diner who read them in droves and left the used ones for Mom as part of her tip. That and her library card kept her in books year-round. She rarely had to pay for them.

I had always wondered what the books that had been off-limits to me my entire life were like, and so that night, after John and I had yet another argument about