by Maya Rodale, Caroline Linden, Miranda Neville, Katharine Ashe
“We were expecting a Welshman called Owen,” Nanny said. “But I’m sure you’ll do just as well. American, are you? Americans have such funny names. Is Arwen a family name?” Nanny was not apparently an aficionado of J.R.R. Tolkien.
“My mother’s maiden name.” Her usual lie. She had always hated being named after an elf. Since she had parents who didn’t believe in marriage, the concept of a maiden name played to her personal fantasies.
“Would you like a coffee?”
Arwen eyed a big jar of instant on the pine table that dominated the center of the room and shuddered. “Thanks, I picked up Starbucks at the airport. Would it be okay to see my room and freshen up?” Even traveling first class—thank you, Duke Austen!—she felt grimy after the overnight flight.
“Of course, dear. Follow me.”
Her room was gorgeous, all antique furniture and faded chintz in blues and yellows that picked out the colors of the wallpaper, a Chinese pattern of bamboo, lotus flowers, and birds. She tested the mattress on a canopy bed out of a costume drama and found it eminently nap-worthy. If the guest rooms in the new hotel were like this it would be perfect. Those New York and Silicon Valley hipsters were going to get a taste of real class. The bathroom was a couple of doors down the hall, but Nanny assured her there were no other guests and she had it to herself. She plugged in her laptop and phone, using three-pin adapters bought at the airport, and noted a couple of bars of Wi-Fi. Hopefully she’d get better signal elsewhere in the house. She’d better. Internet service was more important than bathrooms to tech guys.
She had no complaints about the spacious bathroom with the biggest stand-alone tub she’d ever seen. The showerhead was handheld but gleaming silver, the hot water plentiful. She washed away all traces of the flight as she wallowed luxuriantly and planned her I am a kickass wedding planner who takes no prisoners outfit: jeans, Tory Burch jacket, and the Valentino flats she’d found on deep sale. Heels would be preferable to lend her gravitas and height, but she was in the country and walking on gravel in stilettos was not for sissies.
Time to work, but first the hair.
Plugging her travel hairdryer into another adapter, she turned it on and was rewarded by a whir, an explosion of ominous sparks, and silence. Crap.
Then she noticed the light on her laptop charger had gone out. She’d blown a fuse.
Nice start, Arwen. Her stomach lurched. The reason she’d come to Brampton was because a kitchen fire had damaged Kingstag Castle, Jane’s first choice.
She tore down to the kitchen in a panic, her head filled with a vision of the headlines.
Historic Mansion Burned to the Ground, American Wedding Planner Blamed.
Nanny, unfazed by wet hair and her flimsy Chinatown robe, assured her that someone called Harry, who was ever so handy, would fix it and offered her a glass of sherry while she waited. What the hell. This was a good moment to break her rule about not drinking at lunch (or technically before lunch). The old lady sat her down with a beautiful cut glass decanter and a matching glass. The sherry was dry but tasty and Arwen felt the tension ease out of her. Despite its size, the room was comfortable and welcoming. She could imagine half a dozen small children with milk mustaches sitting around the old table, munching on cookies.
“Do you know if there’s anywhere in the house I can get cell service? Mobile phone service,” she added when Nanny looked blank.
“Harry will know,” Nanny replied, lifting a gigantic pot from the scary black stove.
“Do you need help with that?” Arwen asked. “It looks awfully heavy.”
“I can manage.” Nanny drained something that looked suspiciously like cauliflower into a huge colander in an enamel sink almost as big as the bathtub. Everything in the place was on a monumental scale.
“Is there anything else I can do?” she said, once assured that Nanny wasn’t going to collapse under a tsunami of boiling water.
“Thank you, dear, but I won’t make you work when you’ve only just arrived. Relax and enjoy your sherry.” Arwen took another sip, which wasn’t a good idea since it inspired a crazy desire for sleep.
“I’d like to look around the facilities.” That was a really hard word to pronounce. “Fa-cil-it-ies,” she repeated. “Is Lord Melbury here?” Although she didn’t suppose the lord of the manor would concern himself directly with a wedding planner.
“He and Lady Melbury are abroad.”
“Who’s in charge of the hotel?”
“Harry can answer all your questions. He’ll be in for lunch soon.”
A wonderful old clock surrounded by an amazing collection of copper molds read twelve thirty. Arwen set down her empty sherry glass and rose to wobbly feet. “I’d better go back upstairs and get dressed,” she said.
Harry glanced in his rearview mirror and wondered if he should have stayed to make sure the pretty girl in the white Vauxhall managed to get her car in gear. He hated being rude, especially to pretty girls, and this one was particularly attractive. For a moment his predicament had faded behind the urge to chat her up, find out what she was doing in the narrow lane, a shortcut used by very few. Once she was out of sight his black mood descended again.
He took several deep breaths and tried to empty his mind of the morning’s cock-up and achieve inner peace. It was his own fault for trying to run the excavator himself. Fed up by the nonappearance of the workmen for a third day and anxious to get the trench dug so they could run the gas line to the new catering kitchen, he’d managed to bugger the fiber optic cable bringing high-speed broadband to serve the entire hotel. It turned out you couldn’t patch that kind of wiring together with electrical tape. Who knew?
Then he’d learned that Duke Austen had sent a man called Owen Kilpatrick to look the place over before he wrote the gigantic, heart-stopping check, the monumental bonus for opening the hotel early for Austen’s wedding to Jane Sparks.
Instead of spending a happy morning pottering around with heavy machinery, he had to go into Melbury and persuade British Telecom to restore Internet service to Brampton House immediately. It was going to take no small degree of charm and groveling to get the capricious gods (i.e. telephone company employees) to hurry up. And the charming and groveling had better be good because this Owen fellow would arrive at any moment and nothing was going to amuse the representative of an Internet billionaire less than a total absence of Internet.
Two hours later, the Land Rover threw up showers of gravel as he screeched round the corner, any semblance of inner peace shot to smithereens by his total failure to make the servants of British Telecom see reason. What the hell was he going to say to Kilpatrick? Lie through his teeth, he supposed.
In the kitchen, Nanny was laying the lunch at the big pine table he’d known all his life. A bubbling cauliflower cheese sat on the AGA but thank God she’d got out a decent bottle of claret. Dear Nanny. The revolution in British food had passed her by and she cooked as if they were still in the nursery. He supposed it was lucky she hadn’t made Welsh rarebit, since she was convinced that Duke Austen’s representative from New York was Welsh.
“Oh good, you’re back, Harry dear. We have a blown fuse in the Chinese bedroom.”
He groaned. “It would happen to Mr. Kilpatrick.” They’d assigned him the best spare room.
“Such a surprise, dear. He’s not Welsh at all.”
“Fancy that.”
“He’s not a he either. It’s Miss Kilpatrick and she’s American.”
Harry had a nasty feeling about this. “Tall and blond?” he said hopefully.
“Oh no. Quite small with lovely shiny dark hair. Pretty.”
Just as he feared. He’d yelled at Duke Austen’s representative and ogled her legs and he wasn’t sure which was worse. Bloody bloody hell. On the bright side, if he could bluff his way through the current crisis he wouldn’t mind getting to know her better. “Tell me what happened, Nanny. From the beginning. I want to know everything she said.”
“Nothing very much
, though she seems a nice girl. I offered her a nice cup of Nescafé but all she wanted was a bath.”
Harry shook his head to dispel a sudden image of Miss Kilpatrick’s legs draped over the edge of the bathtub. “Did she ask about the Wi-Fi?”
Nanny shook her head. “The poor girl was so upset when she came down in her dressing gown with her hair wet. She plugged in her American hairdryer. There’s no electricity in her room.”
“Bugger. Let’s hope it’s only a fuse.” The main house had been rewired for the hotel conversion but the family quarters weren’t quite finished. There was quite a lot that wasn’t quite finished and Miss Kilpatrick needed to be kept in ignorance. “Doesn’t the woman know that American and British electrical systems are incompatible?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.” Visits to foreign parts had never impressed Nanny. Her idea of abroad was a nice holiday in the Isle of Wight. “She was ever so sorry. I told her not to worry and you’d have it mended in a jiffy.”
“Sorry was she?” Harry had an idea how he might turn the situation to his advantage.
“You be nice, Harry. Accidents happen. Change that fuse and bring her down to lunch.”
Whistling optimistically, Harry grabbed his tool bag and headed for the Chinese bedroom, with a small detour via the estate office where he unplugged the wireless router. It wasn’t as though it would do any good, power or no power.
From the little he’d seen of her, Miss Owen—was that really her name?—Kilpatrick was a strong-minded young woman not afraid to argue. He needed to put her on the defensive. If she was still in her dressing gown—a short one, please God—all the better.
She was. And sprawled on her stomach on the Chinese counterpane, fast asleep, as he discovered when she didn’t answer his knock and he assumed she must be in the bathroom. Feeling a bit guilty, Harry had another look at the legs that were just as good as he remembered. Piously, he refrained from trying to peer beneath the red silk robe that hardly covered her bottom. He bet her little bum was just as shapely as her limbs. She stirred on the bed and wiggled it. Since he’d rather not compound the bad start to their acquaintance by being caught leering like an elderly rake, he found the hairdryer on the floor next to a plug, fished out a screwdriver, and got down on his knees to remove the socket cover.
Someone was in the room and Arwen felt a breeze up her ass. Suddenly quite awake, she rolled over and tugged at her robe, covering her behind but baring her boobs. Luckily he wasn’t looking. The man, Harry she presumed, was on his knees fiddling with the plug and revealing several inches of skin between a black T-shirt and low-hanging blue jeans. Not to mince words, he was showing butt crack. Crack of mighty fine butt.
Harry, the handyman who knew everything, was tall and lithe with intriguing hints of strength beneath the tee. And what a fabulous butt. The hips were slender, but the glutes well developed, doubtless by constant manual labor in the service of his noble overlords.
Arwen’s notions of the British aristocracy were vague, gained from reading about the royals in People magazine and, more recently, in Jane Sparks’s historical romance novels. She was fairly sure they didn’t have much real power anymore, but she kind of enjoyed imagining this hunky guy shaking off the shackles of oppression and stringing up his cruel masters from streetlamps. Although that, she remembered from an old movie version of A Tale of Two Cities, was the French Revolution. She’d majored in Environmental Studies at Emory, with an undeclared minor in the history of party-giving.
Or perhaps he just worked out a lot, a boring explanation compared to the vision of him swinging a sledgehammer under the whip of a supercilious aristocrat in jodhpurs and a monocle. Or were those Nazis?
Time to shake off the jet lag fueled lust and move into intimidating professional mode. Pity she was wearing a crumpled silk robe selected because it took up very little packing space.
“Ahem.” She staggered to her feet and knotted her sash, tightly. As she coughed again, Harry stood up and turned.
“You! You were leaving,” she said stupidly.
“Yes I was, and I came back. I happen to live here.”
She inventoried a set of features that made her understand what chiseled meant: prominent brow, straight brown hair, blue eyes, the high cheekbones she’d noticed even under the shadow of the world’s least stylish rain hat, and lips that quirked attractively.
“What do you do here exactly?” She found it hard to believe such a scruffy guy was related to a lord. His T-shirt had a paint stain in a place that drew attention to the possibility of pectoral muscles to match his fine ass.
“This and that. I’m supposed to show you round so that you can finalize the plans for Mr. Austen and Miss Sparks’s wedding.”
“If I decide Brampton House is suitable.”
“I understand Miss Sparks fell in love with the history of the house. And of course Brampton is regarded as the finest example of late seventeenth-century domestic architecture in England.”
He was right, of course. Jane was crazy about the place, even more than she had been about the fire-damaged castle. “Mr. Austen is determined that his fiancée gets the wedding of her dreams and it’s my business to make sure it doesn’t turn into a nightmare. It’s what I do and I take it very seriously. I haven’t had an unsatisfied bride yet.”
He flashed white teeth in his perfectly shaped mouth. “I call that excessive devotion to duty.”
“Nothing is too much trouble to make her day perfect,” she said, lowering her eyelids. “After the confetti, however, I generally turn the matter over to the bridegroom.”
“What about him? Have you had an unsatisfied bridegroom? I find it hard to believe.”
“I’ve never had a bridegroom. Always a wedding planner, never a bride.” Oh my God she was flirting with the handyman, or whatever he was. How unprofessional could she get? “And that’s the way I like it. This isn’t getting us anywhere, Mister…”
“Just Harry.”
“Well, Just Harry. Can I dry my hair now?” She put her hand up and discovered frizz.
“Not with that hairdryer. I’m afraid it’ll be good for nothing but the dustbin after the jolt it took.”
“Oh my God, my laptop!” The orange charging light was on again. “Will your damn electricity fry that too?”
“Computers and mobiles are fine with an adapter. They take very low voltage. Anything with any power and you have a problem.”
Arwen grabbed her phone. “No service,” she said. “How am I supposed to make calls?”
“I can show you places in the grounds that get signal.”
“And no Wi-Fi bars, either. Surely you have Internet.”
“Of course we do. Brampton is a country house hotel with all modern conveniences.”
She fiddled with her settings, then thrust the phone at him. “Look. Nada. No Wi-Fi.”
Harry gave an exaggerated sigh. “I was afraid of that. The wiring in this part of the house is very delicate and I’m afraid your blown fuse may have disturbed the router signal.”
“Really? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“You’re not in America now, Miss Kilpatrick. Things are different here.” He launched into a long explanation about bandwidth and watts and amps and volts that turned her head to cotton. “So you see,” he concluded, “you really mustn’t blame yourself. There was no way you could have known that a humble domestic appliance like a hairdryer could cause so much trouble. I’m sure it won’t take more than a day or two to recover.”
Great. She hadn’t burned the house down, but the way Harry the Handyman was carrying on she’d done the next worst thing.
Since Arwen set a high premium on doing things right the first time, apologizing for mistakes was one of her least favorite activities. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope this won’t happen if one of your hotel guests makes a similar mistake.” Being mad at herself made her bitchy and being bitchy made her more mad at herself.
“Not at all. Everything
’s new over there, as you will see when I give you a tour after lunch. You’ll feel much better after some food.” He smiled with friendly condescension. “Let me fetch you an English hairdryer so you can get ready. I’ll be back in a tick.”
“Don’t bother.” Her hair was a lost cause unless she washed it again. And lunch sounded wonderful, even if she had to eat it with this hunky oaf. Her stomach rumbled, though she wasn’t quite hungry enough to crave cauliflower. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on the other hand… “How long do I have?”
“We usually have lunch at one.” On the way out the door he turned. “I’ve never met a girl called Owen before.”
“You still haven’t. It’s Arwen.” She spelled it out.
“Ah, the elf. You look more like a pixie.”
She acknowledged the remark with a perfunctory shrug. Some days she wished Tolkien had never lived.
“I suppose you’ve heard that before.”
“Two or three hundred times.”
“Rule number one: if you want to be original, never joke about people’s names.” He gave a wicked little smile that made her stomach flip. “I shall be very serious when I call you Elf.”
Almost her unruffled self—there wasn’t anything to do about hair that had gone haywire in the English climate—Arwen joined Nanny and Harry for lunch. She’d have expected a meal served in a formal dining room by a butler, but supposed that wasn’t offered when the owner wasn’t in residence. She was tickled to discover that even a casual meal at the kitchen table in company with the cook and the handyman merited fabulous old china and silver, huge starched linen napkins, and vintage Bordeaux served in crystal fine enough to shatter at a breath of wind. She sipped carefully.
While the wine was a treat, she was appalled to discover that cauliflower in a thick white sauce was the main course of the meal.
“Delicious, Nanny darling.” Harry, who was consuming the stuff hungrily, caught her sideways glance and winked. “Cauliflower cheese is her forte,” he explained.
