The Austen Playbook

by Lucy Parker

“You?” He was stroking light patterns on her back.

  “Surprising nobody, I’m all for the postcoital cuddling.” Delicious goose bumps broke out on her skin when his hand reached the dip at the base of her spine. “But I suspect you’re not.”

  “Not usually. But nothing else about tonight is within my usual experience.”

  “But...” Her voice trailed off when he touched a knuckle to her cheek. She looked at him for a heartbeat longer, then closed her eyes again and curled into him, and felt his head come to rest against hers.

  In the dark, the outside world started to exist again, and the rain continued to patter on the windows, and all the lurking problems beyond the enclosed intimacy and security of the room tried to sneak through the crack under the door and back into her mind.

  She tightened her hand on Griff’s.

  * * *

  It wasn’t a censorious butler or disapproving hostess who woke them just before eight, but an unexpectedly conscientious little brother.

  Charlie’s current car, which looked and sounded like it should be on a Formula One track, roared into the courtyard, and broke Griff abruptly back into consciousness and momentary disorientation. He’d dropped into complete oblivion after the most intensely intimate experience of his life.

  Lifting his head from the tangle of Freddy’s hair, he breathed in her scent—coconut—and tensed, trying to work out what—

  Another rev of a familiar engine before it cut off and a car door slammed, and he finally got his brain working. Slipping his hand down her arm in a brief caress, he disentangled their legs and rolled out of bed, striding naked to the window and looking out.

  His brother was standing by the vehicle that he treated like an extortionately expensive child, looking up at the manor. Even from a distance, Griff could see the incredulity and growing amusement as Charlie took in the full Gothic splendour.

  Retrieving his trousers from the floor, where Freddy had thrown them, he dressed quickly. His shirt had been removed last night before he’d gone to investigate the light footsteps creeping about the hallways, so it was in decent shape, but from the waist down he looked like he’d been dragged backwards through a bush.

  Coming to sit on the edge of the bed, he looked down at where Freddy was still sleeping soundly, her hair a disaster, one hand tucked under her chin.

  Wrinkled clothing was a small price to pay.

  Although he could just imagine the forthcoming commentary from Charlie.

  “Freddy.” He ran his fingers down her cheek and then her arm, and she briefly stirred, made a small sound, and promptly went back to sleep. Griff pushed back a handful of her curls and bent to kiss her ear. “Darling.” The endearment, which he’d never used in his life, slipped out with surprising ease, a low murmur straight into her ear.

  Her lashes parted and she looked at him with no recognition, then a smile brightened her sleepy gaze, and he felt himself returning it.

  “Good morning.” She yawned and reached an arm up to hook around his neck, and he couldn’t resist dropping a brief kiss on her mouth. “Why’re you dressed already?” The words slurred together through another yawn.

  “It’s almost eight, and Charlie’s just driven into the courtyard.”

  A single blink, and then it was like she’d been plugged in and turned on. She shot out of bed, almost shoving him aside. Folding his arms, he leaned against the tall wooden bedpost and admired the view as Freddy bent over to ferret out her dress and lingerie from under a pile of pillows.

  “Oh my God. My call-time is nine-thirty today. And if Charlie’s here, Wanda and Arthur are probably up. I hope they didn’t hear us last night.” Orgasms seemed to have an unusual effect on her. Teasing and flirtation had been replaced by flapping hands and words. “You’re surprisingly loud in bed.”

  “I’m surprisingly loud? The British infantry regiments could have staged the Trooping of the Colour in the courtyard last night and you wouldn’t have known a thing about it.” Every muscle in Griff’s body felt lax and satisfied, and it was difficult to summon the energy to care about the shite waiting back at Highbrook. No doubt the pleasant sense of lethargy had a time limit, however, and the clock was counting down. He gave it an hour at most before the stresses descended like yesterday’s fog.

  Considering that Charlie had driven out here at an hour of the morning when he was usually still snoring in bed, possibly about three minutes.

  Freddy winced. “Do you think people did hear us?”

  “Not even your promised squeaks could have drowned out Wanda’s snoring.” Griff lifted his phone from the bedside table and slipped it into his pocket. “But as it now seems to have stopped, and I doubt Charlie drove out here for a scenic trip, we’d better go down.”

  Freddy looked as rumpled as he did when they came out into the courtyard. Charlie was in animated conversation with Wanda, who was wearing a safari suit today and looked like an extra from a 1940s film. She was a good example of not judging people’s character by their appearance, because based on her manner, most costume departments would put her in black bombazine with a chatelaine at her belt.

  Although she was almost giggling under the full battery of Charlie’s charm act. “Your dear brother is here to fix your car,” she said to Griff. “Isn’t that kind? I hope you both slept well. You obviously didn’t see the garment steamer in your wardrobe.”

  Charlie, standing with one hip propped against his car, focused properly on Griff at that, examining him from unshaven jaw to creased legs. His intrigued gaze moved to Freddy’s wrinkled dress. A small smile started to play about his mouth, and Griff looked at him warningly.

  “You got up before seven in the morning to do an AA job for us?”

  “From what you said, the local garage wasn’t likely to do a speed fix, and our leading lady here is due on The Henry stage shortly.” Charlie turned the full force of his smile on Freddy, and Griff was caught off guard by the instinctive reaction that hit him in the gut.

  If he’d never been very tactile, he’d sure as hell never been possessive, but seeing Charlie flirt with Freddy shot tension through his whole body. Which was both ridiculous and bloody ungrateful, when Charlie was doing him a favour. Albeit suspiciously.

  It was the similarities between them, he thought grimly, as Freddy returned Charlie’s smile with breezy affection. They clearly recognised a sympathetic bond in one another. And they were a much more obvious pair. Had anyone placed a bet on Freddy becoming involved with either him or Charlie, his own odds would be comparable to a fairground pony winning the Grand National.

  “You’re an actress?” Wanda looked narrowly at Freddy. Her lips pursed. “I should have guessed. I suppose you have grand plans to write the next great dramatic showpiece, too. Let’s hope you don’t follow too closely in your grandmother’s footsteps.”

  “No.” That disquiet he’d noticed yesterday returned to Freddy’s face. “Let’s hope not.”

  Charlie rolled up his sleeves, retrieved a toolbox from his own car, and popped open the bonnet of Griff’s. Within seconds, he was whistling. After a few notes, Griff recognised the tune as an old song about taking a girl away for a dirty weekend.

  Rolling his eyes, he joined Charlie at the engine. His brother’s hands were moving dexterously and surely. “Let’s hear the rest of it, then.”

  Charlie didn’t beat any further about the bush. Straightening, he wiped his hands on a grease-stained rag. “I thought you’d want to get back to Highbrook as quickly as possible.”

  The last of Griff’s inner contentment vanished into the ether. “What’s gone wrong with the theatre?”

  Freddy had somehow disposed of Wanda, and she came to stand by his side. Her fingers lightly touched his elbow and he glanced down at her.

  As Griff moved his thumb over her knuckles, Charlie’s expression seemed to momentarily soften, but his apprehension
swept straight back in.

  “It’s not the theatre,” he said. “It’s Mum and Dad.”

  Chapter Ten

  The best sex of her life should have led to a truly epic afterglow. But even an orgasm that had blown Freddy’s nerve-endings into orbit somewhere around Saturn couldn’t compete with the sense of impending disaster as they neared Highbrook.

  With an anxious eye on the car clock, she made an aborted attempt at running through the scenes on the schedule for today, but Griff had gone into frosty automaton mode at the wheel and she didn’t think he’d appreciate having Lydia Bennet foisted on him again. She was an acquired taste at the best of times.

  “Your parents are all right?” she asked again into the silence. “They haven’t had an accident or anything?”

  “By the sounds of it, nothing has happened to them.” The words had more edges than a Rubik’s Cube. “It’s what they’ve done that’s the problem.”

  What they’d done became apparent the moment that Griff’s car, purring like a kitten after Charlie’s adept ministrations, turned into the Highbrook driveway, and Freddy saw the crane.

  “Holy crap,” she said faintly, when she stepped out onto the gravel. She closed the car door without looking away from the scene unfolding on the east lawn.

  To the obvious dismay of bystanders from both The Austen Playbook crew and Griff’s own production team, a whole new set of builders and some very heavy-duty machinery had arrived to join the party. They were in the beginning stages of turning a section of the Highbrook grounds into a miniature village, complete with a child-size, rideable train track.

  “Village” was an understatement. Miniature city, judging by the dimensions being roped off. It wasn’t quite Legoland, but it would make a lot of the fantasy creations that sprang up around London at Christmastime look like pound-store toy sets.

  Griff’s face set into dark lines as he located his parents in the crowd. He touched his hand to the base of Freddy’s spine, then strode towards them. When he passed what appeared to be the structural framework of a castle, Freddy tilted her head. There was something—Oh, wow. Not just a village. If she was correctly identifying some of those smaller structures, what was coming together was a child-sized replica of Anathorn, the hidden city from the Allegra Hawthorne books.

  Honestly, in other circumstances, she’d want to go and have an enchanted peek at the plans, but the visual reminder of the approaching audition for Anathorn the musical kicked nerves into her gut, and she had a rehearsal to get to. If she didn’t pull off this performance in The Austen Playbook and impress Fiona Gallagher, there would be no future path leading to Anathorn for her, and with everything that had happened during the brief visit to Mallowren, it was going to be hard enough to concentrate as it was.

  In any case, she didn’t think ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the miniatures would go down well. It wasn’t difficult to pick up on the vibes from Griff and Charlie. After the conversation she’d overheard between Griff and his dreamily extravagant mother, she could guess the reason for the gathering thunderclouds.

  And he’d been so beautifully relaxed this morning. For about ten minutes.

  “Jesus God.” Charlie spoke over her shoulder. “They’ve actually hired a crane.”

  “I think it’s safe to assume none of this comes cheap?”

  “Even when they started with single, simple dollhouses, their cost of materials was twice the price they charged for the work. And they give away a lot to kids in need and good causes. Admirable, obviously, but...” Charlie shook his head.

  “Did Griff really have to mortgage his flat once to pay for repairs on the house?” Freddy asked in a low voice, and wasn’t expecting Charlie’s sudden sharp turn.

  “What?”

  “Uh.” She tucked a curl behind her ear. The nervous tic again. “I sort of overheard... I may have got it wrong.”

  “No.” Charlie looked at the rigid lines of his brother’s back as Griff cut an uncompromising path through the crowds of onlookers. All of a sudden, he looked older, that air of the Eton-and-Oxford playboy disappearing behind a grave exterior. Actually, for the first time there was a family resemblance to Griff. “Knowing Griff, I doubt if you did. He’s been sliding us all out of scrapes since he was old enough to walk. The first time I can remember Mum and Dad blowing the annual budget on whatever hobby they had at the time, I was at school, and there was no ready money to pay the next term’s fees. Griff emptied his savings account, talked his way into one of the most exclusive clubs in the financial district, and managed to get stock advice from the most powerful broker in London. Made enough to keep me at school for six more years. He was only a kid himself, just started at uni.”

  Silently, Freddy watched Griff’s restrained, frustrated gestures as he spoke to his parents.

  “He still invests in stocks,” Charlie said. “And apparently pays for a lot more than I’d thought.” When she tore her eyes from Griff, Charlie’s mouth looked tight. “But it’s never enough. You can only invest what you have, and the place needs a whacking big cash injection, or it’s going to end up the property of the bank or some wealthy overseas tycoon, who’ll use it as a summer pad a few days a year.” He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe it would be better if we just sold it.”

  Given Griff’s general lack of sentimentality, in some ways it was surprising that the family hadn’t just sold up. The fact that they were fighting so hard spoke volumes.

  “You don’t really feel that way, do you?” Freddy asked, and he shook his head once.

  “No. No matter where I go, or what I do, it’s home, you know? I want to think it’ll still be here to come back to if I need it.” His smile was a shadow of his usual cockiness. “Even when I’m a dashing old bachelor of eighty with my vintage cars and my adoring elderly girlfriends.” The teasing faded. “Not that I’m doing much to keep the place in the family. One ultimately shite idea after another. I read commerce at uni because I thought, hey, look what Griff did with just a few stocks and shares. Imagine what I could do.” His laugh was brief and intense with self-derision. “Bugger all, it turns out. I don’t have a business brain. I’m pretty sure Griff thinks I don’t have a brain at all. No wonder he thinks I’m useless.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  Charlie lifted a gently mocking brow. “And I’m sure you’re not biased at all.”

  “Oh, I am,” she admitted readily. “I seem to have gone in head-first over your big brother.”

  “Surprising.” Charlie flashed a genuine half-grin. “But I ship it.”

  “You give a good impression of being—” What had Griff called it? Unsquashable? “—very resilient.”

  “I’m an optimist and I like to have fun. I’m not a wind-up toy that just bounces around spouting happy phrases. Despite what Griff thinks, I do worry.”

  If he weren’t several years older and delightfully ginger, she’d think she’d found a long-lost twin brother.

  “I still say you’re wrong about what Griff thinks, and you’re bloody well not useless. I think you’re just in the wrong job. Why didn’t you apprentice with a mechanic or a car manufacturer? Hell, why don’t you sell cars? Griff might have the knack of getting people to do what he wants while being incredibly rude to them, but let’s face it, mate. You’re the one with the sales patter.”

  “I’d have liked to be a mechanic.” Charlie looked over his family again. “Not quite as lucrative as finance.”

  Since he didn’t seem to be doing any great shakes in finance anyway, he might as well just do what he was good at and what made him happy, instead of sacrificing himself trying to follow in someone else’s footsteps.

  Hypocrisy, thy name is Freddy.

  That feeling in her stomach again, like something turning over. She swallowed.

  As Charlie headed over to join Griff in the stand-off with his parents, she
looked at her watch, torn. She wanted to follow and offer silent support, whether it was welcome or not, but she was due at The Henry in four minutes, and none of her colleagues looked to be in a good mood.

  With the amount of noise the crane was making as it set the roof on a scaled-down stone barracks, which appeared to have real gold detailing on the gates, she wasn’t surprised. Rehearsals weren’t going well enough for tolerance over yet more construction noise.

  With a last glance back, she jogged in the opposite direction, to the path that wound through the trees to the theatre. The TV crew were doing recce outside the front entrance of The Henry, muttering about the chaos at the main house.

  Inside, Maya, Sadie, and several of the other principals were already onstage, running through scene variations for the second act. Freddy did her best to smooth her crumpled dress and hoped nobody remembered she’d been wearing it yesterday. There wouldn’t be time to change until the morning tea break.

  Sadie was delivering one of Emma Woodhouse’s monologues with her usual ease of performance, but she looked over at where Freddy stood, and her gaze immediately dropped to her clothing. Naturally, the human spyglass over there would notice every avenue of possible gossip.

  It was a futile hope, given that Sadie ran a personal intelligence service that outshone MI5, but Freddy would prefer she didn’t realise there was anything happening with Griff. He would give absolutely zero shits what Sadie Foster said about him—and he’d probably done her one better for snide remarks in reviews over the years—but Freddy felt irrationally protective of him. Of them.

  “Fancy seeing you here, darling.” A male voice spoke into her ear, and for a second an echo of memory awoke in Freddy’s mind, of her sleepy rousing this morning and Griff’s deeper voice murmuring that same endearment, a warm shiver on her skin.

  Immediate reality intruded on dreamy recollection. She’d know that Mancunian accent anywhere. She turned. “Ferren.”

  She didn’t bother with a polite tone. She was tired and hungry, and as much as she was enjoying playing Lydia, she’d rather still be asleep in Griff’s arms right now, oblivious to everything unfolding in the waking world. And Ferren had caused enough heartache in their family for a lifetime.