Free Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford

Brakeston. Now she was in New York City, having signed a book contract and gone over the edits with her editor. Her handsome, funny, smart editor.
    She brushed the thought from her mind. It was true that Kelly was all of those things. But thinking about him in that way was hardly professional. Still, over the dinner they’d shared followingtheir work on the manuscript, she had found herself behaving more and more like a besotted schoolgirl and less like a woman of 234. It was during the performance of
Gypsy
, to which Kelly had taken her after dinner, that she had realized that he reminded her very much of Richard Mansfield, the enchanting nineteenth-century actor and star of the D’Oyly Carte opera company. She had attended seventeen consecutive performances of
The Mikado
just to see Mansfield, and her devotion to him had not faltered even during the nasty Jack the Ripper business, when he was one of the prime suspects. (She’d known the Ripper, and although charming, he was not nearly as handsome as Mansfield.)
    Her crush on Mansfield had eventually faded, and she suspected this one would as well. It was just the excitement of once again being a published author. She turned and looked at the cover of her book, the poster of which she had taped to the mirror above the room’s dresser. It hardly seemed possible that it was really
her
book.
“Constance
,” she said aloud. “By Jane Fairfax.” She giggled, embarrassed by how thrilling it was to say her name like that.
    The title of the book, she had to admit, was not her best. She preferred something pithy. After all, could anything be better than
Pride and Prejudice
or
Sense and Sensibility
? True,
Mansfield Park
and
Northanger Abbey
were a bit drab, but that had been the fashion at the time. And at least they weren’t as bad as Scott’s
Tales of My Landlord
.
    Anyway, she liked the cover. And she mostly liked being Jane Fairfax. She would have preferred to be Jane Austen, but that was of course impossible. Besides, she was used to being a Fairfax now.
    Opening the minibar, she took out two Scharffen Berger dark chocolate bars and a half bottle of Shiraz. Then she lay down onthe bed, sinking into the impossibly soft mattress with a contented sigh. Pulling the wrapper from the first bar, she nibbled the corner as she turned on the television and began flipping through the channels. She watched a minute or two of several different things, but none held her interest. She had consumed half of the chocolate bar before she recognized a familiar face on one of the channels and stopped.
    It was Peter Cushing. And the film, she realized shortly thereafter, was
Brides of Dracula
. It was one of her favorites, and she had not seen it in a long time. Now she settled in to enjoy it, alternately sipping from the bottle of wine and taking bites of the chocolate.
    One of the infamous Hammer horror films,
Brides of Dracula
was enormously fun, particularly, Jane thought, if you were a vampire yourself. Watching the young heroine fall under the spell of the gorgeous and tragic vampire Baron Meinster (the name made her cringe) amused her, as did the generally ridiculous plot and the fact that despite the title and one brief reference in the dialogue, not once did Dracula himself actually appear in the film.
    Yet as she watched the story unfold, Jane found herself growing sad. For the first time, she identified with young Marianne Danielle, the innocent schoolteacher tricked into helping Meinster escape from the room in which he was being kept prisoner by his mother the baroness. Rather than seeing her as a stupid girl who overlooks the obvious, Jane saw her as a girl in love, a girl who sees a wounded man needing her comfort.
    By the end of the film she had worked her way through the bottle and most of the second chocolate bar, and felt a bit sick. And although she was happy that Marianne had escaped the fate of the other vampire brides, the scenes in which the baron is firstdisfigured