Free Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford Page B

manuscript. When they were done, Kelly tucked the pages into his briefcase.
    “We should get you to Penn Station,” he said. “Your train leaves in half an hour.”
    Jane went upstairs to retrieve her bag. Then Kelly flagged them a cab and they rode to the train station.
    “Have a safe trip home,” Kelly said, kissing Jane on the cheek again before she exited the cab in front of Penn Station. “I’ll call you in a few days to discuss what happens next.”
    Jane waved goodbye and watched as the cab pulled away, her head filled with thoughts of Kelly, her book, and the new possibilities in her life. Had his lips lingered a bit longer than was strictly polite?
    The train was not particularly crowded, and Jane had a row to herself. She settled into the window seat and opened the book she’d started on the journey down the day before. But she found herself unable to concentrate. She would have to tell people about her novel, of course. Lucy anyway. Perhaps Walter. Suddenly she thought of Walter. She saw his face, and imagined how excited he would be for her when she told him she was going to be published.His congratulations would be genuine, not the insincere words of someone jealous of her success. Walter was incapable of insincerity.
    Despite knowing it was foolish, Jane couldn’t help comparing Walter to Kelly. They were so different. Where Kelly moved in a fast-paced world, Walter was content with small-town life. Where Kelly was worldly, Walter was simple. Yet both were kind men. Most important, Jane reminded herself, Walter had already expressed his feelings for her. Kelly was just her editor.
    And yet she couldn’t help wondering if Kelly might not become more. They were—at least as far as Kelly knew—roughly the same age. They shared many interests. And they would be working closely together. Wasn’t it possible that romance could blossom?
    Jane felt guilty for even thinking such a thing. But there it was. She couldn’t deny that she found Kelly attractive. And part of her believed that he might accept the inevitable truth about her condition more easily than Walter would.
I imagine there are far more unbelievable things in New York than vampires
, she thought.
    As the train left the station and began its steady crawl north, Jane continued to wrestle with the question of her romantic life like a dog worrying a bone. After two hundred years of romantic deprivation, it was time for a change.
    “I won’t do anything rash,” she assured herself. “I’ll just take things as they come.”
    It was a sensible decision, and she was pleased to have come to it. After all, she had made no promises to Walter. Until she did, she was free to do anything she liked. And at the moment she wasn’t doing anything but speculating. If she found that Kellywas interested, then she would do the right thing and make a decision between them.
    Having settled the matter, she returned to her book. She was trying, and failing, to make her way through Barbara Pym’s
The Sweet Dove Died. She isn’t a bit like me
, Jane thought as she finished a page.
I can’t imagine why anyone thinks we’re similar. She’s all tea and garden parties and ladies’ hats
.

Chapter 10
    She had not expected him to be in attendance at the party. Yet when she entered the drawing room she saw him seated on a sofa in intimate proximity to Barbara Wexley. He whispered into her ear. The girl giggled and tapped him lightly on the knee, to which Jonathan reacted with feigned hurt, turning his gaze toward the doorway. Seeing Constance standing there, he smiled mockingly, and she felt her heart burn with hatred for him
.
    —Jane Austen,
Constance
, manuscript
    “S OMETHING’S DIFFERENT ,” J ANE SAID, LOOKING AROUND THE store. “You moved something.”
    Lucy gave Jane a big hug. “Welcome home,” she said.
    “I was only gone for forty-eight hours,” Jane said. “It wasn’t as if I went off to war.”
    Lucy, who went to hang up her coat in the