Karen Doornebos - Definitely Not Mr Darcy

She’d read it more than once. Now it made sense that they only sent one man’s biography instead of the entire cast or an array of bios of other possible suitors. It would be her and a gaggle of other women pitted against one another to snare the wealthy Mr. Wrightman.

At least he looked good on paper. If Chloe could believe the bio, the Oxford-educated Jane Austen fan valued honesty, was ready to start a family, but also loved to travel. She and he seemed compatible in every way, but her hopes had been crushed before.

“Yes, I read it.” She turned her back on the TVs, handed George the bio without even looking at it, and paced the floor. The camera followed.

A gangly girl dressed in black sauntered out of a room in the back of the trailer to the Miele espresso maker.

George checked his iPhone again. “Chin up, Miss Parker. You’re an American heiress come to summer here in the English countryside. I fully expect you to take on that role.”

Did he say “heiress”?

“Heiresses don’t need to win a man.” She walked back over to him.

He handed her a thick black hand-bound book with Miss Parker’s Rulebook embossed in gold script on the cover. “Tell Janey what kind of coffee you take.”

“Double espresso skinny latte, please. If you can’t, then just a regular—”

George interrupted. “An heiress would not concern herself with whether the hired help can or can’t do her bidding. It’s not her problem.” He finally set his iPhone aside, picked up a remote, and aimed it at the three TV screens. “You’re going to love doing this show. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Check it out. Here’s what’s going on throughout the estate.”

A young woman in a bonnet fed chickens on one screen, on another a cook chopped herbs. And, on screen three, a dark-haired guy paused near a copper bathtub, untying his cravat while light from a window behind the tub gave him a silhouette quality. A butler removed his waistcoat and pulled the loose linen shirt over his head. The guy’s shoulder blades popped. Was that him? The Mr. Wrightman she was supposed to win over?

She pretended to fan herself. “Be still, my beating heart. Oh, George, is that my future husband?”

George eyed the young woman feeding the chickens while he talked. The swooshing of the milk frother on the espresso machine almost drowned out his voice. “Rule number one. Sarcasm will not be tolerated. Rule number two. You don’t have a daughter on this program. Not a word of it, and Fiona’s been instructed not to speak of her with you, nor to say anything about it to the rest of the cast.”

Janey gave George his coffee in a black mug and handed Chloe her latte in a white paper cup, complete with plastic lid and cardboard sleeve. “Thank you,” Chloe said, noting the significance of the fact that hers was a to-go cup.

Without a word, Janey slunk back to wherever she came from.

Even through the cardboard sleeve, the coffee burned Chloe’s hand and she set it down on the table littered with gossip magazines.

George finished off his coffee. “It’s all very celeb of you, being a single mum in the twenty-first century, but you don’t have a daughter here. That would be very uncool unless you’re a widow, and that just wasn’t sexy enough for us, quite frankly. Here you’re an American heiress eager to secure a place in society—and fast. This may be your last chance, considering your age.”

Chloe said nothing.

“You need to marry a man of society and save your American family from ruin. They can only afford to keep you here for three weeks.”

Chloe turned her back to the camera. “Why would an heiress need to marry up?” She whispered, “It sounds a little desperate.”

“We do our best to base everyone’s stories on their current circumstances.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He looked at the camera then turned away from it, lowering his voice. “You come from a blue-blood English family on your mother’s side, but you’ve fallen on hard times. Your business is about to go belly-up and you can’t rally the cash to afford your home or your daughter’s private school. You depleted your savings just to fly over here. Am I right?”

The air conditioner blew cold air on her bare back. The camera panned around her. The trailer closed in and felt too small for four people. He sure did his homework. She was a girl without a fortune, a damsel in financial distress. She gravitated to the wine refrigerator. She needed a drink. Or two. “Miss Parker may need financial security by marrying a certain gentleman, but I don’t. I’ve got lots of irons in the fire.”

“I’m sure you do.” George smirked. “Think of this as another iron. Get him to propose and you’ve won our little Regency love match. A hundred thousand dollars. How can you resist?”

“Ugh. I have to get him to propose to win the money? Please.”

“Certainly you, of all contestants, would know that the only way a Regency woman of your stature could acquire such a sum would be to marry into it. Women couldn’t work to amass their fortune, you know that.”

Chloe sighed. “This might be more realistic than I’d bargained for.”

“Who knows? Perhaps you’ll fall in love with Mr. Wrightman.”

On TV number three, the man, who she was convinced must be Mr. Wrightman, was now in the tub, and bowed his dark-haired head while his servant poured pitchers of steaming water over him. Chloe gaped at his broad shoulders, which glistened in the sunlight. What if he was The One? As soon as the question shimmered through her, she thought of how her employee, Emma, might react if she quit and came home.

“Let me get this straight,” Emma would say. “The guy was good-looking and rich. And you came home because—?”

Chloe had nothing to lose—except her dignity.

“If I can do this, you certainly can,” George said. “Come here so I can wire you for sound.”

She folded her bare arms over her shelflike bosom, and that wasn’t easy.

“You belong here, Miss Parker. You drive your college intern batty with your four o’clock teatimes, you take carriage rides in the city instead of taxis, although I doubt you can afford that indulgence now, and you don’t have cable TV. Do you think the average American eight-year-old even knows who Jane Austen is? Your daughter does. Think of how disappointed she’ll be if you go home now.”

She’d thought of that already. “You’re a rake, George. Isn’t that what they’d call you in 1812? An absolute rake.”

He smiled. “I’ve been called worse. This is my business, Miss Parker. Reality.”

“Hook me up, then—with the mike, that is.”

He laughed and clipped the wireless translucent microphone pack to the back of her gown, then draped a silky shawl over her shoulders. “Mr. Wrightman handpicked you. You! Out of eight thousand applicants—”

Chloe interrupted. “Eight thousand?”

She felt flattered, and already enamored of the kind of man who would participate in such an elaborate Jane Austenesque scheme in the hopes of finding his true love—if she were to believe all this.

“You’re the only American contestant.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. It had a competitive, Olympic-type feel to it, as if she alone were representing the entire United States, and she hardly qualified to represent the typical American woman.

“Rule number three,” George said. “Stay in character. No talking about the Internet and jobs and iPods.”

“I think we’re up to rule number five now. But not to worry about me babbling on about modern life. I’m ecstatic to be away from it.”

“Every day there will be a task, some tasks will take only a few hours, others will be ongoing, but each small task will be worth five points. Larger tasks and competitions will be worth fifteen. You’ll acquire these ‘Accomplishment Points’ by completing challenges such as trimming a bonnet and seeing a few Regency craft projects through to completion.