A Weekend with Mr. Darcy Read Online Free Page B

out,’ he said.
    â€˜Hang out where?’
    â€˜Wherever you want me to,’ he said, giving a lascivious wink. ‘We don’t spend enough time together. I thought it would be nice to have a weekend away.’
    â€˜But we won’t be together, Jace. I’ll be at the conference— all weekend.’
    â€˜There’ll still be time to see each other, won’t there?’
    Robyn stared at him. What was this? Jace had never been the sort to suggest a weekend away together before. Maybe he’d guessed she wanted to break up with him. Maybe this was his way of trying to smooth things over.
    â€˜Got a beer?’ he asked.
    Robyn walked through to the kitchen and retrieved a can of beer from the fridge. What on earth was she going to do? The thought of Jace ‘hanging out’ anywhere near Jane Austen country was just frightful.
    â€˜Any crisps?’ he asked as she entered the room with the beer.
    She shook her head.
    â€˜Nuts?’
    She returned to the kitchen and came back with a bag of fruit and nuts. Jace grimaced. ‘No salty ones?’
    â€˜No,’ she said, wincing as he placed his beer can on her newest copy of Pride and Prejudice . He saw where she was looking.
    â€˜Oh sorry, babes,’ he said, picking it up. Robyn saw the dark circle embossed on Elizabeth Bennet’s face and couldn’t help noticing that Jace’s feet which were now sockless, were dangerously close to the BBC DVD of Persuasion , a personal favourite of hers.
    With such atrocities as these before her, she thought it best if she left the room.

Chapter 4
    Warwick Lawton picked up the last letter he’d received from Katherine Roberts and read it again. The smile didn’t leave his face until the very end when he gave a weary sigh and scratched his chin. She didn’t know, did she? She had absolutely no idea that Lorna Warwick was a man. Why should she? The biography in the front of his novels was as fictional as the novels themselves, and nobody but his agent and publisher knew the truth because as far as his professional life went, he was a recluse, shunning the media and turning his back on book signings. Even his close friends didn’t know the truth. They were aware only that Warwick wrote ‘some drivel or other’ and never pushed him for any more information and that was just the way that Warwick liked it. Not that he was ashamed of what he wrote—certainly not. He loved his books. After all, if he weren’t passionate about his characters and their fates, how could he expect his readers to love them?
    His late mother, Lara Lawton, had taught him the pleasure of reading and writing. She’d been an actress although she’d never risen to the great heights that her name and beauty had always suggested to the young Warwick. Lara Lawton . It should have been a name emblazoned across a thousand theatres, a name that dominated the cinema screen and was splashed across magazine covers. Instead she’d swum in the shallows of the world of film and television, taking bit roles here and background roles there.
    â€˜And always a book in her hands,’ Warwick remembered. There was so much time for her hanging around sets and his mother had been a passionate reader, telling him the plots of all the novels she read and encouraging him when he sat down one day, determined to rewrite the story of Wuthering Heights and give it a happy ending that had more to do with Hollywood than Brontë. His mother had been delighted with the result and persuaded him to write some of his own stories. At first he did it to please her but he soon found that it also pleased him and that had been the beginning of his writing career.
    The fact that he’d chosen to write historical romances still amazed him and he often wondered if he should turn his attention to thrillers or crime or something a bit more masculine but his mother’s early influence had been too powerful