A Weekend with Mr Darcy: The perfect summer read for Austen addicts!. Victoria Connelly

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       Chapter Four

      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. But 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 only aware 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 wasn’t passionate about his characters and their fates, how could he expect his readers to love them?

      It was his late mother, Lara Lawton, who’d 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 that had been 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.

      And always a book in her hands, Warwick remembered. There was so much time 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 Bronte. His mother had been delighted with the result and persuaded him to write some of his own stories. At first, he’d done it to please her but he’d 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 and all those evenings together spent watching Jane Austen and Daphne Du Maurier adaptations and films like Dragonwyck and Gone With the Wind had left their mark.

      Now he was sailing high in the bestseller lists and leading a double life as a woman. For a moment, he wondered what his mother would make of it all. What would she say if she knew her little boy was now known by the majority of the population as Lorna? She’d probably laugh - that lovely silvery laugh of hers that had always made him laugh too.

      His friends would laugh as well. He dreaded to think how much they’d laugh if they ever found out. Warwick Lawton writing as a woman! The same six foot two Warwick Lawton who went rock climbing and abseiling with his mates at weekends swapping his keyboard for the feel of a bit of Peak District gritstone under his fingers? Surely not! But, if he was honest, he rather liked the duality of his nature. It was like playing a game. One minute, he was Warwick, speeding up the motorway in his latest fast car with a tangle of ropes and harnesses in his boot; the next he was Lorna researching ladies’ undergarments in the early nineteenth СКАЧАТЬ