Chapter Seven
Macey
I curse under my breath as three women surround me in my office at The Cowherd late Saturday afternoon. Mama pulls at my hair, adding copious amounts of hair spray. Ginny tugs at my dress, making sure my corset is firmly in place. Eloise, the owner of Darcy Bridal Boutique, finishes up the hem so I won’t tear the gown when I walk.
And I’ve had it. I’ve been poked and prodded at for the last two hours, all to prepare for a Wild Darcy Derby I never wanted to participate in, to begin with.
“That’s enough!” I step back. “I’m sure I look fine.”
Eloise stumbles forward onto her hands and knees from my sudden movement, and Ginny steps away, but I can’t shake Mama, who’s glued to my hair like a cat on a mouse.
I bat at my mother’s hands until she lets go. Then I walk into the bathroom and survey the damage.
My hair is piled up onto the top of my head in a curly, styled bun, and the corset is so snug my boobs look about two sizes bigger than they are.
“Look at your cleavage!” Ginny’s come up behind me and is staring into the mirror. “That corset is fantastic!”
“This thing’s coming off as soon as possible,” I vow. “I have my bag packed with a tank top and shorts. You’ll hold it for me?”
“Of course. But you know—” She giggles. “I’d hold off on changing until after dinner. Logan’s going to want to jump you as soon as he sees that corset. And all those buttons and ties could be fun for him to work with, you know.”
“Shh. Don’t get my mother more intrigued than she already is. She’s desperate for me to date like a normal person.”
“How is Logan going to make sure he wins, exactly?” Ginny says in a lower voice. “I know he’s an amazing rider and all, but so are lots of men in this town.”
I shrug. “I didn’t ask him how. He just said he had it and not to worry.”
And in over twenty years, Logan Wild hasn’t let me down yet.
* * *
As Ginny and Eloise head outside, my mother shuts the door to my office, closing the two of us inside.
When she stares pointedly at my left wrist, I immediately cover it with my right hand.
“Mama, this isn’t the time.”
“This is exactly the time, baby. You know what Vivian’s diary says.”
Yes. I could recite it in my darn sleep.
Despite that fact, I know what she wants.
I reach inside the slot underneath my desk and pull out the torn antiquated page from Vivian Elmstock Haskins’s diary, the page Mama discovered one tipsy night at the Cowherd when Daddy was away getting sober. I may not believe in the legend of Darcy, but Vivian is a woman I can relate to. She’s the Olde English version of my mother—bitter, melodramatic, and trapped in a marriage she both desired but despised.
Vivian was the first lady of Darcy. She was married to town founder and first mayor Frederick Woodholm Haskins, and her diary has been kept as a historical artifact. It belongs to the Darcy Museum, but The Cowherd borrows it for every wedding season in Hill Country.
I sigh as bullet points of the legend burst into my head:
In 1857, Vivian found a copy of Pride and Prejudice left behind by Frederick’s high-society mistress. I guess she wasn’t too happy because she blamed the forty-years-deceased Jane Austen and her idealistic notions of romantic love for Frederick’s affair.
Desperate to keep his angry wife from leaving him, Frederick hired a witch to cast a curse and kidnap Jane Austen’s spirit. The story goes that she was taken away from her soul mate lover who lived in the same cemetery. She ended up at the county jail in Darcy, Texas, the same jail my great-great-granddaddy won in a poker game and converted into The Cowherd Whiskey Saloon & Chapel.
The curse has only one way to be broken: two soul mates must marry in the presence of Jane Austen’s ghost by the one hundred and fiftieth year of the town’s founding.
I glance down at the diary page in my hand. I don’t need to unravel it and read Vivian’s faded beautiful cursive to rememberitsbullet points:
The eldest daughter of the jailkeeper is also cursed, a curse marked by a scar on her flesh.
