Jane Air
Around Midnight, Book 1
Anna Wellschlager
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Thank You
Pride and Penelope
Excerpt
Also by Anna:
Midnight, Maine
About the Author
Jane Air
by Anna Wellschlager
Copyright 2020 by Anna Wellschlager
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Cover design by Sarah Hansen
Edition: June 2020
For more information or to subscribe to Anna’s newsletter, visit www.annawellschlager.com.
Readers help writers keep writing. If you enjoy this love story, please consider leaving a review wherever you feel readers will find it!
Created with Vellum
For Booklovers
and
The Real Jane
1
Jane
Everyone’s talking about it. What he looks like. When he’s coming. Putting the last of the mail in my bag, I hear the whispers floating down the hallway. No one is speaking at full volume, but the place practically vibrates with gossip.
Because it’s not every day that a big movie star moves into a small town.
A small town like Midnight, Maine.
And a big movie star like David Jacobs.
Yes, that David Jacobs.
The one you’ve read about.
The one I’ve read about. And I don’t have time for that.
He’s moving here.
That’s the word, anyway.
“It’s the old Hanson estate, up the hill behind the orchard.”
“No, no, he’s buying the orchard.”
“I heard he’s building something, down the road.”
I close my bag and stand up. It’s hard not to smile. The students are so excited, but I even overheard Professor Jeffreys, twenty years older than me, discussing it with one of the administrators.
“I think it’s all made up.”
That last voice is a bit louder than the rest and I bite my lip as I head to the door.
Whoever said that, I have to agree. I mean, no offense to Midnight, our lovely little town, but it’s just not the kind of place where the beautiful people want to live. Visit, maybe. Shoot a movie, sure. Every Lifetime movie I watch looks like it was shot here.
But move in? Let’s see…
We have three bars. They shut down by 11.
We have a few restaurants. Cafes, more like. My friend, Dory, owns one. The pie is great, I’ll admit, but I doubt that’s enough to appeal to the Hollywood set.
Cute little shops. Great public library. Couple of dog parks. Local college down the road. Orchards. Small lakes tucked behind winding roads. Farms with horses and sheep and goats, and all that stuff. Good school system. Low crime. The kind of place where neighbors know each other and everyone has a set of everyone else’s keys.
It’s great, actually. Midnight is a fantastic town.
Personally, I’d like to keep it that way. No offense to the Hollywood crowd, but there’s a reason that the people who live here don’t live there.
Not that you’d know it, the way everyone keeps whispering his name, passing it back and forth in secret like a dirty magazine.
Names are funny things. Some, like David Jacobs, inspire lurid fantasies, heated discussions, and I’m sure more than the occasional late night, ahem, session.
Others do not.
Like mine.
Professor J.A.
The script is bold and black and hangs on a plastic board that catches my eye as I close my office door, locking the monstrous piles of books behind me. I keep meaning to replace it with an actual sign, something official that says, Here is where I belong, but the university has moved my office so many times I can’t be bothered to drill something into a wall that I’m just going to have to remove later.
Plus, I like to avoid presenting my name in full wherever possible.
Jane Air.
Yeah, I know. It’s cute, right? The literature professor named after the famous character. You think, when I tell you it’s Jane Air, that I spell it Jane Eyre. Like the novel. And you get all excited and wonder if I have some sort of gothic romance in my life, if I’m a governess in a castle, escaped from a terrible situation. If some hot recluse is going to fall in love with me, sweep me off my feet, and then accidentally let slip that he’s locked his first wife in the attic. Then I’ll run off and almost marry some lame dude, but get called back, the aching cry of my lost love summoning me over the moors. And he’ll be blind, and the first wife conveniently dead, and I’ll have found out about a magical inheritance and we’ll make it work, in the burned down castle, with the dead wife’s ghost and the super weird servants.
Yeah, sure.
I’ve read that. I even teach it.
I don’t live that.
But my name makes you think it’s a possibility. If only my Mom had gotten the spelling correct. Then, maybe, I could have been a Bronte goddess, ripped from the novels of a classic romance, forever associated with problematic protagonists and moody heroes. Perhaps I could have been running across wild, windswept landscapes towards some dark, brooding man, instead of writing an academic analysis of the significance of gender representation in the last quarter of the text.
Nope.
Not even a little bit.
If my life were a book, you would skim it, if you picked it up at all.
And that’s the real joke. The misspelled namesake, Jane Air, could totally work on a different sort of woman. Someone funny and witty, clever and creative. Becky with the good hair. An international business person, or world traveler. One of the beautiful people. It would be so perfect. Can you imagine? On talk shows and magazine
