Page 137 of The Fiancée Farce
“Brooks, I—”
“No. It’s true. I handled my heartbreak terribly. Not a day went by that I didn’t regret letting this family dictate my choices. Control my life.” He shook his head. “Be better than me, Gemma. Rise above it.” Brooks smiled softly. “As for feeling like you’ve failed, well, failure is an inescapable part of life. Butfailingdoesn’t make you afailure. And I’m sorry your father made you feel like the two were synonymous. You are more than your achievements, Gemma. You are brilliant, and ambitious, and you aregood, do you hear me? And what you do or do not achieve in this life has no bearing on your value.”
God.She dragged a hand under her nose and laughed. “I hate you so much.”
She didn’t. Not even a little.
The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. “Love you, too, niece.”
“Why couldn’t you have married my mom?” she asked. “Then you could’ve been my dad.”
Brooks threw his head back and laughed. “I make a much better uncle, trust me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re drunk,” he said, still smiling.
Yes, but not so drunk that she didn’t know what she was saying.Not so drunk that she didn’t mean it. “Whatever you are, you’re pretty great.”
“If I’m so great, maybe my advice is worth listening to. Worth taking.”
She sniffed hard and leaned her head back against the wall. “Let’s say I try. What happens the next time I inevitably fuck up?”
“Then you wake up the next day and you try again and fail again and fail better.”
Gemma snorted. “Okay, Samuel Beckett.”
“I mean it, Gemma. You might not deserve Tansy now—though it’s not up for you to decide—but you willneverdeserve her if you continue to sit around wasting your time and getting plastered on a yacht docked in alake.”
Loath as she was to admit it, he had a point.
“The way I see it, you have two choices. You can stay here, pickling your liver with my—” Brooks looked at the bottle in his hand and winced. “Really, Gemma? My Glenlivet?”
She shrugged. “Sorry?”
“Can’t say you aren’t my niece.” He rolled his eyes. “You can stay here, pickling your liver with my eighteen-year-old Glenlivet single malt scotch,oryou can get dressed—” He sniffed, wrinkling his nose. “Correction. You canshowerand get dressed—”
“Hey!” she protested, sniffing her hair and—oh God, she really was rank.
“—and come with me to the general meeting,” Brooks finished.
Her jaw went slack. “Why in God’s name would I want to do that?”
“Because,” he said, taking a swig from the bottle and barely wincing. “Tucker hasn’t inherited the company yet. If and when he does, he intends to sell it.”
“What?”No.All this, everything Tucker had put her through, putTansythrough, and for what? To turn around and sell the company for a quick buck? “To who? Wait—how do you even know this?”
“Remember how I told you I was going to be your inside man? Well, slandering you to your father and Tucker worked wonders.” He smiled, wry. “Or it did until the evening of your rehearsal dinner, during which your father saw me speaking to your mother and swiftly booted me back out of theinner sanctum.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m only sorry they never quite trusted me enough to divulgeallthe details of their sordid plan. Otherwise, you must know I’d have told you before Tucker could get up and—”
“I believe you, Brooks. I trust you, okay?”
Brooks’s face did something complicated, blinking rapidly. “My, thank you. That is—” He cleared his throat. “Now isn’t the time for me to be getting sentimental, is it?”
“Rain check? You can blubber on me later.” She smiled. “I’ll even let you use my shoulder as a hanky.”
He laughed. “I have my own hankies,thank you very much.”
“Monogrammed?”
