Page 30 of The Fiancée Farce
Her voice cracked and squeaked—mortifying.
“How else.” Gemma nodded. “No holds barred, Tansy. I want the truth.”
A wave of frustration rose up inside her. She’d never lied; she’dgivenGemma the truth. She didn’t owe Gemma her past. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. But if they were doing this,reallydoing this, getting married, maybe she ought to tell Gemma the whole truth. She’d rather Gemma hear it from her than from someone else. Honestly, it was a miracle Gemma didn’t already know, what with being related to Tucker.
Gemma reached down, picking up the skein of yarn off the floor. Mills darted out from beneath the coffee table and cried, mad at his toy being touched. “Holy shit.” She gasped. “You have a cat.” She looked at Tansy with huge eyes. “You didn’t tell me you had a cat.”
Tansy snickered. “I have two. They’re ragdoll kittens. I was fostering them for a friend, but I decided to keep them. That’s Mills. Boon is around here somewhere.”
Probably wreaking havoc, considering he was the more chaotic of the twins.
“Mills and Boon?” Gemma laughed, resting her hand against her heaving bosom. “Clever. I like it.”
So did she. What better name for a pair of bookstore cats than Mills & Boon, an homage to one of the most illustrious romance imprints? “You can just leave the yarn on the floor. It’s theirs now.”
Gemma dropped the skein. Mills swished his tail and disappeared beneath the coffee table, chattering quietly, appeased now that Gemma had her paws off his toy. “So—”
“If you don’t believe me, why don’t you go askTucker?”
If she happened to spit his name out with a little more vitriol than necessary, whatever. It was her house; she made the rules.
“Tansy,fiancée o’ mine, did you miss the part where I said I want the truth? I don’t trust my cousin as far as I can throw him. Granted, the last time we were on my uncle’s yacht, Ididtry to throw him overboard. Unfortunately, he has a low center of gravity and is disappointingly steady on his feet.” Gemma wrinkled her nose. “Point is, I don’t trust him. Not a whit. But I have a friend Idotrust who has a friend who went to Montlake Prep. According to them, you and Tucker were more than classmates.” She made a face, lips pursing. “A lot more.”
A bevy of awful words pirouetted through Tansy’s mind, words she’d been called in whispers in hallways and boldly online.Whore. Slut. Desperate. Sleaze. Delusional. Tramp.Harlotorslattern, if someone had been prepping for the SATs.
“Go on,” Tansy said, immune to the words by this point, the names. They bounced off her like—what was the saying? Rubber? “What did your friend’s friend have to say about me?”
Something flickered in Gemma’s gaze. “I’d rather hear it from you. That’s why I’m here.”
“You want to hear it from me?” Something ugly bubbled up inside her. “You want the whole truth?” She didn’t wait for Gemma to nod; the words just kept coming, like blood seeping from an open wound. “Let me guess, your friend—sorry, yourfriend’sfriend said I was obsessed with Tucker. That I couldn’t take a hint.” An ugly laugh escaped her. “Or maybe I was easy? Was I asking for it?”
Gemma frowned sharply. “I don’t—”
“Tucker never could get his story straight.”
But no matter how he told it, whether she pursued him or he pursued her, she was always the floozy who gave it up too easy. She was the one who parted her thighs for Tucker; no one ever asked what it took for him to give it up forher. Hescored, shewasscored, a prize that was worthless once won. A double standard.Disgusting.
Gemma opened her mouth and closed it, blotches of red appearing on her cheeks, shamefaced. “I don’t—I didn’t come here because—I didn’t know that—if... I just wanted...”
She could’ve let Gemma flounder. Except, no, shecouldn’t. The anticipation, waiting for Gemma to play the guessing game, it hurt. Like salt in a wound, all achy and raw. She didn’t need to know that Gemma thought the worst of her. The specifics of it. Tansy could fill in the blanks.
“You want the truth?” Tansy crossed her arms and leaned against the wall that divided the tiny yet sufficient kitchen from the living room. “I’ll tell you the truth. My mom died when I was twelve, and my dad remarried when I was fourteen. We moved out of the apartment,thisapartment, and in with Katherine and Ashleigh in Montlake. It was a different school district, not that it mattered; Ashleigh was in private school, Montlake Prep, and Dad and Katherine mutually decided it would be better for me if I went to Montlake, too. That way, I’d know someone. That way, I’d have a friend.”
Even though she and Ashleigh had initially butted heads, with Ashleigh refusing to accept a newcomer into her home, Dad and Katherine had remained optimistic.Ignorant.
“My dad died a year later.” At which point she’d had no support structure. Not a reliable one, at least. Katherine had drowned her grief at losing yet another husband in bottle after bottle of wine, and Ashleigh had seen to it that Tansy remained an outcast at Montlake Prep. “I kept my head down. Focused on my grades, put in a few hours at the store every afternoon. It was easy to do since I didn’t have many friends. I was the new girl whose mom had died and father had remarried, and to make matters worse, because I was shy, people thought I was either stuck-up or stupid. Ashleigh didn’t like me, and Madison was indifferent.” She told the story, plain and perfunctory. Like it had happened to someone else, someone who wasn’t her. Because itwasn’ther. She wasn’t that girl anymore. “Tucker was a senior, and I had a crush on him.”
Gemma wrinkled her nose.
“I thought I was subtle. Just like I thought I was special when Tucker started paying attention to me. I was a sophomore; he was a senior. He asked me out, but told me we had to keep it a secret.His dad was tough on him, wanted him focused on his classes and getting into a good college.” What a crock. “I thought it was grand and romantic, dating Tucker van Dalen in secret. I was so stupid.”
“You were what? Fifteen? Sixteen? You’re supposed to be a little stupid at sixteen.” Gemma’s smile was small and fleeting, but it was there. It was real. Tansy saw it. “If not then, when?”
She was pretty sure that was rhetorical.
“He’d send a car to pick me up, since I was too young to drive. We’d go out. Sometimes. Dinner, drinks, parties, usually expensive places where no one ever carded us because they knew who he was, who his dad was. It all made me feel so... so mature. Like I was all grown up.”
Whatever sadness she had left inside her, it wasn’tforTucker. Wasn’t even really about Tucker or their relationship, if she could even call it that. Any residual sadness was for the girl she’d been, so full of hope, bursting with it. So trusting. A romantic through and through. That girl hadn’t just gotten her heart broken—people went through breakups and got their hearts broken every day; that was life—she’d had her trust annihilated, her name run through the mud, and her reputation destroyed.
