Page 52 of The Fiancée Farce
One glass of champagne was her limit.
Gemma shrugged. “More for me.” She took another pull, drinking the liquor like it was water. “I want to talk about you.”
“Me?”
“No, the otheryouin the room,” Gemma teased, grinning behind the bottle’s mouth. She dragged the side of her hand against her lips, catching an errant drop of scotch that she proceeded to lick off her wrist, tongue darting out to capture it.
Tansy swallowed hard, suddenly parched.
“I know your deep, dark secrets”—Gemma smiled softly, making it obvious she meant no harm—“but I want to know more than that. I want to knowyou.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Hmm. Let’s see... let’s start with what Idoknow. You’re a bookworm. You’ve got two cats named Mills and Boon. You’ve got quite the collection of romance novels.” Gemma grinned. “I peeked at your bookshelves. Like I said, impeccable taste.”
Tansy plucked a book off the shelf, a heavy leatherbound volume with deckled edges. She smoothed her hand over the well-loved cover, little raised nicks in the leather tickling her palm. Books truly were a feast for the senses. “All true.”
“So tell me.” Gemma propped her hip against the arm of a nearby emerald velvet wingback chair. “Did you always want to own a bookstore?”
“As far back as I can remember.” She flipped the front cover open and was immediately greeted with that slightly musty smell she loved so much. The paper inside was yellowed with age. She leaned against the bookshelf and sighed. Beautiful. “My dad always talked about the store like it would be mine one day, so I always just assumed it would be.” And built her life and dreams around it accordingly. “How about you? Did you always want to be...”
She trailed off, not exactly sure what to say.
“A newspaper heiress?” Gemma laughed and lifted her dress sothat she could kick off her shoes, giving Tansy an eyeful of smooth bare skin all the way up to her thighs. Her heels—gorgeous, impractically tall hot pink pumps that matched her dress—clattered against the hardwood floor. “Yeah, no. But we’re not talking about me, remember? We’re talking about you.”
It took Tansy a second to get her mouth to work; her brain was still stuck on that flash of golden skin. “And I can’t be curious about you, too?” Tansy slipped the book back onto the shelf where it belonged. “Because I am. Curious.”
“Careful.” Gemma took a smaller sip of scotch. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
“You’re forgetting the second half of the saying.But satisfaction brought it back.”
Gemma’s gaze dipped to Tansy’s mouth, and Tansy’s stomach fluttered, filled to the brim with butterflies. “Satisfaction, huh? I like the sound of that.”
Tansy squirmed, shelf biting into her shoulder blades as she pressed her back against the bookcase. “If you didn’t want to be a newspaper heiress, what did you want to be?”
“How much time do you have?” Gemma joked.
She did that a lot, used humor to deflect.
“How long do we have until someone finds us and kicks us out of here?”
“If history’s anything to go off, we’ve got all night.” Gemma ran her finger around the mouth of the bottle, briefly dipping it inside.
Tansy tore her eyes away and reached back, lifting her heavy hair off her neck, trying to cool down. Thoughts of spendingall nightwith Gemma, of everything they could get up to, were making her sweat.
“I guess I went through the usual phases kids go through. Iremember wanting to be a mermaid and a treasure hunter and a zookeeper and an ice skater. Most of them at the same time.” Gemma smiled loftily. “I was quite the ambitious six-year-old.”
Tansy smiled, picturing a precocious child with green eyes and pigtails.
“One Thanksgiving—my parents had just divorced, so I must’ve been ten—the whole family went to visit my great-aunt Ilse in Valkenburg. It was my first holiday without my mom, so I spent most of the trip in a terrible mood and bored out of my skull, with only Tucker for company. Until I found Ilse’s stash of romance novels. Johanna Lindsey, Beverly Jenkins, Jennifer Wilde, Judith McNaught. The classics, you know? The covers were vibrant and the women weresobeautiful and I remember looking at those covers and thinking that I wanted to be like that.”
Tansy frowned, arms falling to her sides. “Beautiful?”
Gemmawasbeautiful. So beautiful she drove Tansy—usually levelheaded—to distraction. Forgetting her words, getting distracted by her lips, her thighs, her eyes, her—whatdidn’tdistract her? That list would be shorter.
Gemma shook her head. “Wanted.” Her lips, painted a gorgeous shade of raspberry, quirked. “Does that sound stupid? My family isn’t very affectionate. Not... demonstratively. My mom is. But even when my parents were married, I swear to God I can’t remember ever seeing them hug, let alone kiss. When I saw those covers for the first time, it looked like those people actuallylikedeach other.” She snorted. “Okay, that definitely sounds stupid.”
What Gemma had said didn’t sound stupid at all.
