Page 5 of Royal Charmer
She turns her phone facedown on the bench. “He’s an English professor at Spire College back in Oregon. We met at a bookstore.”
“Still a geek.”
“When he took off his glasses, it was a very Clark Kent-Superman kind of thing. He worked out. He was a catch, I promise you. Riley always said how lucky I was. That’s my best friend.” She stops abruptly. “Wasmy best friend. And now I guess she’s the lucky one since they’re in love.” Her voice cracks, and she turns her head away.
There’s the love triangle. I suspect the betrayal of her best friend is even worse than the betrayal of the smug ass. Women’s friendships run deep. Damn, a double betrayal. No wonder she’s a mess. She’s keeping it together, but it’s all right there just under the surface.
“What you need is to exorcise him,” I say. “Start fresh.” I’ll leave the best-friend exorcism to another woman to fix. Maybe my sister-in-law, Anna. She’s fiercely loyal to my mother and sisters. Woman power and all that good stuff. I don’t know what exactly goes on with them, but they’re tight.
She meets my gaze and says softly, “That’s why I came here, but theyfollowedme.”
“We need to destroy something.”
She straightens. “We do?”
“Absolutely. Okay, forget her. It’s him we need to focus on. He’s the one who broke your heart.”
She sighs. “Riley’s hard to forget. I knew her longer, since we were eleven when she defended me from a vicious bully. We were inseparable after that.”
I wince. It just keeps getting worse. “That sounds horrific, but for now let’s focus on exorcising your ex so you can enjoy your honeymoon more like a vacation. What reminds you of him?”
She lifts a finger to her cheek. “He had a dimple right—”
“No.”
“And a cowlick.” She smooths her hair with a wistful look. “It always stuck up a little in back.”
Jesus.“Leaving out his betrayal, what else did you hate about him?”
She blinks up at me. “I didn’t hate anything about him. I loved him.” Still with the love after what this prick did? She’s clearly not over him, and I’m angry on her behalf.
“So he was perfect. Nothing irritated you.”
She looks at the sky and then says quietly, “He used to ask me when I was going to write something serious. He said my books were fluff.” She lifts her chin. “My books are important to me. In fact, he never even read them. The first one won an award for debut novel; the second one made me a bestseller. His book never won an award or sold more than a couple of hundred copies.”
I pounce on that. “He was jealous. Let’s burn his book.”
“Oh, I would never burn a book.”
“I’m getting a hold of his no doubt pretentious book, and we’re ripping off his geeky author photo from the back cover and burning it.”
Her jaw drops, and she shuts it with a snap. “The book is calledRoot in the Air. It’s a story about feeling like you have no roots because there’s no longer a sense of community in the new generation of mobile commuters who follow the money.”
Pretentious ass.“Let me guess, you read his book even though he never read yours.”
“Yes, it was very well written.”
“Did you like it?”
“Well, there were some good—”
“Did you like it?” I press.
“No. There was no story, really.” She dances her fingers in the air. “It just wandered all over the place. Too many run-on sentences meant to be poetic. There were a lot of characters, a lot of different points of view, and they never added up to anything.”
“Aha! Sounds like fluff.”
She laughs, a musical delighted laugh that makes me smile. I did that. “Very serious highbrow fluff.”
