“No, no, not yet. I’m still comparing.” He took another bite of cobbler. “Good. Yes, very good. I can see merits in both of them. I can’t quite decide between the two of you.”
“Oh yeah?” she said as she took the full spoon from him. She started toward her mouth as though she were going to eat it, but she didn’t make it. Instead, she let the warm, thick, sweet pie drop down onto her bare breast. “Uh oh,” she said. “How will I ever get that off?”
Colin set the dish of cobbler on the bedside table, then turned to her. “It would be a real shame to let that go to waste.”
“Wouldn’t it?” Gemma said.
In the next second they were entangled again, a mass of arms and legs, mouths and necks.
Thirty minutes later, Colin rolled away. “You win,” he managed to say.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“You taste the best. Better than all the cobblers ever made.” He pulled her to him, snuggling her like a child’s toy. “I think—” he murmured, but said no more.
Gemma lifted on her elbow and saw that he was asleep. She’d never been a person who could nap, so she quietly got out of bed and went to the shower. She’d never been so happy in her life.
21
BY THE END of the week, Gemma felt that she was becoming the kind of woman she used to detest. Over the years, she’d had to sit by and watch good friends transform from I into we. And no matter how many times it happened, it always startled her—especially the abruptness of it. She and her friends all dated and they loved to get together afterward to talk about how good or how awful the date had been.
But what always happened was that one day a friend would start saying we. It started out innocently enough. Gemma would ask her friend if she’d like to go somewhere on Saturday and her friend would say, “I’ll have to check what we’re doing this weekend.”
The first time it happened, Gemma hadn’t noticed, and she’d been unprepared for the we that soon escalated into our, as in “our” classes, “our” books and lastly, “our” time.
Before Gemma knew it had even begun, her friend had left the group and she rarely ever saw her alone again. There was no more of their being just the girls. Her friend had become an us and to be with her meant that she brought with her a male who was pretty much always bored and yearning to be somewhere else.
The first time one of her friends showed up wearing an engagement ring, Gemma had naively said, “Promise that we’ll always be friends.”
By the time her third friend flashed a diamond ring, Gemma wanted to say, “Let’s hit it with a hammer and see if it’s real.”
But now, she at last understood. She and Colin had spent every minute possible of the last week together.
When the furniture arrived, she and Colin directed the placing of it. It had been fun to argue about whether the blue rug went in “their” bedroom or the guestroom. Colin said the bedside table on “his” side of “their” bed was too small, so they’d switched it with one meant for the guest bedroom.
When one of the delivery men had trouble lifting Colin’s big leather chair, Gemma sighed loudly and said, “It’s too bad Lanny and Pere aren’t here to help carry it in.”
As Colin walked past her, he picked her up by the waist, carried her outside, set her in the chair, then carried them both inside.
The delivery man looked at Gemma’s wide eyes and said to Colin, “I see what you’re gettin’ tonight.”
And of course he was right.
That night they’d finally opened the champagne from Tess and they drank to their house and their furniture.
The next morning Colin had driven Gemma back to the guesthouse and for a moment he’d sat behind the wheel, not moving. “You like this place a lot, don’t you?”
“Do you mean your parents’ estate or the guesthouse?”
“Either. Both,” he said.
“I love the guesthouse library. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever worked.”
He didn’t say any more, just walked her inside, kissed her goodbye, and went to work.
Gemma spent the day reading the old Frazier documents and making notes. She was beginning to piece together a more complete story of the first Frazier who came to America. She was intrigued by him and wondered how he got an earl’s daughter to fall in love with him. Maybe Shamus was so handsome—no, she thought. He was a Frazier, so it was probably his strength that won the lady.
Gemma entertained herself with a story of great passion, of a beautiful countess trapped under a yellow carriage, and along comes a man of extraordinary strength who lifts the vehicle and frees her. Of course she fell in love with him.