Chapter 1 #2
Gemma looked at her reflection in the train window as it sped towards Larchester.
She should hate Rory for her actions, but she found she couldn’t.
Rory had been her first love, her first female sexual partner, and no one in the years since had come close to her in comparison.
Gemma pulled a can of gin and tonic from her bag and opened it, downing half in one go before realising that her hands were shaking.
She hadn’t seen Rory since that night, but in a moment of drunken weakness a year ago, following another short relationship breaking down, she had found her on Facebook.
Rory had just turned thirty and was just as stunning as Gemma remembered, her smiling face shining from every pixel of every picture on her profile.
Gemma had felt an unusual wave of warmth wash over her as she looked into Rory’s beautiful face, only to have her hopes of a reconciliation dashed at the phrase “Aurora Davies is engaged to Darcy Williams” that was plastered across her profile.
That phrase seemed to mock Gemma, but unable to stop herself, Gemma had looked at all their engagement pictures.
Each one radiated love and contentment, Rory’s stunning and swarthy good looks a perfect match for Darcy’s feminine features, perfect figure and bouncy blond curls.
Gemma had slammed her laptop shut in disgust at the hurt coursing through her and had got very drunk with Teagan and Brad, swearing off women for all of two weeks until she inevitably found another woman to warm her bed and who she fucked into submission trying to eradicate the memories of Rory’s fingers on her skin.
She hadn’t told Teagan, but the night that she’d had the message from her mother summoning her home, she had dived into Facebook again to search for pictures of Rory.
Fuelled by re-heated pizza and cheap wine, she had scoured Rory’s posts, noting that they all seemed to be posed and formal rather than the fun, flirty ones Gemma had on her Instagram.
Gemma was amazed to see that Rory was much more girly than she remembered.
At school, Rory was a tomboy, and Gemma could still remember burying her fingers in Rory’s short brown hair as she rode her fingers to oblivion.
This femme version of Rory was, hopefully, less of a challenge to her heart and libido.
She realised far too late that she probably should have only had one can of gin on the train, rather than the three she had downed, as she tried to walk in her ridiculous heels towards the taxi rank at the station with her clutch bag in one hand, dragging her small suitcase behind her.
She figured that if she was going to face Rory and her fiancée, then she would look sexy and unobtainable and tease Rory with what she was missing, and what she could have had if she’d only stayed in bed that fateful morning ten years ago.
As the taxi pulled up to the drop-off point at the opera house, Gemma looked around for her mother.
She paid the taxi driver and stood on the pavement for a moment when a tall, dark-haired figure in a black evening suit sauntered towards her.
Gemma felt her breath hitch and was grateful for the sunglasses covering her eyes so she could appraise the figure of the woman who had been haunting her dreams for far too long.
As her heart flipped and her stomach filled with butterflies, she realised that she absolutely should have had more gin on the train.
“Hello!” Rory’s voice was slightly deeper than Gemma remembered but just as cultured – and poured over her like melted chocolate. “Grandmother sent me to scoop you up and show you where we’re sitting.”
She reached out a hand and effortlessly took Gemma’s suitcase from her. “Would you like to take my arm?” Rory offered, “It’s been raining for the last few days, although mercifully it’s cleared up, but it’s still a bit soft underfoot in places.”
Gemma drank in the sight of Rory before her.
In her heart and mind, she had been preparing for Rory in a dress, perhaps in clingy evening trousers, but Rory in a suit, with her hair twisted up into a tight bun and those warm brown eyes gazing at her was a sight nothing could have prepared her for.
Rory was the perfect example of androgynous chic, and Gemma could feel her stomach flip, not only at the sight but also at the memory of what they had done together the last time they had been in the same room.
She had told Teagan that she was not still attracted to Rory, that Rory was in her past. That was crap.
She was still 100% attracted to Rory. She had told herself on the train that she was dressing to teach Rory a lesson, to show her what she was missing.
To upstage her English rose of a perfect fiancée, but the fact was that she was still, after ten years of not seeing this woman, so attracted to her it hurt and if Rory crooked her finger, she would be in bed with her in a trice.
The tarmac of the drop-off area morphed into a flagstone path that led to the gardens.
Her heels clicked as they walked. Gemma was happy to let Rory take her wheeled suitcase and concentrated on negotiating the uneven path in her high heels.
For now, they were in the shade of the hedges that lined the path, and Gemma tried not to sink into Rory as her body was crying out for her to do.
She had no idea that her reaction to this woman would be so visceral.
She had to remind herself that Rory was engaged and that in only a few moments, Gemma would be face to face with the woman who had captured Rory’s heart.
Before long, they turned off the path and were into the gardens proper.
The scent of the flowers from the borders was almost overwhelming and reminded Gemma of summer days in her grandmother’s garden, playing and hanging out with Rory when they were teenagers.
She took one look at the grass and decided to take Rory’s proffered arm for support.
Her heels may make her ass look incredible, but they were not sensible for soft grass that had been rained on for several days.
More than once, Gemma had to steady herself and felt Rory’s bicep tense under her jacket.
Rory had always kept herself fit and was athletic as a child, and that, it seemed, had extended into adulthood.
Gemma tried to keep her features neutral as Rory chatted gently about nothing of consequence and tried to walk straight, her heels and the three gins in quick succession on an empty stomach not helping in that regard.
She turned to look at Rory, but just then the wind shifted, and she got a whiff of Rory’s perfume up her nose and her body reacted immediately.
It was the same scent that she’d been wearing the night they spent together, the same scent that haunted Gemma’s dreams and the same scent that now twisted her body into a new state of arousal.
She tried to ignore the feelings coursing through her and concentrated on setting her features, and the onslaught of the combined Armstrong/Davies family interrogation.
Despite Gemma not seeing Rory for so many years, their parents had remained good friends, oblivious to what had happened with their daughters, and she had seen Rory’s parents many times as she’d visited her own family, the last time only to be besieged with pictures of Rory and Darcy’s perfect engagement.
She grimaced internally and tried to work out if she’d had too much or not enough alcohol to deal with this.