Backstage Romance: An Austen-Inspired Romantic Comedy Box Set by Gigi Blume (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📕

I make a point of swaying my hips just a little extra. If he’s finally noticing me after all these years, I consider this payback.

I hear a heavy sigh behind me. He’s probably running his fingers through his hair again.

Gah! Don’t turn around and watch. Keep walking. 

Besides, I need to find somewhere to sit. This place is huge. Aisles and aisles of stainless steel machinery boggle my mind and it makes me sad to think of the dozens of employees that will lose their jobs if Ingram has his way. That sobers me up real quick and my cheeks feel cool again.

What was Eugene thinking? He hired my small consulting firm to save his pita bread factory. I’m not a big shot like Yale Boy here. I run my business out of my basement in Verona, New Jersey. Just me, myself, and I. But I have amazing ideas to turn his company around. It’s what I do. I’m good at it. So why did Eugene bring Ingram in? I’ve been driving up to his factory in Albany for two weeks now. I thought we had an understanding.

I find a stack of plastic crates and sit to rest my pups. It doesn’t take long for Ingram to join me. He could be anywhere in this giant factory yet he sits next to me. He checks his watch again and we sit in silence for a long time. I feel like anything we say to each other now, after so much bad jou jou between us, is pointless unless it will help get us out of here. But I can tell by the way he twists his lips around that he has something on his mind.

Neither one of us have our cell phones. I left my purse in the accounting office before coming over to the warehouse. I didn’t think it was sanitary to bring it with me where they do the baking. Let’s not even mention how ridiculous I looked in the hair cap they made me wear.

Ingram had slugged off his suit jacket when I arrived at the office. I tell myself the heat of my disdain got him hot and bothered. But not in a fun way. More of a hope you brought your Lume way. Now he says his phone was in that jacket pocket. I know what he’s thinking. Surely someone would have seen our stuff in the office before locking up for the night. They should have looked for us. But I’d tucked my purse under the desk to keep it hidden. And it’s Friday. Nobody’s going to split hairs over a suit jacket. We’re doomed.

He shifts on the crate. Not the most comfortable of seating arrangements, I’ll give him that. But it’s something else. He’s studying me.

I move my gaze to him ever so slowly—my best mad dog side-eye. It is oh so not the dreamy way I used to look at him. It’s the opposite of dreamy.

“What?” I accentuate the last letter. Like a bite.

He smiles. He thinks he’s got something on me. I can tell by the glimmer in his eyes.

“Thor muscles, huh?”

2

INGRAM

I won’t survive the night.

There’s a musical my friend Bing and I performed in high school. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I got the lead role but everyone knew Bing was the one who’d make it on Broadway. He was made to perform. I just took theatre classes for fun. Rumor has it Bing turned down the lead role for one reason:

He was spooked about singing love songs to a character with his sister’s name.

Rosemary.

So the part fell to me. Singing that song messed with my head. We’d rehearse after school and Bing’s little sister would be there. Watching. Doe-eyed and pudgy-faced, her beauty only the shadow of a promise back then.

And I’d sing out her name… because it was the lyric.

Rose...ma-ry. One note for every syllable.

My voice filled the theatre with it and I understood then why Bing didn’t want the part. But what did I care? She wasn’t MY sister.

Funny thing about songs, though. They come back to you. Those three descending notes love to crash my thoughts at the most inconvenient times. Back in college they would burrow in my ear during a calculus final. Sometimes I find myself humming at work during an important business meeting.

And now.

Rosemary sits next to me, pouting. No, not pouting. Feisty. Fiery. Electric. A woman in every sense of the word. What is it about her? She used to be so sweet. Bubbly. Eager to please, even. But one day, out of the blue, she turned frigid. I see dead people frigid.

Now, sitting next to me, she’s the opposite of cold. She’s a volcano ready to erupt. Her eyes aflame with rage. Her skin a furnace. I can feel it sear through me. It drives me wild. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve her wrath, but I’ll take it any day over her arctic indifference.

Maybe my presence here today is stirring up some old repressed feelings. Feelings that were off-limits ten years ago.

She mumbled something earlier she thinks I didn’t hear. Oh I heard her. Thor muscles. Just the idea of that slipping from her mouth makes me smile inside. And when I call her out on it she acts like she doesn’t hear me...

“Hmmm?” she says. So innocent.

“You think I’ve got a Thor bod?”

She snorts. “Fat Thor, maybe.”

I crack a grin. This woman! She’s got a chip on her shoulder when it comes to me. Why? I want to reply with a witty comeback. I want to make her laugh. I want to kiss her.

Wait. What?

I try for a tease instead.

My eyes dip to the sensitive spot just behind her jaw. She has a freckle there. It dances with her racing pulse. Out and in, out and in. It’s the most tantalizing version of the hokey pokey ever.

I inch closer, slowly closing the space between