Flirting With Forever Gwyn Cready (best book series to read txt) 📖

most knowledgeable person on Earth about a subject no one real y cares about. I believe there’s a special wing of the Star Trek Society that wil be honoring you soon.”

“No, I mean is this al ? Weren’t you getting in an article f r o m Burlington Magazine?” Cam was at her desk surrounded by a dozen open books. When she was real y engrossed in what she was writing, as she was now, the keyboard clicked like a Geiger counter, punctuated by cracks loud enough to make Jeanne jump when she hit ENTER at the end of a paragraph.

“I guess the mimeograph’s working kinda slow on their end. The article’s from 1932.”

“Christ!”

The look on Cam’s face reminded Jeanne she needed to pick up some bug spray on her way home. “Maybe you’d like to pul up a chapter on England on your magical little Amazon flying carpet and hop on over there yourself ?”

Cam shook her head in disgust and returned to typing.

“You know, you don’t actual y have to have the book done by the board meeting,” Jeanne said. “You only need a contract for it, which you already have.”

“This book is practical y writing itself.” Cam hit the ENTER

key so hard Jeanne wondered if the keyboard was going to flip in the air. “I am awash in heavenly inspiration. Meeting Peter Lely was just what I needed.”

“Heavenly is the word for it, al right. You’re like an angel.”

“What?” Cam grimaced fiercely in her admin’s direction.

“Heavenly,” Jeanne said louder. “I said you’re like one of our Father’s celestial seraphim.”

Cam grunted. She dug into the stack of books, holding two up with her elbow, and flipped the pages of a particularly large and musty-looking folio while attempting to keep the whole improbable Jenga tower from taking her little easel, the dead Christmas cactus and about sixteen Flair pens over the edge like a biblio-Mount Etna.

“Dammit!” she cried. “There’s just not enough information on Ursula.”

“Information? I thought we decided you were going to make this stuff up.”

“I-I—” A warm pink crawled across Cam’s cheeks. “I’m not going to make it al up. And there’s nothing official anywhere about his marital status. A good author, you know, checks at least some of the facts.”

“Yeah, but who cares whether some woman whose last name we don’t even know was married or wore a wedding band or liked apples? Apples? I mean, real y! Yesterday you had me spend an hour with a magnifying glass trying to tel if her hair was natural y curly or curled with a curling iron.”

They both turned to look at the book that held the plate of the demurely capped Ursula, which Cam had placed on an easel on the bookcase, right next to a sketch of the same woman, entitled “Lady Lely.” “I mean, c’mon,” Jeanne went on, “who’s going to care unless you’re—Oh my God! You’re jealous!”

“I am not jealous.”

“You told me nothing happened. I fel to my knees, praying something would happen, but you swore to me, nope, nothing happened.” Now it al made sense to Jeanne.

The book in which the sketch appeared—the sixteenth that had been ordered from various booksel ers around the globe—had arrived earlier in the week, and Cam, who flipped through it madly after the package landed on her desk, had sunk slowly into her chair when she’d come to that page and lapsed into a moody silence that lasted for the rest of the day.

It took two more seconds for Jeanne’s brain to catch up.

“Lady Lely,” she said. “It’s the title. That’s why you’re so upset. He didn’t tel you he was married.”

“I told you, nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened? You cal ed me, wearing nothing but a silk sheet and raving so hard about what fun it was to pose naked, I thought my phone was gonna catch fire. If you didn’t get laid after that, there’s nothing left for you except an IV and bed restraints. No wonder he came barreling back after you. The poor guy’s probably got an erection that reaches from here to the Battle of Trafalgar.”

“He didn’t come back for me. I told you that.”

“You have told me exactly nothing since you started revising the Van Dyck biography. You told me nothing when your publisher did an about-face on the book and suddenly it was about Lely instead of Van Dyck. ‘I miscalculated,’ you said. You told me