The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman Read Free

into his arms. Instead, I was caught by a drop-dead-beautiful young woman standing at Richard’s shoulder.
    This would be a better story if I’d just lie, but I wanttruth in romance. And the truth is that the first time I saw Richard Bradshaw after four years of separation, I knocked the wind out of him and was saved from falling on my face by his girlfriend.

Chapter Two of a romance novel is where the antagonist is introduced. You know, the character who is going to get under the craw of the protagonist, in this case me. The antagonist’s job is to try her provoking best to keep the heroine and hero from getting together and providing the reader with a happy ending too quickly. A novel, after all, must have at least a hundred pages of blessed tension. Heroine and hero must be conspired against.
    Like I said,
she
was drop-dead beautiful. “Are you hurt?” she asked in a voice that could melt a fifteen-year-old cheese.
    I could have sworn she dropped her postvocalic “r.” It was subtle.
    “Those fruit boots are death in the house,” my father said. Had he heard it too? He and Mother were the last to step into the dining room from the kitchen.
    “I’m sorry,” I muttered. I couldn’t help gazing into the young woman’s face. The face of an angel.
    “She’s all right,” Bjorn said. “She’s used to knocking around in the house.”
    “Take those boots off, honey,” Mother said.
    Richard pounded a fist against his chest as if to correct whatever I had injured. “It’s nice to see you again, Boo.” He used my thirteen-year-old name, but he smiled, and we glanced briefly at each other—our eyes didn’t lock or anything—but it was easy to forgive him. Then, as if he had forgotten himself, he said, “Oh, this is my friend
Fleur St. Germaine
.”
    I swear to god, that was her real name. Fleur St. Germaine. Would I make up a name like that?
    “Richard hasn’t been to Minnesota since his folks moved to California,” Bjorn said.
    I knew that.
    “So we invited him to come out with us—besides, his car worked, and ours didn’t.” Bjorn grinned. “He’s in the comp. lit. program too.”
    I knew that.
    “Fleur is in comp. lit. too.”
    Ducky. I couldn’t help staring at her. It was her hair, a mane of California blond, combined with a soft tan and those clear green eyes. “Hi,” I said. She was his
friend
. What did that mean exactly? Her beautiful tanned skin made me feel like a marshmallow.
    “I’m so glad you all decided to come,” my mother said. And I could see that it was true. Her energy level had risen since I’d left earlier. She liked having Bjorn in the house again. “It was going to be such a lonely Christmas with just the three of us.”
    That was overstating it. The three of us have never been lonely in our lives.
    “We really should have called,” Trish apologized, “but Bjorn wanted to surprise you.”
    Fleur pulled her coat tightly around her neck. “If you don’t have room in the house, I could stay in a hotel,” she offered.
    Her diphthong in “house” was a little slow, I thought. A halo of blond wisps floated around her delicate face.
    “We both could,” Richard cut in. Was there eagerness in his voice or was that my paranoia? In the same hotel room? In the same bed? Possibly. Depressing images of the two of them, loins and limbs entangled, floated through my head.
    Bjorn shook his head as if that were the dumbest idea he’d ever heard, and Mother’s hands fluttered up, shooing away their doubts. “No, no, no, there’s more than enough room,” she insisted.
    I couldn’t help noticing what a thoroughly stunning romance-novel couple Fleur and Richard made. She was compact and petite, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. He was a few inches taller than I was, if that I felt like a giant praying mantis in fruit boots—boots with treads the size of truck tires.
    Mother was asking them if they were hungry, but they said they’d had dinner on the road