Breaking Up with Barrett: The English Brothers #1 (The Blueberry Lane Series - The English Brothers) by Katy Regnery Read Free Book Online

confidence to vulnerability. Her eyebrows furrowed ever so subtly. If he’d been looking any less intensely, he would have missed it.
    “Barrett…” she whispered, searching his eyes with hers for a deeply intimate moment, and he felt the lines between game and reality, fiction and truth, blur irreparably. His heart raced and he thought about pulling her away from the table, finding a dark nook somewhere, and kissing her slowly and deeply without stopping for a long, long time. Would she let him? Was this game her way of telling him she’d fantasized about him the way he had about her?
    “Emily sometimes forgets the romantic hidden deep inside of me.”
    “I do,” she murmured in a daze, her eyes soft and supple, staring at him in languid fascination.
    “But I had a lunch arranged at a small table under a cherry blossom tree.”
    “You did?” Her voice tilted up and his eyes widened at her, squeezing her hand a little harder, forcing her to shake herself out of her reverie, and play along. “You did,” she said with more confidence. “A lunch. Under a cherry tree.”
    “And then he just…popped the question?” asked Hélène.
    Barrett turned away from Emily, forcing a light smile for Hélène’s benefit. “Not yet.”
    “We had lunch first,” she said. “After lunch we gazed out at the gardens, and finally I said it was time to go.”
    “But I said it wasn’t time to go. I dropped to one knee.”
    “And you asked me to be your wife.”
    “And you said yes.”
    Emily picked up her wineglass and downed the entire thing in a single gulp. “And I said yes.”
    Hélène and J.J. clapped quietly, offering their half-empty glasses for a toast and exclaiming over the romance of Barrett and Emily’s love story.
    Barrett flashed his eyes at J.J., feeling like the king of the world with Emily Edwards still holding his hand beside him. “You see, J.J.? I always get what I want in the end.”
    “We’ll see, Shark,” said J.J., his eyes narrowing. “We’ll see about that.”
    Emily pulled her hand away from him to pick up her wineglass and he instantly missed the warmth of her fingers entwined with his. He pushed his thigh into hers, but she moved away slightly, crossing her leg to the other side. What had just happened? What had he missed?
    When Barrett looked at Emily, her face was reserved and polite, as it always was at these dinners, and she smiled appropriately at him, then at the Harrisons, before excusing herself in a perfectly modulated voice to go to the ladies’ room.

 
 
 
CHAPTER 4
     
    Another cliché that Emily was particularly fond of? “Can’t pull the wool over her eyes.” And yet, she’d willfully pulled the wool over her own.
    Emily sat on a puffy, mint green ottoman set in front of a low mirror and opened her small purse to root around for her lip gloss.
    At first, she’d wanted see what would happen if she tried to rouse a little emotion in Barrett, but she’d never expected him to engage with her so playfully, eliciting emotions she had no business feeling. At the time, she’d wavered between enjoying the fun of it—the teasing and the flirtation, the surprising way he remembered her favorite breakfast food and spoke admiringly about her studies—and fantasizing that it was true, breathless with the way Barrett was making her feel. It was when he said, “ You see, J.J.? I always get what I want in the end,” that everything had suddenly changed on a dime.
    In that moment, Emily had reminded herself that she was doing a job and their night would end with three hundred dollars tidily transferred from his hands to hers. Barrett had never misrepresented himself. He’d made it clear from the start he had no romantic interest in her. She was an Edwards and he wasn’t interested in messy romantic entanglements, so he’d drawn the lines boldly, placing employment and money between them.
    And yet she had fallen for him, engaging in a dangerous fantasy that meant something