Page 15 of Love Is…?

Jayde frowned. Somehow, the whole conversation had been flipped. She crossed her arms, matching Tessa’s stance. “No.”

“Yes.”

“Tessa—”

“I won’t take your bet…” Tessa said in a sing-song voice, then held the silence with an eyebrow raise and a shoulder lift. Who on earth could resist that?

Jayde rallied. “I…You don’t even know why I’m averse to love.”

“You’ll tell me if you want to. I’m going to spend three potentially uncomfortable months making random women suffer through my flirting ineptitude. I’m stepping outside my comfort zone, and past history.” That flash of something zipped through Tessa’s expression again. Fear? “But I will be a willing student within reason. And it’s not a bet. It’s a dare.” Tessa delivered a quick smile. “I like you. I think we could be good friends, and this might be fun, sort of. But.” She wiggled hershoulders like a teenager challenging a rival. “If you want to back out, I’m okay with that.”

“I don’t back out of dares, either.” Jayde narrowed her eyes, and they held more eye contact than extras inGunfight At The O.K. Corral. The staring, the looking, the contemplating was so nice. No. Not nice. Delicious. Yes, much better.

Finally, Jayde growled softly, which made Tessa laugh, and stuck out her hand.

“For God’s sake,” Jayde mumbled. “Fine. Dare accepted.” Splashes of anxiety fell on the shores of Jayde’s brain. Deep, deep in the recesses of her heart, Jayde recognised the idea of love, but didn’t know what it truly was. It wasn’t a message in a movie, or a friend yammering on about their latest lover. Tessa wanted to teach her what love was. In a few months. Good luck with that.

Her heart tapped on the window of love’s living room, as if to let it know that love’s moment had arrived, because Tessa was going to smoosh the profile topic and the romance lessons into one giant ball and fling Jayde into the middle of it.

Tessa smirked, and clasped Jayde’s hand and, Jayde tried very hard to ignore the feeling of Tessa’s soft skin against her own, how gently she held the smaller hand as if it was the most fragile object in the world, how she looked up to meet those light brown eyes that refused to look away. She swallowed, and her heart laughed out loud.

Chapter

Five

Oh God.A bet. Really?As Jayde, upon hearing a notification alert, reached down to pull out her phone, Tessa took the opportunity to spin around and mouth, “Oh my God,” at the tiles on the other side of the kitchen. What on earth was she thinking?She’d been thinking about arresting brown eyes, and wavy brown-with-delicious-not-quite-blonde highlights, and collarbones, and delightful freckles, and a mouth just aching to be kissed.That’s what she’d been thinking.

Hooking up with a woman gave her goosebumps—the good and bad kind—and swoops low in her stomach and utter panic in her heart. She hadn’t told Jayde the other big reason why she’d given up on that particular ritual. It had hurt so much when she’d been scoffed at for wanting just a drink and conversation, and not sex for the night. Or when she’d actually shown an interest in a woman’s suggestion for an interlude in a hotel room, they’d backed out when she’d told them that she had cold feet and could they just talk for a while. Lovely.

Then, every single one night standshe’dinstigated—a grand total of two—had ended before they’d begun. Neither the gorgeous butch, nor the sexy never-going-to-be-a-bottom had been interested in Tessa’s incredibly tame tastes, and hadlaughed when Tessa called a stop to the whole night before it even got started. None of those experiences were about sex being a journey into the whole and the beautiful. None of them screamed relationship growth. All of those experiences screamed such a moment of now that she could have touched the finish line before they’d left the bar. So she’d retreated from the very idea altogether because it was embarrassing and the derision hurt. Best to meet women in places like the cinema, which is where she’d met Olna, who had smelled of softness, and wishes, and hot popcorn in buckets.

Footsteps, light and quick, sounded on the wooden steps of the staircase, and Theo leapt to his feet. Grace Taylor appeared around the corner, all long limbs, sparkling eyes, and hair like her mother’s, and plopped herself onto a seat at the dining table. Grace had accepted Tessa’s role, her presence, relatively well. The morning of the first day had consisted of an eye-roll and a, “Puh-leese. A chaperone?” while the afternoon saw Abby, Sam, Tessa, and Grace arranged on various pieces of furniture in the lounge with hot drinks, discussing the positives of Tessa’s employment, at which Grace started nodding, then grinned and informed Tessa that she’d set some type of invisible assessment at the beginning of the day and Tessa had passed with flying colours.

Tessa had blinked, Sam had hummed quietly under her breath and mumbled a, “Seriously, kiddo?” and Abby had raised an eyebrow—the parental kind. And with that, Tessa was absorbed into Grace’s life.

Grace pulled one leg up to hug it, grinned at Tessa, then looked quizzically at Jayde, who studied the teenager in return.

“Oh.” Tessa stepped forward. “Grace, this is Jayde Ferguson, the reporter?—”

“Journalist.”

“Thejournalistwho’s writing the profile on your mum,” she continued, then cut a glance at Jayde who shot her an obnoxiously sexy half-smile. A blush raced up Tessa’s neck. Luckily, Jayde didn’t see because she’d reached over to shake Grace’s hand. But Grace saw, and rolled her lips together suppressing a smile.

Mmhmm. Grace was sure to ask aboutthatparticular reaction.

Tessa sighed. Teenagers were fabulous at dreaming up theories about things, like who was hacked recently, and why TikTok algorithms were fake, and why her chaperone was behaving like she’d developed a crush on the journalist who had appeared in the house every second day during the week.

Not a crush. She’d smother that thought straight away.It’s a crush, her traitorous brain whispered.

“Sam told me your name but it’s nice to meet you properly,” Grace said.

The buzzer sounded indicating that the small lift was bringing someone up from the underground garage. Tessa was thrilled to focus on something other than Jayde’s eyes and those shoulders that filled out her shirt, and her perfect height so that if they were hugging, Jayde’s chin would nearly sit on top of Tessa’s head if Tessa bent her knees a little. She widened her eyes in disbelief.

She stared at the image in the small rectangular screen. She didn’t know the woman in the lift but clearly the woman knew the access code into the carpark and because Tessa knew that the lift took all of fifteen seconds to travel from the garage to the main floor, the woman would be arriving right about?—

The narrow doors of the lift opened and a wonderfully curvy woman with fabulous boobs, wearing a fire engine red dress barrelled into the room. She was clutching a large bakery-style box.

“Grace!” The woman’s blue eyes sparkled with energy. “Haven’t seen you in a whole twenty-nine days, except at the school at which I teach and which you attend so therefore twenty-nine days is only based outside the nine am to three pm bubble. Have you graduated yet?”

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