by Debbie Mason
“Danny is just young and misguided. He’ll come around.”
“If he got Mia Paquet pregnant, I certainly hope he marries her.”
“I do, too. But you know how things go in Hollywood.”
“Whatever.” Melissa went back to reading.
“I’m much more worried about David,” Gracie said, smoothing back her outrageously bright red hair.
When Gracie got on the subject of the Lyndons, she was like a pit bull with a bone. Melissa put her finger down at her place in the book and looked up again.
“He’s not moving on with his life, bless his heart. He needs to find love again,” Gracie continued.
Melissa closed her book. If she wanted to finish The Lonesome Cowboy, she would have to leave the diner. “Okay, I can see how David needs to move on, but please don’t put me on your list of possible mates for him, okay? I mean, I feel for the guy. I knew Shelly a little bit. She used to come in the store all the time with Willow Petersen and buy romances by the dozens.”
“See?” Gracie said. “You and David’s late wife are a lot alike.”
“No, we weren’t. She was all about being a nice wife and fitting in with the Lyndon family’s plans for David’s political career. Can you see me doing that? Ever?”
“You could learn…”
“Gracie, please. I don’t like Pam Lyndon, and I’m not interested in her son.”
“Only because your grandmother carried a grudge. You know it’s time to lay that to rest with her, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“And you could do worse than hooking up with a Lyndon. If David isn’t the one for you, he’s got four or five cousins. They’re all handsome as the devil.”
Melissa ground her teeth. “Gracie, stop. I don’t want anything to do with any of the Lyndons. Period. End of subject.”
But of course it wasn’t the end of the subject, because the way things were shaping up, she would be selling the Lyndons the one thing she held most dear.
Chapter Three
Mr. Hottie Professor made Melissa’s Tuesday when he returned to Secondhand Prose. He walked through the door and almost bowled Melissa over in the front aisle, where she was shelving a few books on military history. In fact, she would have toppled right over if the guy hadn’t snagged her shoulders and steadied her.
“Oh, hi,” she said, taking a step back and shrugging off his touch, which had sent an electric shock down her backbone that woke up her girl parts. They had been dead to her for such a long time that she hardly even remembered she had them.
And now suddenly there they were, awake and aware and…well…aroused.
Whoa, wait one sec. She was not about to let her hormones take a dive into insanity. This guy was more than merely handsome. He was like Chris—an intellectual. And Chris was just the latest in a long line of attractive, brainy boyfriends, all of whom had broken her heart.
Mr. Professor looked utterly tempting today in his skinny jeans, oxford cloth button-down, and a blue tweed sweater. The guy definitely had the urban casual vibe going for him—the kind that took a sizable clothing budget to achieve.
“Hi,” she said. “How did you enjoy the Thoreau?”
“To be honest, it sucked.”
“You didn’t like Walden, really?” She blurted the words in surprise. He looked exactly like the type of guy who would not only enjoy Thoreau, but make a big deal of discussing it.
“No, I didn’t. It doesn’t work as a manual for living off the grid in the twenty-first century. And Thoreau is kind of preachy. I mean, it’s depressing to discover that I’m living a life of quiet desperation caused by the weight of my personal possessions.”
“Only if you’re the type of person who values material things.”
“I know. And that’s why I’m here. I have a plan to improve myself.”
“You do?” she asked. Was he flirting or trying to have a book discussion, or maybe both?
“Yes. I came to volunteer,” he said.
“Volunteer?”
“Yeah. You need help, and I’m here to lend a hand.”
“Doing what?” Several things came to mind, none of them involving books, unless he might consider reading poetry to her. Robert Browning would be perfect. She took another step back.
“I’m here to do whatever it is you need me to do. And I don’t need the seven twenty-five an hour. According to Thoreau, working for nothing is more enlightening than working for peanuts.”
He took another step forward, invading her space with impunity. He plucked the books from her hand.
“Ah,” he said, studying their spines, “these are military history, so they get shelved here, right?”
She found herself nodding.
“By title or author?”
“Author.”
He turned and started shelving the books.
“Look, you can’t just—”
“What? Give you some help?” He finished shelving the books and turned back toward her.
“Um, I can’t pay you.”
“I know. And I have a plan for that, too. See, I’ve been trying to follow in Thoreau’s footsteps—staying in a cabin that’s way off the grid—but I’ve discovered that I can’t survive without Internet. So I thought maybe we could work out an arrangement, you know? I’ll give you a few hours a day doing whatever, and in return you can let me set up my laptop somewhere and borrow your Internet.”
Something didn’t add up. The guys who lived in those remote cabins usually wore camo vests or fishing shirts, not urban-hip tweed sweaters. She cleared her throat and tried to sound tough and decisive. “Uh, thanks, but I told you I don’t need help.”
“Then why do you keep the ‘Help Wanted’ poster on the front door?”
She shrugged, and they stood staring at each other for a long moment.
“Look,” he finally said on a long breath, his eyes going even more soulful, “the truth is I’m a writer and—”
“Wait a sec. You’re a writer?” Now she understood the tweeds and the bulky sweaters and the Byronic hair and her fatal attraction. She loved writers. They were, in her opinion, practically gods. And here stood a particularly handsome specimen, right in the middle of her bookstore.
He nodded. “Yeah, I am a writer, and I—”
“Oh my God. What’s your name?”
* * *
Damn. What now? If the bookshop girl stayed abreast of current events, she’d recognize his name, and he damn sure didn’t want to have a discussion of his failings as a journalist. He also didn’t want her blabbing her mouth around town. He just wanted something to occupy his time while he considered what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He’d discovered that brooding about the future, while spending endless days utterly alone in a cabin, was murder on his psyche.
He would have to lie.
“I’m not famous,” he said. “I’m not even published.”
“Oh,” Melissa said in a disappointed tone.
He stuck out his hand. “I’m Jeff Talbert. Author in the making.” This was only a half-truth. Like every journalist worth his salt, Jeff was sure he had a novel in him somewhere. He’d been talking about writing a book for years, but he’d done nothing about actually starting it.
He studied her face, waiting to see if she bought any of this, especially the abridged version of his Jefferson Talbert-Lyndon byline. She seemed to take him utterly at face value.
She took his hand, her palm warm and soft. “I’m Melissa Portman,” she said. “I inherited this store from my grandmother.”
“And I’m here to help you shelve books in return for borrowing your Internet. Oh, and I also intend to make friends with your demon cat.”
Melissa let go of a long breath. “I’ve told you, I don’t need help. And forget about Dickens. He doesn’t like people.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
She cocked her head, and Jeff swore her cheeks colored. She looked a lot like the vintage book illustr
ation of Snow White on her pink T-shirt—pale skin, a round face with rosy cheeks, and a dark cloud of hair pulled away from her face with a plaid hairband. Her skinny jeans were green and hugged her curves, and she wasn’t wearing any socks with her red Converse low-top lace-ups.
She eyed him from behind her black glasses, one eyebrow arched. “I’m not kidding. Dickens is a crazy cat. Don’t try to pet him. You’ll draw back a bloody nub.”
“Okay. I’ll stay away from the cats.” He took another step forward in the narrow aisle, forcing her to retreat again. “I’ll just head over to the checkout and start sorting the piles of books over there.”
“I told you already, I don’t need or want your help,” Melissa said, crossing her arms over her Snow White T-shirt. She looked bad-ass, in a colorfully hip way.
He ignored her and simply took another step forward and then eased his way around her, brushing against her in the process. She smelled great, like a field of wildflowers.
He headed for the checkout, where he picked up the book on top of one lopsided pile—a hardback edition of Robinson Crusoe. “This is fiction,” he said, laying the book aside and picking up the next one, a reference book on how to knit. “This goes in the how-to, reference area.”
He laid that one down to start another subpile, then glanced over his shoulder. The adorable Melissa Portman still had her arms crossed, only now there was a big rumple across her brow. He wanted to erase those lines.
“How am I doing so far?” he asked.
“I don’t need your help.”
“Of course you do.” He turned away and sorted several more books, while Melissa’s gaze burned a hole in his back between his shoulder blades.
The standoff lasted several minutes until Dickens, the demon cat, jumped down from his throne in the window and padded toward Jeff, his amber eyes dilated, his tail erect, ears perked. The body language seemed friendly enough, but Jeff could only see the cat out of the corner of his eye.
Jeff had had plenty of experience with feral cats in his day, so he avoided direct eye contact. He’d learned just about everything anyone ever needed to know about wild cats during his visits to Grandmother Talbert—a woman lovingly referred to as the Crazy Cat Lady on the Hudson.
So he braced for the cat to pounce, with claws extended.
But the attack never came. Instead Dickens gave a friendly sounding meow and then pussyfooted up against Jeff and gave him a little head butt that was a cat’s classic request for attention.
He squatted down slowly and let Dickens get a good sniff of him before he carefully and gently rubbed his hands from the cat’s head to his tail. The animal arched its hind end up to press against his touch.
Dickens’s eyes closed to slits, and he started to purr as Jeff settled in to scratch him liberally behind his ears. When Jeff took his hand away, the cat moved forward and leaned his forehead against Jeff’s knee.
He picked Dickens up and settled him in his arms. Then he turned toward Melissa. “See, I told you I would make friends with your cat.”
Melissa’s eyes had grown wide behind her glasses. “I’m seeing it, but I don’t believe it,” she said. “What are you, some kind of cat whisperer?”
Chapter Four
When Dickens came down from his tree and allowed Jeff to pick him up, Melissa had no choice, really, but to let Jeff stay and volunteer.
She relented for Dickens’s sake. Since Grammy’s death, Dickens had occupied the cat tree in the window almost twenty-four-seven, allowing no one to touch him, hardly eating, and leaving his perch only for litter-box calls.
She told herself that letting Jeff volunteer was about the cat, but having Jeff shelve the books that Grammy had purchased before she died gave Melissa a big dose of hope in a situation that was utterly hopeless. Having someone else around the store eased the loneliness that had settled into the deepest recesses of her heart.
Still, it was a fantasy, this idea of fixing up the store. She needed to end the charade. Tomorrow she would make an appointment with Walter Braden, the Realtor in town who handled commercial real estate sales. He’d already called a few times to let her know that the Lyndons were anxious to make an offer on the building Grammy had owned for sixty years.
But Melissa’s resolve disappeared on Wednesday morning, when Jeff showed up on her doorstep bright and early bearing gifts: a new, expensive-looking coffeemaker for the back room, a bag of cat treats for Hugo, and a catnip mouse for Dickens, who came down from his tree and played with it for a solid hour.
“So what’s on today’s agenda?” Jeff asked after he’d set up the coffeemaker and brewed the first pot of the day. Why the man didn’t just get his coffee across the street was a mystery. But once she took her first sip of coffee from his new machine, she had to admit that the guy knew how to brew a good cup of coffee. Obviously Jeff was a master at winning lonely cat ladies over.
Plus she had a weakness for guys who wore tweed jackets…and formfitting white T-shirts and jeans, which was Wednesday’s outfit.
Yup, he was as yummy as the coffee.
“Let’s get the boxes behind the counter cleaned up and shelved,” she said, casting aside her resolution about calling Walter Braden.
They went to work hauling books around the store while she attempted to give him the third degree. But he was slippery. Their conversations always left something to be desired.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“Up on the ridge.” No specific address. And the Blue Ridge ran right through the middle of the state. Saying you were living in the Blue Ridge Mountains wasn’t very informative.
“Where are you from?” she asked as they tidied up the history section.
“New York.” Of course he was from New York. She could hear it in his accent.
“State? City?”
“Both.” He was a master of the one-syllable response.
“Where did you learn to handle cats?” she asked as they reorganized the fiction department.
“My grandmother. She was a cat lady.”
Two sentences. She was on a roll. “Mine too.”
“I figured.”
And that was the end of that conversation, unless she wanted to tell him all about Grammy, and at the moment conversations about Grammy tended to become overly emotional. She wasn’t ready for Jeff to see her cry. And besides, she really ought to be calling Walter about selling the place. Tomorrow.
But on Thursday she forgot all about calling Walter. She’d had trouble sleeping that night, and she was all prepared with a bunch of book-related questions. Jeff seemed to know his literature.
So as they started dusting every inch of the store, she asked him if he’d ever read any Jack Kerouac. It was just the first question on her list of sneaky ones designed to see if he was a literature snob, like Chris.
He gave her a look from the measureless dark of his eyes. “Is that a trick question?”
Damn, he was onto her. “How could a simple question about a book be a trick question? Have you read On the Road?”
“Have you?”
“Of course I have.”
“Did you read it because you thought it was hip?”
She blinked at him because the truth was she had read it because Chris had told her she needed to read it in order to be well rounded. She had not particularly enjoyed the book.
Jeff smiled before she could respond. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell the in crowd that you didn’t much like it. The problem with reading Kerouac today is that everyone thinks he’s cool, when the truth is, he was just the writer guy, you know, the dude with the journal keeping notes on the crazy stuff his friends did.”
“I’m not worried about what people think,” she said. “So, are you like him? I mean, are you the writer guy who keeps a journal and chronicles the crazy stuff your friends do?”
His smile faded. “No. Not really. But I have a question for you.”
“Okay.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to be on the receiv
ing end of any questions.
“What were you reading that day when I came in the store the first time?”
Oh, crap. She wasn’t about to tell him she’d been reading a romance novel. How pathetic would that be? So she thought fast and lied. “Oliver Twist.”
His mouth turned up adorably. He didn’t believe her. “Good book. I wholeheartedly believe that we should all ask for more.”
And that was the end of her attempt at using book talk to discover his secrets. It was, however, the beginning of several long conversations about the classics, where she discovered that Jeff Talbert had actually read Jane Eyre. He’d hated every minute of it, but he’d read it in high school.
He’d also read The Call of the Wild and The Last of the Mohicans. Those books he’d liked. She wasn’t surprised.
All that book talk was tantalizing. So when Thursday came to a close, she took a leap and asked, “So, uh, you want to go down to the Jaybird for a drink or something?”
He gave her a soulful brown-eyed look and shook his head. “No. Maybe some other time.” And then he left the store, but not before he glanced out the window as if checking to see who might be out there on the sidewalk, watching.
* * *
He should stop. Now. Going to Secondhand Prose on a daily basis was a dumb idea. Even though the store wasn’t exactly the type of place Pam would frequent, he still risked being seen. He’d learned from the grapevine that Aunt Pam didn’t spend much time with Uncle Mark in DC. She stayed at Charlotte’s Grove and managed things. What things she managed were not precisely clear, but it wasn’t unusual for Aunt Pam to be seen on Liberty Avenue shopping or visiting with merchants.
Maybe he should book a flight to the Bahamas or something.
He jettisoned the idea. For some reason, helping Melissa clean and organize her grandmother’s bookstore had become the thing he wanted to do right now. It filled his days. It gave him purpose.
And maybe he was accomplishing something important—pulling Melissa out of her funk. She may not have shed a tear or said a word, but Melissa was grieving for her Grammy. Working to clean and organize the place seemed to have given her a purpose, too.
