Sam took it from her and looked at the name. ‘Caroline Logan,’ he read. ‘You’re the author, aren’t you?’ he said with a wry grin.
Callie nodded. ‘I’m afraid I gave my last copy of the book away by accident and it’s quite hard to find now.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve never had an author buy their own book from me before,’ he said. ‘It’s like that old commercial, isn’t it?’
‘The fly fishing book?’
‘That’s the one!’
‘And do you have a copy of that in the shop?’
‘Er, no,’ he said, ‘but the book really exists although it was written by Michael Russell who just uses the name J R Hartley to cash in on its popularity after the commercial. Perhaps I could order one for you?’ He was grinning again.
‘I think I’ll just wait for my Perdita,’ Callie said.
‘Well, take a bookmark. It’s got our number and website on it so you can keep in touch.’
Callie took it from him. ‘Thank you,’ she said, reading the words written across it.
Nightingale’s – for books which make your heart sing.
‘Very clever,’ she said.
‘My sister, Polly, came up with that.’
‘I like it,’ she said, handing over the money for the hardback she was buying and watching as Sam placed it in a brown paper bag with the shop’s logo neatly stamped upon it.
‘Enjoy your purchase,’ he said, ‘even if you don’t actually read it.’
She smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, suddenly aware that she’d been in the shop for much longer than she’d intended and that she had enjoyed every single second, ‘I’d better be going.’
‘It was great to meet you,’ he said, extending his hand across the books to shake hers.
‘You too,’ she said, turning to go.
‘Oh,’ he said suddenly, halting her before she reached the door. ‘I’m thinking of setting up a book club. Perhaps you’d be interested in joining?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said and he nodded, his dark eyes holding her blue ones for a moment.
After a spot of shopping in the town, Callie drove through the country lanes back to Newton St Clare. The hedges were thick with dark, jewel-like elderberries and she rolled her window down to inhale the sweet air.
She’d really enjoyed her trip to Castle Clare and knew she would be returning to the bookshop. Sam Nightingale had definitely been intriguing and she’d so enjoyed their conversation about books. Being married to a publisher, one would have thought that Callie would have had her fill of conversations about books, but that hadn’t been the case. Piers had had great enthusiasm for books, of course, but he usually talked about them in terms of making the bestseller lists or winning prizes. She couldn’t actually remember him handling a book with the love and attention she had seen Sam Nightingale display.
She thought about Sam and the way his hands had cradled the book that was now sitting on the passenger seat in the brown paper bag. She thought of the little bookmark he had given her and she thought about the intense brown eyes which had held both humour and sadness too. She also thought about Grandpa Joe, the library steps, the funny little kitchen with the Penguin mugs, and she knew that she had found a very special place indeed.
Entering the village and passing the church with its black and white flint walls glinting in the sunlight and the spire leaning very slightly to the west, she felt like the luckiest girl alive. And there, overlooking the village green, was Owl Cottage, her little home. Pride and joy swelled her heart at how perfect it was, but then she felt a stab of pain as she remembered that the journey which had brought her there had resulted from a failed marriage. She could barely believe that the last few years had happened to her and that her youthful dreams of love and romance had withered.
Well, she thought as she got out of the car with her shopping bags, she couldn’t change the past, but she could jolly well make sure that it wouldn’t be repeated in the future and Callie had made a promise that, under no circumstances, would she ever fall in love again.
She opened the little wooden gate and saw something on the doorstep of Owl Cottage. At first glance she thought it was a skinny cat, but then she realised that it wasn’t moving.
Dropping her shopping bags, she anxiously walked forward and swallowed hard when she saw what it was.
It was a dead rabbit.
Chapter 3
Sam Nightingale had been struck from the first second he’d seen Callie Logan in the bookshop, despite swearing to himself that he was never going to be struck again by any woman – not after his divorce from Emma.
He raked a hand through his dark hair as he thought about his ex-wife and their last miserable months together. He still couldn’t fathom what had gone wrong. Well, apart from what she’d done. But what on earth had made her do it? Had she been so unhappy with him, and had he simply misread the signs?
He should never have married Emma, he realised, but he’d been bowled over by her beauty and her charisma. She had been so unlike the other women he’d dated with her witty conversation and her charm, and he’d fallen for her big time. His parents had adored her too although his mother had warned him that Emma had a slightly flighty look about her – as though she wasn’t the kind to settle down and be happy with life as the wife of a bookshop owner and, sure enough, she hadn’t been.
Sam often wondered what had attracted Emma to him in the first place. She’d only ever briefly talked about her past relationships and Sam had got the impression that the men in her life had been hotshot city types who might have dazzled her with their money and possessions, but had been somewhat lacking when it had come to just being able to talk to a woman. But had Sam been really good at that? He remembered many wonderful nights sitting up with Emma, rambling from subject to subject, so what had gone wrong between them?
‘Perhaps I’ll never know,’ he said to himself as he admired the colourful paperbacks on the table in the main room of the shop. Perhaps she’d just grown bored, her seven-year itch arriving a year early.
He tried to put Emma out of his mind. It was over, done, finished. It was as much a part of the past as his precious collection of nineteenth-century novels. Instead, he thought about Callie.
She had reminded him of a butterfly with her slender frame, her fair hair which had fallen so softly down to her shoulders, and the misty blue eyes which had been full of wonder as she’d surveyed his shop.
There was something about a woman who loved books, he thought. Something intrinsically attractive. There was always an instant bond between readers, he thought, and he’d felt it with Callie as soon as they’d started talking. She was as crazy about the written word and the whole universe of books as he was.
He smiled as he remembered the sight of her sniffing the Kingston hardback and how her face had flushed when she realised he’d been watching her. How could you not like a woman who took joy in such a simple thing as the scent of a book? That was something Emma had never understood.
‘I don’t know how you can stick your nose in those horrible old things,’ she’d once said. ‘You don’t know where they’ve been or who else has had their noses in them.’
She had a point, he supposed, and yet the instinct in a natural born reader to do just that was very strong indeed.
He’d done his best to ignite a love of books in Emma, but it just never happened. He’d make gifts of some of the loveliest volumes he’d come across on his travels but, although she’d always thanked him, she’d always looked slightly disappointed to be given a book as a gift.
He straightened the rogue copy of Oliver Twist which nobody seemed to want. It had been in the bookshop for at least two years now. He thought about the number of customers who came to his shop every week, every month, every year. Some of them were good friends now and regular customers but, for the most part, they were tourists or idle passers-by who would drift in and out – sometimes without so much as a hello or goodbye – and he would never see t
hem again. Which was Callie to be, he wondered? Would she be a regular customer? And would she really be interested in his little book club? She was probably much too busy with her writing. She didn’t need a provincial book club. She probably had no end of friends in London to talk to about books.
He shook his head. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine Callie feeling at home somewhere like The Ivy. Maybe that was why she had swapped London for Suffolk. Perhaps their small town would suit her after all.
It was funny. The most important people in his life were all connected to books. It had been his Grandpa Joe and his wife, Nell, who had first opened the bookshop, raising their sons, Frank and Ralph, in the rooms above the shop in which Sam was now living. Uncle Ralph had gone on to become a university lecturer, teaching English Literature and Theatre Studies. He was particularly passionate about medieval poetry and mythology and he’d hoped to name the three children he’d had with his wife, Bonnie, after characters from Arthurian legend. But Bonnie had put her foot down after agreeing to Tristan, and so Sam’s other cousins had been given the more traditional names of Luke and Megan.
Sam thought about his own siblings. He was the eldest child of Frank and Eleanor Nightingale. Then there was Polly, Josh, Bryony and Lara. The entire Nightingale family still lived in and around Castle Clare. A few of them had experimented with moving away in the past with Josh taking off to London for a couple of years and Polly teaching abroad, but they’d found their way back again. Castle Clare was one of those places that it was hard to stay away from for long.
Now, Bryony ran the children’s bookshop opposite Sam’s secondhand one, Josh ran the independent selling new books, and Polly, who was mother to six-year-old Archie, worked part-time in all three of the shops, taking over if there was a family crisis. His cousin, Tristan, was a freelance editor and, for the last few years, had been organising Castle Clare’s very own literary festival. It wasn’t quite of the stature of Hay-on-Wye, but it was definitely gaining a good reputation and the crowds were getting bigger and bigger each year. Megan worked in the tiny local library and Luke was a reporter with aspirations to either write a novel or to act. He was just waiting for the right story to fall into his lap or for the right director to cast him, he said.
Of course, the bookshop was how he’d met Emma too. She’d run inside during a downpour. That’s how he got a lot of his customers, he thought with a grin – many of them discovered him whilst seeking shelter from the temperamental English weather. Emma had slipped on the pavement outside and had landed badly on her left hand which had been bleeding when she’d entered the shop. He’d taken her upstairs where her clothes had made a big puddle on his Persian rug. She’d then sat on his sofa, soaking that through too, but he hadn’t cared. He’d bathed her injured hand, popped a plaster on it, given her a cup of tea and fallen in love. It had been as simple and as quick as that. The end hadn’t been as simple or as quick unfortunately.
Straightening a lovely old edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sam went into the back room.
‘Tea, Grandpa?’
‘Has she gone?’ Grandpa Joe asked, looking up from his book.
‘Who?’ Sam asked.
Grandpa Joe tutted. ‘The girl! Don’t pretend she wasn’t a looker and you didn’t notice!’
‘She’s gone,’ Sam said with a resigned sigh at his grandfather’s summation, ‘and don’t think I didn’t notice you checking her out.’
Grandpa Joe’s bushy white eyebrows hovered over his dark eyes. ‘Well, of course I checked her out. I’m not dead yet!’
Sam chuckled. ‘Tea?’
‘Yep.’
Sam moved on through the room, returning a copy of Roses for an Empress to its rightful home before making two cups of Earl Grey tea.
‘Ginger biscuit?’ he called through.
‘Since when have I said no to a ginger biscuit?’
Sam reached for the tin and took out four ginger biscuits. Grandpa Joe liked to dunk.
‘So,’ Grandpa Joe said, putting his book down as Sam joined him on the sofa. He watched as the old man dunked his biscuit in the mug of tea, taking his time until the whole thing had almost dissolved. ‘Did you get her number?’
‘I did,’ Sam said, ‘in a professional capacity.’
‘Same thing as personal,’ Grandpa Joe said.
‘It is not,’ Sam said, ‘and, before you say anything else, it would be totally unethical of me to call her if it wasn’t book-related.’
‘Everything’s book-related if you put your mind to it,’ Grandpa Joe said.
‘It would be taking advantage–’
‘So take advantage!’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘She might come back anyway, especially if I can get hold of the first edition she’s after.’
‘That’s not guaranteed though, is it?’ Grandpa Joe said. ‘Ring her, Sammy!’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
Grandpa Joe sighed and Sam knew what was coming.
‘What your Emma did was inexcusable,’ he said, ‘but you can’t lock that heart of yours away forever. You’ve got to get yourself out there.’
‘Out where?’
‘Into the arena of love!’
‘Oh, Grandpa!’
‘What?’ he said, dunking his second biscuit.
‘You’re being so melodramatic about it all. I just want a quiet life.’
‘What? Shutting yourself away with these dusty old books? That’s no life. That’s a secondhand life – living through other people’s experiences. It’s not healthy.’
‘I guess not, but it might be happier.’
‘Really? You truly believe that?’
‘No, not really,’ Sam said, ‘but it suited you, didn’t it? And Dad too.’
‘Yes but we’d already found our soulmates before we took on this place.’
Sam nodded, thinking of his Grandma Nell who had run the bookshop alongside his grandpa for so many years. When Nightingale’s had first opened, it had sold everything under one roof: the new books, the secondhand ones and the children’s but, slowly, as the business had expanded, they’d opened the other two shops which had been run by Sam’s dad and Uncle Ralph before he’d become a university lecturer. Then Sam, Polly, Josh and Bryony had taken over. Their dad was still involved with the running of the bookshop, but preferred to do things from his computer at home these days, sourcing rare copies from the internet so that he could spend as much time as possible in his beloved garden.
Sam adored his family home, Campion House. It was a marvellous Georgian manor whose facade was covered with wisteria in late spring and roses in summer. Just one mile from the centre of Castle Clare, outside the village of Wintermarsh the house had been a renovation project which was the only reason his parents had been able to afford it, and Sam remembered some very cold childhood winters there when they’d been forced to wear coats, hats and gloves inside because there hadn’t been any central heating.
Slowly but surely, as profits from the book business grew, the Nightingales breathed new life back into the house, restoring each room and turning it into the perfect family home which, his mother insisted, everyone returned to each Sunday for a family lunch – no excuses. Even though her children were all grown-up, Eleanor Nightingale liked to be sure that they each got at least one proper hot meal into them each week, especially young Lara who was studying Literature at university in Norwich. Lara couldn’t always make the weekly lunches but, whenever she did, Eleanor always made sure that her youngest child got double helpings.
‘I don’t want you all running around surviving on microwaved rubbish,’ she frequently told them. Anyway, it was a good chance to catch up with everybody’s news and to swap stories from their three shops.
‘That Mr Bray came in again today,’ Josh would say.
‘Did he take anything?’ Polly would ask.
Josh would nod. ‘The new Dan Brown.’
‘Good heavens!’ their father would exclaim. ‘How the
hell did he shoplift that? It’s enormous! You’d think he’d choose a nice slim Penguin classic or something.’
‘I saw him pinch a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar,’ Bryony said. ‘I didn’t say anything because it was shop-soiled after Mrs Carter’s boy wiped his nose on it.’
Sam would watch and listen to his family, marvelling at the good fortune that they all still got on. How lucky they were, he realised, knowing several of the friends he’d grown up with came from broken homes with parents who were distant either emotionally or geographically and siblings that had little to do with each other.
Sam’s grandparents had moved into Campion House a few years ago when Frank and Eleanor had insisted that there was plenty of room and that their own house was far too much work for them in retirement. There had been little protest and Joe and Nell now had their own little wing on the ground floor, which had been extended to accommodate them.
‘You over for Sunday lunch?’ Grandpa Joe asked now as if reading Sam’s mind.
‘Of course,’ Sam said. He didn’t know why his grandpa asked him each week because it was always the same answer. In fact, in all the years of the great Sunday lunch tradition, Sam had only missed it once and that had been the week he’d had his honeymoon. He and Emma had gone to Venice and he’d done his best not to venture into too many of the amazing book binding shops there.
‘You bringing anyone?’ Grandpa Joe asked.
‘No,’ Sam said, taking a sip of his tea. ‘When do I ever bring anyone?’
‘Exactly,’ Grandpa Joe said. ‘It’s time that you did.’
‘Got anyone in mind, have you?’ he asked with a wry smile.
‘Just the one,’ his grandpa said.
Sam’s eyes narrowed. ‘What exactly is it about this woman that’s got you all worked up?’
He shrugged. ‘I like the way she moved around the shop,’ he said.
Sam smiled. He’d liked it too.
The Book Lovers Page 3
