He was too young to feel this old, Derek thought. But he did, he realized the next moment. He did feel old. Worse, he felt as if all of life had somehow just managed to go on, leaving him standing behind.
Leaving him with a lovely daughter who depended on him, Derek reminded himself. He had to stop thinking as if he already had two feet in the grave. He was only forty-seven, for God sakes. Medicine being what it was these days, he could have another forty-seven years left ahead of him.
But Marla had had only fifty-five. And for Jeremy there had only been thirty-five.
The thought was sobering. He had to make the most of what there was, he told himself, which meant being there for his daughter. Like a father, not like some specter about to cross over to the other side.
He’d watched his sister being buried. That didn’t mean he had to bury himself, as well.
Derek heard the door being opened behind him and he turned to see who was coming in. Several people entered the shop, all clustered around James Holden, this evening’s guest reader. The author was obviously basking in all the attention he was receiving.
“Looks like our author is here,” Derek called out to his daughter.
He saw her look up, smile and then go back to what she was doing. She seemed completely unaffected by the man’s arrival. The last time the writer was here, he’d spent some time after the reading talking to her. Turning her head. She’d floated around for several days, until she had seen a photograph of Holden with a supermodel he was taking to some Hollywood party.
Holden was closer to his daughter’s age than Mark was, but in Derek’s opinion, the author was far less suitable. The serious man who had entered their lives such a short time ago seemed a far more decent sort. A man who had lived hard and still managed to come out of the fray standing up, ready to take whatever else life had to throw at him.
Mark Banning was the kind of man who could keep his daughter safe, just in case he wasn’t around for the next forty-seven years. It never hurt, Derek thought, to have a plan, to be prepared.
If he’d had a plan all those years ago, things might have turned out differently. For everyone.
There was no use thinking about what might have been, he thought. There was only the present and the future to work with.
And tonight’s reading, he thought as he walked over to greet Holden.
He’d watched her. All through the reading, he’d studied her, watched her react to the words the man at the podium was reciting with such passion. Brooke seemed to be transported to another place.
If he tried, he could almost visualize her as someone from the last century. She had a timelessness about her, an innocence that was sorely lacking in girls even half her age.
Damn it, now he was the one waxing poetic, Mark noticed. But it was hard not to, given the circumstances. In an effort to create an atmosphere, Derek had lowered the lights, so that all they could focus on was the author’s hypnotic, deep voice as it took them on a journey into another world.
It had seemed endless, but finally the author had stopped reading. He’d thought that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. There was a question-and-answer period, conducted solely, in his opinion, to further inflate the author’s already overinflated ego.
He’d noticed that James Holden had attempted to make eye contact with Brooke several times during the question-and-answer period. But the dreamy expression on her face had vanished and she seemed to be Brooke again.
And her attention, he’d noted with no small satisfaction, even though he knew it shouldn’t have mattered to him, had been directed toward him.
Chapter Eight
Derek paused as he came away from the front door. For a moment he watched as Mark went methodically down the rows, collapsing chairs and stacking them against the far wall.
He smiled to himself.
“You know,” Derek commented, crossing to the young man and his daughter, “you help out any more around here and I might have to give serious thought to putting you on the payroll.”
He had just ushered the last of the people who had attended the reading out the door. At nine-thirty the bookstore was finally closed for the night.
It had been a profitable evening for everyone. The people who had come to listen to James Holden had been given an extra bonus. The author had been in rare form tonight, offering his audience not only words from his previously published tome, but a taste of the next book, as well. The latter wasn’t slated to appear on the stands for almost another three months.
It had whetted everyone’s appetite. Not only had there been healthy sales of the book Holden had been scheduled to read from, but many of the people who’d attended the reading had preordered the next book, as well. Holden had been properly grateful, with just enough studied humbleness to set the hearts of his female listeners fluttering.
The only time the dark, good-looking writer hadn’t been the last word in gracious smugness was when he had failed to draw Brooke’s attention away from Mark. Derek noted it had put the author off, though he tried to hide it. The last time James Holden had conducted a reading here, Brooke had hung on his every word and they had gone out afterward for coffee.
His daughter had been completely taken with the man, a condition Derek knew lasted for weeks. She’d spent her days and nights waiting for the telephone to ring. It never did. His heart ached for Brooke.
That the man, who was always a promising draw at Buy the Book, had failed in his attempt to reel Brooke in tonight gave Derek a great deal of pleasure.
He knew it was due in no small part to this new writer who had happened on their horizon. So far Mark seemed like a fine, upstanding, if somewhat quiet, young man. He sincerely hoped Mark wouldn’t wind up breaking Brooke’s heart.
Setting the chair he was holding down against the others he’d previously stacked, Mark glanced over his shoulder at Derek. “If I don’t find any publishers for this book when I’m finished working on it, I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Why not now?” Brooke suggested suddenly. Both men turned to look at her. “I mean, you have to eat. Unless you’ve got an independent source of income,” she added as the thought struck her.
“Brooke.” There were times when he thought his daughter was a bit too honest, a bit too uncomplicated. “You can’t ask Mark something like that.” A man’s business was his own. He above all people knew that. God knew he couldn’t risk having someone pry into his life.
Brooke didn’t see that she’d said anything really wrong. She believed in being open. Her own life was an open book and she didn’t see why everyone else’s couldn’t be. Especially, she thought, her father’s.
She secretly hoped that if she conducted herself this way, that if she got Mark to open up, as well, it might coax her father to be more open with her. She wanted him to tell her who that woman whose funeral he’d attended really was. And, more important, what that woman had meant to him and why he’d been so unlike himself since he’d received the news of her death.
Brooke flashed a smile bright enough to spread itself across both men, drawing them in, and informed her father, “I just did.”
Mark shook his head. There it was again, that innocence. That innocence and honesty that made him feel so damn guilty about doing his job.
“I don’t think your father’s really serious,” he confided to her in what was meant to be taken as a stage whisper.
Brooke raised a single slim eyebrow and looked at her father expectantly. “Dad?”
Because it meant something to her, Derek gave the comment he’d uttered in jest some serious thought now. “Well, I suppose that we could use an occasional hand with the Monday shipments.”
It was their heaviest day. Monday was the day when boxes of mass-market books would arrive and he’d always have to stop Brooke from taking it upon herself to see that they were all placed on the shelves as quickly as possible.
She worked harder than any three people, putting him to shame. What was more, she seem
ed to thrive on constant activity.
“All right.” He nodded, looking at Mark. “Maybe something could be arranged on a part-time basis—if it didn’t interfere with your research.”
Mark wished they’d both stop being so kind to him. He thought about the line about stealing candy from a baby. “Sounds like an offer I’m not supposed to refuse. I’ll keep that in mind,” he repeated evasively.
It gave him another excuse to hang around in case the one he had grew too thin. Sooner or later they were going to catch on to the fact that he wasn’t a writer. Or even a lover of San Francisco the way he claimed. Something was bound to trip him up.
The next moment Mark upbraided himself. He was thinking as if this was going to take a long time. He knew that it wasn’t. He’d already satisfied himself sufficiently that this was the man Tyler had asked him to locate. What he needed now was the right moment, the right opening, to let Derek know that he knew and that someone needed him to go public.
Which meant, in turn, hurting Brooke because she would think he’d used her, the way he’d already gleaned that Holden and a few of the other authors who’d been here giving readings had used her.
They had done it to enhance their own egos. He’d done it to help him get close to her father. He sincerely doubted that she would find his reason any better than theirs. No matter how you looked at it, a wounded heart was still a wounded heart.
“But right now,” Mark continued as he picked up another chair, collapsing it, “let’s just keep this arrangement informal.”
Brooke stepped forward, placing her hand on the same chair that he reached for. “Then you don’t have to do this.” She tried to take the chair away from him.
He deftly pulled the chair back, out of her reach. “You don’t understand, after spending all day thinking and reading, I need to do something physical. It’s a healthy counterbalance.”
Brooke raised both hands up in surrender. “Wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your counterbalance,” she murmured. And then she glanced toward her father. He was definitely looking better these last few days, but right now she judged that bed would be the best place for him. “Why don’t you go on home, Dad? I’ll do the register and then lock up.”
Derek made no attempt to hide his smile. She always could read him like a book. “I guess I am a little tired.” He looked toward Mark. “Thank you again.”
A chair beneath each arm, Mark merely nodded as he headed toward the back and the storeroom.
The door closed, ushering in a wave of silence and a far more intimate atmosphere than had existed just a few moments ago. As she stood there alone for a moment, it reminded her a little of the first night she’d stumbled across Mark.
Picking up a chair, Brooke followed him to the storeroom.
The area was small and, except for one small window that looked out onto a dark alley, it appeared as if it was almost completely sealed off from the world. The bulb that hung overhead should have been a higher wattage, she thought, not for the first time.
But right now she was glad that it wasn’t. It made her think of the cellar of a castle. And Mark was her reluctant knight.
Setting down the chair beside the others, she caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I guess I can be a little outspoken. I’m sorry.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. She was standing too close. He looked away again, trying to sound casual and not like a man who wanted to kiss her.
“About what?”
He was just being polite now. Something else to like about him, she thought. “I shouldn’t go prying into your personal affairs.”
Fighting off urges that had no business being there, it took him a second to figure out what she was talking about.
“Oh, you mean my monetary situation?” He shrugged the incident aside carelessly as he went to bring in more chairs. She followed in his wake like a sensual shadow he couldn’t shake. “You meant no harm.” He was beginning to doubt if she could mean anyone harm if her own life depended on it. She was the kind of woman you wanted to protect and keep safe. “And the image of the starving artist is part of society’s folklore. You were just being thoughtful.”
More than polite, she thought. Picking up another chair to his two, she went back into the storeroom again. “How is it that you can turn all my faults into virtues with a phrase?”
He put the chairs aside, then turned. Again, she was a hair’s breadth away from him. The urge to take her into his arms grew stronger.
Mark focused on the chairs and nothing else. “Maybe because, from where I’m standing, you don’t have any faults.”
“Everyone has faults.”
He laughed softly to himself. If she only knew.
“Believe me, anything you might consider a fault pales in comparison to what I’ve seen.” Depositing the chairs, he went back out into the store again.
She cocked her head as she looked up at his face. Somehow she managed to lengthen her stride and get ahead of him.
“What have you seen, Mark? Tell me about yourself. Give me details,” she coaxed softly. “I don’t know very much, except that you’re from New York and that you like San Francisco. And to be helpful.” Tactfully she omitted the fact that she also knew he was an orphan.
He’d already told her more than he ought to have. “Maybe we should leave it at that.”
Ordinarily, she would have backed away. But there was something about this man, something that had been hurt and that made her want to help him heal, that wouldn’t allow her to back away.
“What are you afraid of, Mark?” Her eyes were wide, innocent, as she asked to be allowed to look into his dark soul.
Feelings moved through him. She was too young and innocent for him. And his soul was decades too old for her. His life had seen to that.
“That if you knew more, you’d like me less.”
She moved her head slowly from side to side, her eyes never leaving his as her silky hair softly moved against her cheeks. “Not possible.”
“Why? Because you like me so little, you couldn’t like me less?”
She began to protest vehemently, then realized he was teasing her. “You’re playing with words.”
Turning his back on her, he went out to gather more chairs. “It’s what I do.”
Brooke doggedly followed him. “You’re a good man, Mark.”
He thought of the life he’d led, the times he had come face-to-face with despair and it had almost conquered him. There’d been a time, right after Dana had terminated her life, that he had contemplated taking his own. Unable to, he’d attempted the next best thing, to be killed by some lowlife while executing the duties of his job. But he’d been disappointed even then.
Those were not the actions of the hero she was looking for. “Don’t be so sure of that.”
“Why?” she wanted to know, refusing to retreat. “Are you a hit man?”
“No.”
Popping up like toast in front of him, she had another one for him. “A bigamist?”
The suggestion was so far from the truth, it almost made him laugh. “No.”
When he turned to bring the last grouping of chairs in, she got in front of him for a third time. “Cruel to small children and medium-size animals?”
This time he did laugh. Depositing the last bunch of chairs against the wall, he looked at Brooke. “No.”
Her point was made. “Okay, that qualifies you as a good man.”
She was so far from right. A good man would have somehow been able to see the signs and kept Dana from taking her own life. A good man wouldn’t be pretending to be something he wasn’t in order to get close to a trusting man and his daughter.
His face was very, very somber as he reiterated, “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Then tell me,” she urged again, adding quickly, “It won’t change my opinion of you, but it’ll satisfy my curiosity.”
“Your curiosity,” Mark echoed. He was accustomed to thinking of hims
elf as a nonentity, as something that blended into the background. It seemed odd to him to have someone actually wonder about him. It gave his life depth and dimension, and he wasn’t altogether sure how to feel about that. “You’re curious about me.”
She looked into his eyes for a long moment. “Immensely.”
He supposed there was an argument for telling her things about himself. For letting her into his life, not all the way, but just enough to make her feel as if she did know him.
In a way it was manipulative of him, but she was asking and if he put her off, it might raise her suspicions. He didn’t want that.
And if he told her lies, if he fabricated things about himself, there was a chance one of them might trip him up.
He had already told her enough lies to try to keep straight.
So he made his decision. “You want to go somewhere and get some coffee after we finish up in here?”
Happiness went through her like a rubber ball set off inside of a rubber room.
“We can get coffee here after I finish with the register,” she told him, already walking to the front counter. “I can brew a fresh pot.” She’d turned the coffeemaker off for the night and had cleaned it out, but it would take nothing to start it again. “We don’t have to go anywhere else if you don’t feel like it.”
“No sense in wasting a whole pot,” he told her. He closed the door to the storeroom, locking it with the key she’d given him earlier. He crossed to her and handed the key back to her. “We’ll go out.”
She was hardly aware of putting the key back in the drawer. Their first date, she thought. Unofficial and last minute, but it was still a date. She’d always loved spontaneity.
On automatic pilot, Brooke went about the business of shutting down the register. Her mind was elsewhere.
There was something very romantic about being swept away by the moment. Just as she had been when she’d kissed him, she thought. It would have been nice to have had him make the first move, but she didn’t regret what she did for one second.
It felt as if she’d been born in that small instance. As if everything else she’d experienced had just been marking time until that moment.
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