Page 1 of Love Walked In

CHAPTER ONE

Mari

As soon as I saw you, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen .

I looked up at the gray stone facade of Ross & Co. and shifted the straps of my overloaded camping backpack, a smile forming on my lips as I remembered Winnie-the-Pooh’s immortal words.

This was my first time in England, but it felt familiar to me just the same. This place had lived between the covers of so many books I’d devoured from practically the moment I’d learned to read, a world I could escape into whenever I’d needed, on good days and bad.

To my kid self, England was Pooh, Paddington, Mary Poppins, and as I got older, it was Dorothea Brooke and Bridget Jones and the heroines of dozens of Regency romance novels. And London? London was the beating heart of it all, the capital of the world, full of possibility.

Now I squinted through the city’s drizzle.

Speaking of English novels, Ross & Co.’s facade gave strong Rebecca vibes.

Gothic turrets and extravagant medieval-style carvings on the front of the building made me think of a rambling great house like Manderley, not a humble independent bookstore. There were gargoyles, for God’s sake.

This late afternoon in early January wouldn’t have been out of place in a Gothic novel, either. Dark coats and pale faces flowed past me on the sidewalk, phones pressed to ears or gripped tight in hands. Heads down, brows furrowed, mouths closed.

The cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question .

I shivered. It was one thing to read Charlotte Bronte’s description of British weather, another to experience it for myself.

For a split second I missed the bright colors of Orchard House Books, the closest thing I had to a home.

The little store in Loch Gordon, California, had warm yellow walls and deep-blue trim, neon-pink camellia bushes blooming by the front door, and a store cat, a fat orange tabby named Emperor Norton, who was probably snoozing in the sunny patch on the front porch right about now.

Best of all, it had Suzanne, my purple-haired mentor and my favorite person.

She’d taught me most of what I knew about bookselling, and after I turned Ross & Co.

around, she was going to retire and turn over Orchard House to me.

But Suzanne was the reason I was here in London at all.

Ross & Co. looked warm, too, the tall front windows glowing gold in the twilight, and I had almost two decades of experience working in bookstores and an MBA.

I was going to give this beautiful old building a bright new future, and I needed to stop imagining myself inside a book. Go see what I was up against.

I tried to push the feeling of missing Orchard House away, the same way I pushed away any emotion that wasn’t helpful.

Away with the fear that I could mess this up, away with the suspicion that I just might be in over my head.

Sure, this place was twice the size of anywhere I’d worked before, and decades older.

But a bookstore was a bookstore, right? I’d helped four other stores become more profitable in the last four years, what was another one?

I readjusted the load on my back, about to cross the street.

“Excuse me,” a British woman said, almost knocking into me. She said it in a snotty tone that sounded a lot more like Fuck you .

“Sorry about that!” I called after her, trying to balance out her bad energy. But she had a point. I needed to be inside that building with the Ross family, figuring out how to get their store back on track.

When I opened the wooden double doors, a blast of dry heat greeted me. My hairline exploded with sweat as I unzipped all my layers as fast as I could and tugged my T-shirt away from my chest. There was central heating, and then there was stepping into an oven.

Once I was a little more comfortable, I could take the place in.

Straight ahead of me was a spiraling staircase, burgundy-carpeted steps leading down to what must have been a basement and up to more floors.

A wooden counter to my left held a computer monitor that looked over a decade old, no one behind it.

I leaned over the counter and saw an old-fashioned wooden desk chair, a battered gray laptop, and an open sketchbook full of delicate pen-and-ink drawings: a black cat pouncing on a dragging piece of string, a girl winding up to kick a soccer ball, another girl wrapped around a cello almost as big as her.

The pen was uncapped so it looked like whoever was drawing had just stepped away for a second.

Figuring the artist would come back soon, I meandered around the space.

In the center of the main room was a round table piled with books, with a sign on top saying “Mr. Ross Recommends.” A personal touch, how nice.

But I didn’t recognize any of the titles.

Mr. Ross seemed to have a thing for polar exploration, Trollope, and biographies of famous artists.

It was an interesting collection, but not the most up-to-date.

I wandered through each room on the ground floor, trailing my fingers over the old tobacco-colored wood of the shelves.

The air was a little stale, but I could still smell the enticing aroma of books, the vanilla-y sweetness of aging paper.

The old-fashioned light bulbs gave everything a golden tint that LEDs couldn’t match.

My fingertips revealed that everything needed to be dusted, but I could feel that someone had loved these nooks and crannies once, even if the selection on the shelves was like the recommendations table in the entrance—it really needed to be culled and reorganized.

I smiled a little to myself. I wanted to revive this place, nurture it the way my mom had rescued dying plants and brought them back to life with warmth and water and attention.

Suzanne had told me once that books actually needed human touch to stay intact, needed to have their spines bent and their pages turned.

Speaking of human touch—where was everybody?

I saw a few people with old wooden carts stocked with books, but if they were employees, they didn’t act like it—they didn’t even look up as I moved past them. There was being distracted, and then there was slacking on the job, and this felt a lot more like the second one.

When I arrived in the empty Natural Science section, I stopped and just listened.

Ross & Co. was hushed, and not in the focused, everyone-is-contemplating-good-books way.

It was quiet the way a graveyard was quiet.

I climbed up to the next floor, looking from side to side, seeking any sign of life.

Finally, in the Lifestyle section I saw an older woman in a hooded black parka quietly standing and reading an enormous cookbook.

But she put the book back, then slowly shuffled toward me and then past me down the stairs, not saying a word.

For a second, I wished for some of Suzanne’s sage to burn.

There was a seriously bad vibe lingering among the tables and shelves, of long-term illness and decline.

I thought of what she’d told me for years: that the beating heart of a bookstore wasn’t the books, it was the people who sold and bought them.

Without people, the books were just stacked piles of nothing, gathering dust.

Maybe the shop needed a test. I always liked visiting my old friends, anyway.

Something about holding a copy of a favorite book, running my fingers over the spine, flicking through to a familiar scene, grounded me in a place.

Nothing made me happier or more at peace than Francie Nolan reading a library book and eating broken peppermints on her fire escape, or the three Fossil sisters escaping to the English countryside to camp out together.

I trotted back down the stairs to see if the doodler was back behind the front counter.

My feet slowed, stopped, as I took in the man who’d made the little drawings.

Silver threaded through his messy black hair, and the bookstore’s warm light glinted off the lenses of his browline glasses.

The long fingers of one hand cradled his cheek as the other hand moved across the notebook, but the resting pose was deceptive.

His eyes were totally focused, his mouth pursed in concentration.

He was handsome in a starving-artist kind of way, quiet and intense…

but as I looked, I realized with a pang that the emphasis was on the “starving.” His oval face was too drawn, his olive skin sallow, and the shadows under his eyes deep and dark, like his last full night’s sleep had been a very long time ago.

My first urge was to tell him gently to head home, eat a hot meal, and go to bed early, that tomorrow was another day.

But that wasn’t my job right now. My job was to see what I could do to get this place back on track, then make suggestions to the three Rosses I was supposed to meet later today.

“Hi,” I said cheerfully as I walked up to the artist. “Can you help me?”

He froze, then looked up at me, his eyes narrowed suspiciously as he capped his pen. “Possibly,” he said in what sounded like a fancy accent, the same way the woman on the street had said “Excuse me.”

“Snooty” was not a vibe I liked in customer service.

It didn’t help that he was wearing a black button-up shirt that made him look like a hipster undertaker.

My eyes zeroed in on the top button. Who buttoned the top button of their shirt when they weren’t wearing a tie?

It was the fussiest thing I’d ever seen.

I waited, propping up my bright smile on sticks, for him to say something else. A welcome to the store, even an apology for not noticing me before.

Nothing.

The smile was on the verge of falling off my face, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m looking for something,” I said, emphasizing my uncertainty, giving him room to step in and, you know, help .

He stood, and now I was looking up at him. But that wasn’t saying much for his height, given that I was only five foot three. “Aren’t we all?” he sighed as he stretched out his narrow back.

Yeah, I wasn’t looking for a philosophical answer, here. “It’s called This Wallflower Breaks Hearts by Beatrice Dashwood.”

“Is that a bodice ripper?” he asked skeptically.

Oh, for crying out loud. Reading romance had given me so much joy over the past decade that I had no time for people’s crusty old ideas about the genre.

I mean, Americans were still making references to Fabio, and he hadn’t been on a cover for thirty years.

My smile turned into a grimace for a second before I forced out a cheerful “That’s not the term we use for romance novels nowadays, given that it’s pretty sexist and rapey, but yes, it is. ”

His shoulders straightened. “Well, we don’t stock romance novels .”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Why not?”

He folded his arms. Behind his glasses, his eyes were almond-shaped and a brown color as flat as his voice. He was the dismal January afternoon in human form. “We’re not that kind of shop.”

I hadn’t been dismissed so callously since my last girlfriend had dumped me seven years ago.

My hands clenched on the straps of my backpack.

“Then you’re missing a trick,” I said, trying to keep warmth in my voice, anger out.

“Romance is the biggest-selling genre in publishing, and it’s only getting more profitable.

Haven’t you seen the news about social media driving demand? ”

He shrugged. “We don’t pay much attention to fads, and romance novels aren’t what our customers want, anyway.”

No wonder Judith Ross had asked Suzanne if I could come help for a few months, if this was the employees’ attitude to selling books. “But it’s a chicken-or-egg problem. As long as you don’t stock romance novels, romance readers won’t come to your store.”

He shook his head and said slowly, like I was a kid, “We serve a different clientele.”

I dramatically looked from left to right. “Your clientele is definitely different. Are invisible shoppers a thing in England?”

“Miss,” he said, like the honorific was rotten in his mouth, “I don’t know what you want, but you’re clearly not going to find it here.”

I could feel fire building in my chest, waiting for me to breathe it at this pain in the ass, but I wasn’t going to win friends with vinegar.

“Look,” I said tightly, “the bookstore I work at in California has a whole case of romance novels, and we’re not exactly bringing down the town’s tone, so maybe it’s something you should consider. Even a shelf to start with might help?”

All of a sudden, his mouth gaped and his eyes widened. “Wait, you’re American.”

My eyebrows shot up at his appalled face. “It took you this long to notice my accent?”

“And you work at a bookshop in California.” He closed his eyes like I’d stabbed him. “Your name’s not Mari Cole, is it?”

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, a little bemused at his discomfort.

He buried his face in his hands and groaned something that sounded like “Fuck my life.” Then he dropped his hands and said flatly, “I’m Leo Ross, the general manager. I would say I’ve been expecting you except…”

“You weren’t,” I finished for him. But he wasn’t what I had expected, either.

This hipster mortician dickhead was Leo Ross?

The manager of the whole store, and one of the owners?

The one I was meant to work closely with for the next ninety days of my one wild and precious life?

Disappointment cramped my stomach. It was like I’d been promised a bowl of ice cream and served soggy broccoli instead.

Obviously I wasn’t going to be friends with him.

But I’d only been in London for three hours.

I had to make the best of it, despite the jet lag starting to play a loud drum solo in my skull.

I forced one more smile and said, “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot?” No maybe about it.

“It’s nice to meet you, Leo.” Lie . “Could you tell me what I’m supposed to be doing for the next three months? ”

He was quiet for a second, and I hoped against hope that he’d tell me that the last five minutes had been a gruesome nightmare from the pit of my insecurities. But he shook his head. “I’ll take you up to the office, and Judith can tell you what she was thinking.”

Judith, his step-grandmother and Suzanne’s friend. Not him. He didn’t want me here.

I ignored the shrinking feeling in my chest, the urge to curl up in a ball so I’d inconvenience him as little as possible. Instead I put on my biggest smile and swept my arm grandly. “Lead the way, Your Highness.”