Page 5 of Love Walked In
CHAPTER FOUR
Mari
Jet lag. Such a boring name for something so totally evil.
I’d blinked awake in the depths of the night like I’d had eight hours’ sleep, but it was only three fifteen.
I’d paged through the sixty-year-old copy of The Bibliophile’s Guide to London I’d found by deep-diving on eBay, five pages of which were dedicated to the wonders of Ross & Co.
, the brilliant double act of Leopold and Alexander curating their Aladdin’s cave of literary treasures.
I’d trailed my fingers over the illustrations of the store as it was, packed floor to ceiling with the latest books and wall to wall with eager customers.
I’d thought maybe I could bring a little bit of that energy back to this tired place.
I’d collapsed back into sleep, the book on my chest, only to wake up what felt like thirty minutes later, sweaty and strung out. A hangover without the party.
I took the pillow, wrapped it around my head, and groaned into it.
Sleep-deprived was not how I wanted to start my first full day at Ross & Co.
It didn’t help that the mattress was thin enough that I could feel the slats of the bed frame digging into my back, and that a chill lingered in the air, like the walls weren’t as much of a barrier to the winter outside as they should be.
I shoved the pillow off my head and inhaled deeply, feeding my tired brain oxygen. I wasn’t feeling great right now, but a hot shower and a steaming cup of coffee loaded with sugar would make everything better.
When I was clean and dressed, and feeling a little more ready to take on Ross & Co., I boiled water for instant coffee and looked at my phone.
Shit, I had a voice note from Walker.
Warily, I pressed Play. His surfer’s drawl told me he’d missed making my oat hazelnut latte for the last few days, and how much he’d liked the last book in the Daevabad trilogy, and he asked if I could recommend him more things like that.
After a long pause, he’d also said he’d missed me last night, describing in vivid detail exactly what sexy things he wanted to do to me when I came back from England.
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, then typed a quick text telling him about Katherine Arden’s trilogy set in medieval Russia, but I didn’t mention anything else he’d said, the dirty talk or the missing me.
This was why I’d tried not to mess around with people who lived in my small town.
When I was feeling fidgety, I usually drove over to Napa and picked up a tourist for a quick oxytocin boost. But I’d had a little bit of a thing for Walker in high school, and when his longtime girlfriend had moved to New York without him and he’d asked if I wanted to hang sometimes, I couldn’t resist his bright green eyes and easy smile.
We’d been fuckbuddies for the last six months, but now I hoped he would take the hint that I didn’t want anything else from him.
My life was better if I kept both my feet on the ground, my expectations of relationships low.
The last time I’d pinned my hopes on someone, she’d treated me so badly I still felt embarrassed at my own stupidity.
Now I closed Walker’s messages and checked the time: seven thirty. The shop opened at nine, so this was a good moment to wander around the store before anyone else got here.
Once I’d braided my hair and twisted it into my usual bun at the nape of my neck, I stepped out of the attic, and the damp, cold air instantly sank its teeth into my bare skin.
I dove back into the room and grabbed the bright blue sweater I’d worn yesterday and the hibiscus-pink scarf Suzanne had knit for my Chanukah present one year.
Now I looked like an Easter egg, but at least I was warm.
First order of business—figure out where the thermostat was.
I sipped the black coffee I’d laced with three spoonfuls of sugar to make it not taste like burnt sadness, still wincing at the acrid flavor. Second order of business—buy oat milk.
After I’d found the thermostat on a random wall in the science section and converted my idea of room temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius, I sat down on the single wooden chair in one corner and submerged myself in the silence of the store before opening, sending out positive thoughts into the empty space.
Imagined hearing cheerful voices here again, books sliding off the shelves into eager hands, paper bags opening to hold purchases.
For a split second Leo Ross’s weary face, his pursed mouth, his stiff movements popped into my head.
I couldn’t help but compare the man now to the candid photograph of him on the upstairs wall, with his armful of art books and his mouth turned up in a smile.
It had been a shy smile, tentative, but it still lit him up.
What would it have been like to work with that Leo?
Grief wasn’t strange to me, and obviously he missed his grandfather a lot. I would have to be a little more careful to get him on my side, help him see what needed to change about this place. Maybe I could put that smile back on his face again.
I heard the scrape of a metal gate lifting and jogged downstairs to the main floor to investigate. By the time I reached the bottom of the steps, the wood-and-glass doors had opened, and a tall blond man was closing them, his black wool back turned to me.
“Hi,” I said, and the man jumped sky-high. He pressed his hand to his heart as he turned around.
“Fuck me,” he yelped. “Gave me a start.”
He wasn’t the only one. His accent was different from Leo’s, rounder and less crisp, but if it weren’t for the twenty-first-century clothes, he’d look like he’d stepped out of a Renaissance painting. His nose was long, his mouth was wide, sensual, his short blond hair full of sunlight.
I’d never believed in the cliché about time stopping when you meet someone, but if I’d spilled my coffee and the drops floated in midair, I wouldn’t have been sur prised. The man’s cornflower-blue eyes were wide as he stared at me, equally stunned.
He was beautiful, but more than that, he was familiar .
Orchard House had always had some British tourists come through the door on their daytrips to wine country, but it was pointless to rack my brain.
I knew I’d have remembered this man. I’d never bought into Suzanne’s astrology charts and colorful array of crystals, but I was having a feeling I could only describe as eerie .
“I know you,” he said through my thoughts, his high forehead furrowed.
I blinked. So I wasn’t the only one wondering if there’d been a wrinkle in time. “I don’t think so,” I said, my voice a little shaky.
We stood there, staring at each other. It was absurd. Of course we’d never met before. I clapped to break the spell and said warmly, “But we can absolutely fix that. I’m Mari.”
He shook his head hard. “Of course. The American who’s here to help. I’m Graham, the nonfiction buyer.” Suddenly, he giggled a little to himself.
“What?” I said, confused.
“Honestly, I only had the one pint last night. I shouldn’t be seeing things.” He stared at me intently. “Are you certain you’ve never been here before?”
I shook my head. “Never been out of the US, and I have the brand-spanking-new passport to prove it.”
“That’s so strange . But anyway, Leo messaged me last night and said I should keep an eye on you. Show you the way we do things.”
I repressed a groan. Because I obviously wasn’t trusted to wander around on my own.
“Come on, then,” Graham said. “I need my coffee first.”
I followed him across the main floor as he threw on light switches, then unlocked another “Employees Only” door.
Inside was a lousy excuse for a break room—a metal table with two folding chairs sitting catty-corner to each other, a gray love seat that looked like it belonged to an office lobby in 1991, and a short counter with a microwave, a sink, and an electric teakettle.
The air smelled vaguely like tomato soup and the same instant coffee I was struggling to drink.
“So, Graham, how long have you been working at Ross and Co.?” I asked as he filled the teakettle with water.
He leaned back against the counter. “Two and a half years? I started when I was in my last year of uni and I’ve been here ever since.”
“What made you decide you wanted to work here?” I told myself I needed to learn about him to understand how he fit into the store, but the sense that I knew him from somewhere was still itching away, and maybe if I scratched it, this would all make sense.
He rubbed the back of his neck shyly. “Honestly? I was here most days anyway, because my girlfriend at the time worked here. I just wanted more chances to snog her. But Leo’s grandad, Alexander, found out I was reading history and politics at UCL and insisted that they needed my expertise.
” He shrugged. “The relationship didn’t work out, but I really liked being here.
The first year was really lovely. I learned a lot from Alexander about all the publishers, what people from the different unis liked.
I liked being surrounded by all these books.
And I like having more time for my own stuff.
I’m in the middle of my PhD and I have a bit of space for research and writing when I’m not here.
” He chuckled a little. “Besides, where’s a better home for a swot like me than a bookshop? ”
I couldn’t help smiling at him, laughing too. His warmth made it impossible to resist. “You said your first year working here was lovely. What changed?”
The teakettle boiled, and Graham turned away from me, the smile sliding off his face. “Alexander, Leo’s granddad, died eight months ago. It was a shock.”
I swallowed hard. I knew something about shocking deaths. I pushed the image of my mom in her hospice bed away. “It was sudden?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
“Yeah,” Graham answered, then his voice faltered for a moment. “I mean, he was in his eighties, it wasn’t like he was young. But he acted years younger than he was. He was vital, I suppose. Dynamic. The lifeblood of the place. And then he had a heart attack one night, and he was gone.”
“What’s been going on since then?”
His mouth twisted. “Not much, as you’ve probably noticed. Leo’s a good egg, but since Alexander died, he’s just been sitting still. Doesn’t want us to touch anything.” He sighed. “He and the old man were thick as thieves, and I think he’s a bit lost without him. We all are.”
Which would explain the tension and stress written all over Leo’s body. “So how many people actually work here?”
“We had to cut back on staff when the other shop closed—the Rosses lost a lot of money when that went.” He opened his hand.
“Right now we have Izzy, Jonathan, Sayeeda, and Neil, each coming in three days a week to sell books,” he said, tapping his fingers while he named them.
“Catriona and I are here five days a week. I handle all the science and social science buying, she buys all the fiction and children’s books.
And Leo is here every day, it feels like, handling everything else—art, cookery, sport, you name it. ”
The nonexistent romance section niggled at my brain. “It’d be good to meet Catriona, if she’s coming in today. The fiction section definitely needs some love.”
“Grammie, where are you?” a grumpy Scottish voice called now. “We have a shop to open.”
Graham groaned. “Yes, she’s in today. Unfortunately .”
A six-foot-tall woman shoved the employee door open and glared at us both. Her frizzy strawberry-red curls were half-contained in a bun, the other half flying every which way. I could see her waving a sword and leading an army of burly men with blue-painted faces.
“You must be Catriona?” I tried.
“I am, yes.” Her sharp accent gave a new meaning to “businesslike.” “And you’re Mari, the new girl who’s come to turn the shop around. Best of luck with that. Now, if you could stop flirting, Grammie, we have work to do.”
Before my eyes Graham’s body language transformed, became rakish, borderline louche. “You know me, sweetheart,” he said with a toothy smile totally unlike the one he’d given me, his accent suddenly stronger. “Can’t help myself, now can I?”
“Someday soon, sweetheart, you won’t be able to play the cheeky chappie and charm your way out of work,” she replied coolly.
He shrugged. “But I’m so good at it, and you make work about as appealing as a soup made out of haggis and Irn-Bru.”
She sniffed disdainfully and walked out the door without responding, but the acrimony and not-funny teasing lingered in the atmosphere. The charming grin had fallen off Graham’s face the second she’d turned her back.
“Am I right in thinking that’s the relationship that didn’t work out?” I asked carefully.
“Well spotted,” he said, shuffling his feet like a contrite teenager.
“I’m guessing it wasn’t that… amicable?”
He stared into his coffee mug. “As amicable as it could be when one person got a lot of attention just walking down the road, and the other person was so jealous she wouldn’t listen when I…” He shook his head and said bitterly, “When he tried to reason with her.”
Graham’s voice was light, but it was a paper-thin cover—his shoulders were hunched, his eyes downcast. It was a weird feeling, to feel sorry for someone for being too pretty for his own good.
But lost love wasn’t my business, Ross & Co.
was. “I guess that’s a compliment to the store, that you’re both still working here in spite of that,” I said thoughtfully.
“I suppose. Or just a comment on how stubborn we both are. What about you, then? Pining for someone back home?”
I rubbed the back of my neck, thinking fleetingly of Walker’s puppy-dog eyes. “Nope. Not the pining kind.” More the love-them-and-leave-them kind. I didn’t let myself catch feelings for anyone, but I needed the occasional human-assisted orgasm just like everybody else.
“Lucky you.” His lady-killer smile came back online, and I grinned back. But some lingering sense of weirdness made me ask directly, “Was that smile just a reflex, or do you actually want to flirt with me?”
He sized me up for a moment. “No,” he said wonderingly. “I don’t. You’re fit and all, but it just…”
“Feels wrong?” I filled in.
He nodded, and the weirdness surged back full force for a second. Then he took a big sip of his coffee and asked, “Now that we’re definitely just going to be mates, can I give you the full tour, new girl?”
I pushed away the sense of déjà vu and followed him.