Page 7 of Love Walked In

Leo’s eyes narrowed as he considered me, and out of nowhere I felt the urge to squirm.

I hadn’t been looked at like that since my stepfather, Greg, moved away, like he wanted me to disappear but needed to think of a second-best option.

I made a point of not being a burden to anyone these days, but I’d been here less than twenty-four hours and this man with a permanently furrowed forehead and prematurely graying hair had already decided I was one.

I needed to show him I could be helpful.

“I could look through the piles of books on the floor? Or see if there are any books you should pull from the shelves?”

“Pull?”

“For returns. Do you have boxes? I could start putting together some boxes to ship back to the publishers. It’ll make more room and you can get some money back. Is there a section that you’d like me to focus on?”

His headshake was so strong it was almost funny. “No, absolutely not. I don’t want you to touch any books at all. No returning anything. Just… watch. Shadow the others, take notes, try not to get underfoot.”

So much for having worked in bookstores for fifteen years. “As you wish.”

Westley had never said those three words to Buttercup with so much sarcasm. But Leo didn’t even bother responding, just turned around and walked away fast, mind already on another problem.

I spent the morning moving around the shop.

An hour sitting next to Graham on the second floor.

Or the first floor, he explained to me, because the first floor was the ground floor in England, bizarrely.

An hour with Catriona in the basement, flicking through one of Patricia Highsmith’s books about Tom Ripley while Catriona served a grand total of three customers.

An hour on the main registers with Leo, where I switched between studying the bookstore’s database to see how long books had been sitting on the shelves and staring out the tall windows at the gray day outside.

People strolled by, but only a few people stopped to look at Ross & Co.

, and fewer came through the doors. Idle curiosity was the lifeblood of a bookstore, what turned a day without buying a book to a purchase, what turned a trip to buy just one book into two or three.

After a sad lunch in the break room (a surprisingly expensive tuna fish sandwich from the chain place around the corner, and a good reminder that I needed to buy groceries and make my own sandwiches), I wandered up to the first floor and found an older man looking uncertain in Military History.

He was wearing a beige trench coat that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a spy novel, and he had a corona of white hair around a freckled bald spot. I took a step forward to help.

“Don’t,” Leo whispered right in my ear.

A gasp jumped out of my mouth. “Jesus.” I pressed my hand over my heart and glared at him. “What the hell?” I whispered.

He hissed, “You were about to go talk to him, weren’t you?”

The way he said “talk,” like it was a dirty word. “It’s called customer service. Look it up.”

He looked over my shoulder, then his long fingers mimed zipping his lips. He pointed around the corner and beckoned.

My own mouth clamped. I hadn’t done anything yet, and that customer was still looking lost, and now Leo wanted to dress me down for no good reason. A flash of pure cussedness made me shake my head and turn away.

He grabbed my upper arm. Hard.

My shocked eyes shifted up to his face, to his pursed lips and his determined expression behind his glasses. A wave of goose bumps rolled up my arm and across my chest. I flexed my bicep, but Leo’s grip was solid for someone who looked so skinny.

He blinked, his lips parted, and in different circumstances, it might have been hot. If we weren’t coworkers and Leo Ross weren’t an uptight asshole.

I tugged, and he immediately let me go, his face stricken. “Sorry,” he mouthed.

Fuck his apologies, especially a half-assed one. “Whatever,” I mouthed back.

For a second, I saw something in his brown eyes that looked like pain. But he shook his head once and it was gone. “Go on, then,” he whispered now, tilted his chin at the old man. “Show me.”

The condescending jerk . Indignation propelled my feet across the room to where the old man was still hovering in front of the bookcase. “Hello there, are you looking for something in particular?” I said warmly.

He turned and blinked at me. “Not really.”

I waited for more words, but nothing doing. Maybe I came on a little too strong. “All right,” I said, making my voice more mellow. “I’m Mari, and I’m around if you need any help.”

I got a nod in response.

OK. That was fine. Some people liked to browse before they made any decisions.

I moved to the other side of the room and crouched down in front of the books about Asian history.

I trailed my fingers over the spines, half my brain checking whether the countries were arranged in the correct order, the other half listening to the older man shifting on his feet, sniffling, occasionally coughing.

I could sense Leo’s smug presence still hovering just around the corner.

Sixty seconds later, the old man hadn’t moved. He wanted something, but he wasn’t seeing it.

I sidled back over to him. “What do you like to read?”

He looked at me, shocked, like I’d asked which sexual position he liked.

I smiled and soldiered on. “Do you like reading about particular battles? Or about branches of the military? Army, navy, air force?”

I was about to call the conversation dead when he said, “Intelligence,” his face and voice totally bland.

“Oh, spies!” I said, unable to keep the relief out of my voice. “I like reading about them, too. Ordinary people like you and me doing extraordinary things.”

“Mmm,” he non-answered.

It was like someone had limited him to speaking one hundred words a day, but I could work with that. “Have you read The Confidence Men by Margalit Fox? It’s not really a spying book, more a book about breaking out of prison, like The Great Escape . Have you seen that?”

His brow furrowed. “Yes.”

“Well, it’s like that, but with Ouija boards and people pretending to lose their minds,” I continued to babble, feeling more and more ridiculous with every word the man didn’t respond to.

“It’s awesome. I think you’d love it.” I leaned down and checked the shelf under F, but of course it wasn’t there. “I’m sure we could get it for you.”

“Not today, thank you,” he clipped out.

His face was closed, his words coldly final, and for a second I clamped my mouth equally shut. “Oh” came out of my mouth high and tight. But I couldn’t help but take one last chance. “OK, but maybe next time you visit? We should have it anyway, I can tell Leo to order a copy.”

Now he wasn’t nodding, or shaking his head. He was just… looking at me, simultaneously annoyed and concerned, and for the first time as an adult I felt the intensely painful urge to put myself in time-out in the corner somewhere, facing the wall.

“Well,” I forced out, “I’ll leave you to it.”

I went back to the Asian history books, and a second later heard him leave the room and make his slow way down the stairs.

I stared blindly at the shelf, a wave of embarrassment and failure crashing through me. It wasn’t just the weather that was frigid. The people here were cold, too.

“I tried to tell you,” Leo said behind me, his voice weary. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

Hurt twisted inside my chest. He’d set me up to fail, to what, teach me a lesson?

I flashed back to my eleven-year-old self, who’d misjudged the distance between two branches of the oak tree in the front yard and plunged to the ground.

I’d been sitting in the dirt with tears and snot cascading down my face, holding my broken right wrist to my chest, Greg’s folded arms and icy voice a shadow over me.

You won’t climb that tree again in a hurry.

I couldn’t paste a smile on my face right now, not with that shameful memory still coursing through me, so I stayed facing away from Leo. “Tell me what?” I said, hating the thickness in my voice that meant tears were closer than I wanted them to be.

“British people don’t want to be sold to. They want to shop for their books in peace.”

So no hand-selling? No learning what your regulars liked? There was no way to make a community if you ignored your customers.

I took a deep breath, reminding myself where I was. I was twenty-nine now, not eleven, and I didn’t have to take this. “Why?” I asked as calmly as I could as I turned around.

“Why what?” Leo asked impatiently.

Clearly the prince of the store wasn’t used to being questioned. “Why is being friendly to customers a problem?”

He thrust long fingers into his hair. “Because this isn’t America. We don’t want people in shops to be our friends. We don’t want to be chatted to, and we don’t want to be pushed into buying something.”

“I wasn’t pushing. I was just trying to help,” I said, exasperation seeping into my voice.

Leo didn’t say anything, just stared at me. I felt like a small child with a dirty face and hands, Greg glaring at me while my mom tried to clean me up for his parents’ weekly visit. Hoping for once I’d please them, even though I’d known I never would.

“Why am I here?” I asked, unable to keep the frustration out of my voice anymore.

Leo looked at me for a long time, and I studied him too, this rigid man impossible to reconcile with the one smiling in the photograph on the wall. For a second, I saw a flicker of an emotion besides exhaustion on his face.

I wasn’t sure anger was an improvement, though.

“I don’t know yet,” he said finally. “So stay away from the customers, please.”

Well, wasn’t that the dumbest sentence I’d ever heard. “Fine. You’re the boss.” Or what passed for one around here.

I went back down to the basement, where Catriona was clipping pictures out of a pile of old magazines. I sat in one of the comfy chairs and took my phone out.

“Defeated already?” Catriona asked absent-mindedly.

Now was not the time to show weakness. I forced a smile and said, “Down, but not out.” If Leo wasn’t going to let me interact with customers, I’d have to figure out some other way to fix things.

Better to ask forgiveness than permission, Suzanne’s voice said in my head. Or her favorite version, Forgiveness, permission, etc.

I thought of the database full of books that hadn’t sold and likely never would, the piles of books on the floor. The way the old man had stood staring at shelves that didn’t speak to him.

Something had to change.