Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor Book 1)
Nevermore Bookstore: Chapter 1

Anticipation

{ĂN-TĬS′Ə-PĀ′SHƏN} NOUN. HOPE, EXPECTATION,INTUITION, FOREKNOWLEDGE, OR PRESCIENCE

Cadence Bloomquist stared at the faux old-fashioned rotary telephone, willing it to ring.

It wasn’t that she was waiting, per se. Waiting by the phone was absolutely not a thing Cady did, and especially not for a man.

Despite her best friend’s completely unfounded accusations.

She was merely making herself available for Nevermore Bookstore’s most lucrative customer. A customer who was polite enough to place his weekly orders every Thursday night at precisely eight p.m.

Over the last several months, Cady discovered that if she not-waited at exactly the right second, she could catch the gleaming gold dial and glossy black enamel vibrating ever so slightly before the brassy jumble of notes sang out.

And they would.

Any minute now.

Planting her hands on the silky wood of the credenza her aunt had repurposed for the bookstore’s cash register, Cady shook out her legs and stretched her stiff back.

Any other evening, and she’d be upstairs life-rafting on her heating pad by now, doomscrolling or binge-watching until the day melted from her bones.

Still. The bookstore did take on a cozily creepy edge once the darkness pressed against the shop’s large front window.

Cady glanced up just as a gust of early-autumn wind sent red and yellow leaves somersaulting down the empty sidewalk. Bathed in the amber glow of wrought-iron streetlamps, Water Street—the quaint seaport town’s main drag—had already gone quiet, the locals safely tucked into their homes and the stream of tourists dwindling as they found their way back to their cozy bed-and-breakfasts.

From the mantel of a fireplace whose chimney had long ago been bricked up, the antique brass clock began to chime.

The mosh pit of butterflies in her stomach pulled out their tiny glow sticks and began to rave as she counted the bell-like musical pings.

Two. Three. Four…

Brrrrrringg.

She waited the customary one and a half rings before clearing her throat and lifting the handset from its golden cradle. The receiver was pleasantly heavy in her hand and cool against her cheek as she inhaled to issue her standard greeting.

“Nevermore Bookstore, this is Cady.” Hearing the manically chirpy edge in her voice, she made a face at herself in the antique mirror above the table bearing teetering stacks of books still in need of shelving.

“It’s Fox.” Two syllables, two goddamned syllables of that smoky, sexy fireside voice, and her vital organs turned to melted butter.

Cady bit her knuckles to keep her rush of excitement from becoming the audible squeak she’d once had to blame on a smoke detector in need of a new battery. Which then led to her having to replicate the sound while she put down the phone and pretended to change it.

Not the ideal scenario for an auditory flirtation.

“Well, hello, Fox,” she said in her Wish App attempt at a seductress’s drawl. Even Edgar, the bookstore’s resident raven mascot, seemed to be rolling his eyes at her.

Eye, anyway. Like the other assorted critters congregating on various bookshelves, Edgar’s taxidermist displayed more enthusiasm than skill when it came to lifelike reconstruction.

“How was your week?” she asked, reaching for the delicate China teacup of Earl Gray she’d put in place at exactly 7:55pm.

“Good. Yours?”

Hearing a muffled jingle on the other end of the line, Cady imagined him seated in a wide, wing-backed leather chair, the phone pressed to his smoking jacket as he rang a bell to order up a triple-distilled something or other from the loyal, silver-haired butler who’d been with his family for ages.

Conjecture of this kind had been one of her favorite parts about their conversations. With a voice that rumbly, he’d have to be tall. Or at least tall-ish. Deep-chested. Broad-shouldered, or his proportions would just be all off and he definitely didn’t sound like a man whose proportions were all off.

Not that it would matter, with the way her lady bits stole her heartbeat when he so much as breathed on the other line.

“My week was excellent.” Moving her cup and saucer onto the lacy disk of a knitted purple coaster, Cady bent at the waist to ease the ache at the base of her spine. “I just got in a brand-new shipment.”

“Is that so?”

Three words already, and not even a full minute in. This had to be some kind of record. The knot of tension behind her sternum began to soften. Their calls had always begun this way—with his mostly monosyllabic answers gradually lengthening as she supplied the conversational push that turned his verbal engine over.

“Mmhmm,” she said. “You’ll never believe what was in it.”

“I bet I would.”

Four? And a voice-smirk?

Cady gripped the corner of the credenza to keep from swooning. “Frankenstein.”

“Not one of the first editions of the third printing in 1831?”

“Even better,” she drawled. “One of the first five hundred published with Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones in 1818.”

“No.”

“Yes indeedy. Speckled calf cover, brown Morocco spine label and all.”

It had taken her three weeks, twenty calls, thirty-seven emails, and promises of nonexistent firstborn children and/or sexual favors to finagle it from a notoriously cantankerous rare book seller on the East Coast.

“I can’t believe you actually got it.”

Seven. Hot damn.

“It almost sounds as if you doubted me.” Cady looped her index finger through a coil of the phone cord, feeling like some kind of moony retro teenager.

“I would never doubt you.”

Cady took a sip of tea to loosen her stiff tongue. “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or a red flag, considering you don’t actually know me very well.”

“I know you have a monster kink.”

Bergamot-scented mist exploded from her lips. Cady promptly managed to aspirate the rest, descending into a coughing fit that lasted a fortnight at least.

“Sorry,” she rasped. “Just went in the wrong hole—er—pipe.”

“Hate it when that happens.”

Something about the way he said it left Cady wondering which scenario he was referring to.

She bent to retrieve a roll of paper towels from the cabinet below the credenza and dabbed atomized droplets from the counter’s surface as she searched for a witty rejoinder.

“To be fair, I had only been talking to you for, like, three weeks when I made that comment about Sasquatches. Sasquatch? Ugh. Is there even a correct plural for that word?”

“I hope not,” he said. “And you didn’t make a comment about Sasquatch—you made a comment about me being one.”

“That is not what I said,” Cady insisted, fighting a grimace when she turned too quickly.

“Then what did you say?”

Caught in her own snare. Hoisted by her own petard. Grudgingly, she sank back into the memory of one of their first conversations, complete with clammy pit-sweat and burning cheeks. She’d been so desperate for any scrap of information about him then. So embarrassingly obvious in her data mining.

“I said, how do I know you’re not a Sasquatch?”

“Is that what you said? Because I feel like there’s something missing,” he mused.

Cady blew out a gusty exhale. Damn him with his stupid raspy voice and his annoyingly perfect memory.

“How do I know you’re not a Sasquatch with a really sexy voice?” she said in the unenthusiastic cadence of a times table recitation.

“So, Miss Monster Kink, will you add it to my shipment?”

Questions like this were part of what informed her mental image of Fox as a reclusive scholar with ancestral money. Well, questions like this, and gothic romance novels. Many, many gothic romance novels. Being occasionally bed-bound was for more glamorous when you could imagine yourself as the ailing but brave heroine in an imposing manor on a windswept cliff.

An ailing but brave heroine with a mysterious benefactor who never once expressed concern about the prices of the rare and sometimes almost un-gettable books he asked her to replace.

The small, unassuming hardbound tome sitting by the phone would have cost her a quarter’s worth of paychecks when she’d only been working for her aunt as opposed to running the bookstore. Buying it had been a significant gamble on her part. If Fox hadn’t been interested, she’d have ended up further in debt, and the book locked in the glass curio cabinet containing her other unfortunate investments.

“Cady?”

The sound of her name caressed by silk and sandpaper snapped her back to the present.

“I’m sorry, what?” Reaching for one of the vintage cookbooks next to the iPad register, she began to fan herself as she frantically searched her short-term memory. If her cheeks grew any hotter, her glasses would be in imminent danger of fogging.

“Will you add Frankenstein to my shipment?”

“Right. Of course. Happy to.” Crumpling the paper towel, she shot it at the wastebasket and missed. “Any special requests or this week’s order?”

“There is, actually.” Silence stretched over the line for a beat.

“I’m listening.”

So, so hard.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any more like—” Another pause. “Like the extra book in last week’s order?”

Her mouth curled up at the corners.

“Extra?” she asked innocently, brushing her chin with the feathery mock-quill pen patrons used to sign for their credit card purchases.

“The mystery?” he prompted.

“The Sign of the Four?” Cady may have mangled seductress, but naïve ingenue she gave in spades.

Fox’s epic sigh sounded like the rushing wind, followed by a mumbled “nancygoo.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t get that.”

“Nancy Drew.”

“Oohhhh. That book.” Using the full extent of the extra-long cord she’d plugged in precisely for this purpose, she walked around the credenza to stand before the set of shelves she couldn’t bring herself to part with despite their slight swaybacked bowing. “You’re in luck,” she said, running her finger down the neat regiment of yellow spines with iconic blue lettering. “I have about forty of those. How many would you like me to send?”

“Top five?”

“Done,” she said, scanning the titles and tipping them forward with her index finger.

She had gotten to The Secret Staircase when something touched her elbow.

Cady let out a little screech and whirled around to replace a familiar face hovering just behind her shoulder.

The instant rush of relief she felt was quickly replaced by irritation as her best friend proceeded to wander around the shop, glancing behind velvet curtains, peering into the many reading nooks and shadowy corners.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, pressing the receiver to her chest.

Gemma McKendrick blinked wide jade-green eyes at her, her rosebud mouth pulled off-kilter by a smirk. “I’m checking for serial killers.”

“Try the closet,” Cady quipped. “He’s probably trying on my hooker heels.”

“Hooker heels?” Fox’s voice crackled up from the region of her breasts.

Shit.

“So sorry about that. My best friend dropped by unannounced, but she’s just leaving.” At this, Cady shot Gemma an expectant look and cut her eyes toward the door. “You were saying?”

Her slide into the animated tone she reserved for Fox alone was surprisingly effortless.

Gemma dramatically batted her lashes, miming a phone snuggled against her pumpkin-colored cardigan.

Cady flipped her off and turned her back to her friend, her flush deepening to an atomic cherry.

“She has a key?” All traces of footwear fetish curiosity had vanished from Fox’s voice.

“No, but she does this all the time. It’s really no big—”

“Lock your doors.”

A chill lifted the fine hairs on the back of Cady’s neck. “What?”

“Lock your doors.” Coming from a man she’d never met face to face, this ought to sound creepy instead of panty-dampening and protective in a John Wick meets Mr. Darcy kind of way.

“This is Townsend Harbor.” Cady laughed, attempting to reinject some levity into the conversation. “Nothing happens here.”

She would have traded her autographed copy of Interview with the Vampire to know what Fox was thinking in the twelve whole seconds that elapsed before his response.

“Nothing happens until it does. Lock your doors.”

“I will, I promise. As soon as we’re—”

“Now. While I’m on the phone with you.”

Cady shifted her weight to the opposite hip, gazing longingly toward the chaise she would have collapsed onto already were her best friend not there to witness it. “See, I can’t lock the door while I’m on the phone with you because the cord won’t reach.”

“I’ll get it,” Gemma sang, picking a dust bunny from her plaid skirt as she rose from the avalanche of books she’d been stacking.

“No.” Fox’s eruption was loud enough for Gemma to hear in the otherwise quiet shop. The smile melted from her face as she raised an eyebrow at Cady. “I want you to get in the habit,” he said, softer now. “Put the phone down and go lock the doors. I’ll wait.”

“Just a minute.” Cady set the receiver on its side at the phone’s base and quickly locked the front door. She’d intended to repeat the process with the building’s rear entrance facing Townsend Bay, but her back and hip had other opinions.

Without missing a beat, Gemma shot to her feet, Mary Janes making the old floorboards creak as she swiftly sprinted up the steps leading to the back. Cady’s chest tightened.

Most days, her determination not to feel sorry for herself was enough to wall off the ever-present envy she felt watching her best friend bounce around like a brunette Tinkerbell in a body that didn’t randomly declare mutiny.

Gemma reappeared in the doorway, tossing her dark braid over her shoulder and giving a thumbs-up.

Cady mouthed thank you and returned to the phone and her self-appointed security guard.

“Doors locked, windows shut, hatches battened, and lights lowered to discourage the late-coming retail scourge,” she said. “Now can we talk about books?”

Fox cleared his throat. “Rain check?”

Cady’s already heavy heart sank into her guts. He’d spoken to her from this chilly distance only one other time—when he abruptly ended their discussion about The Count of Monte Cristo after Cady had flippantly suggested Edmond Dantès should have gotten a good therapist and invested his fortune in aeronautics instead of wasting it on weasel-faced Fernand.

“Of course,” she said. “Listen, if it’s something I said—”

“It’s not,” he said, cutting her off. “Just need to go.”

“O-okay,” she stammered. “Until next week?”

“Next week.”

The dial tone stung her ear.

Cady returned the phone to the hook, blinking away silly, childish tears. It shouldn’t hurt her feelings.

Shouldn’t, but did.

Gemma clomped down the steps and leaned against the corner of the credenza, a guilty grimace tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Yes, you did. But it’s okay.” Cady should have known that her attempts to evade her friend’s not-so-subtle attempts to discover more about the man she’d been spending her Thursday evenings with would only serve to amplify her curiosity.

It was only a matter of time.

Running through the modified closing ritual reserved for her “bad body” days, Cady tugged the dangling brass chain to click off the knockoff Tiffany lamp at the register and picked up her teacup. The purple knit coaster below it jogged a memory.

“Before I forget, do you have any yarn in hideous colors or terrible textures that you’d be willing to donate to a good cause?”

Gemma folded her arms across her chest. “Are you suggesting that Bazaar Girls lacks a carefully curated inventory?”

Hearing the name of her best friend’s knitting and craft shop conjured soothing images of the orderly rows of colorful knots and skeins interspersed with other odds, ends, and notions.

Emphasis on odds.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Cady said. “I was telling my mom about the Stitch n’ Bitch club, and now she wants to start one with her friends.”

“Is that even allowed?” Gemma asked.

“I’m sure they don’t give them metal needles or anything, but yeah, they do crafts.”

“In that case, absolutely. I’ll put something together tomorrow if you’ll remind me.”

“Of course.” Cady had already made a mental note to do just that. For all her many excellent qualities, short-term recall had never been Gemma’s strong suit. “I just need to grab a few more books for an order and we can get out of here.” Ambling over to the bookcase, Cady smiled to herself as she plucked the Nancy Drews she’d selected for Fox.

When she’d included them in last week’s box on a whim, it had been a toss-up between these or the Sweet Valley High books. She’d plowed through two or more a night sometimes during her high school hiatuses—Aunt Fern’s prescription for the insomnia that had plagued Cady in the early days of her condition.

Judging by the rate at which he placed his orders, Fox achieved similar results during the restless hours of the night.

The image of him beneath the brocade covers of a four-poster bed, nursing a burgeoning grudge against the scheming Jessica Wakefield provided a balm to Cady’s still-smarting soul.

“You know that thing is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Gemma said over her shoulder.

Cradling the stack in the crook of her arm, Cady pressed a palm to the side of the bookshelf that had developed a pronounced starboard lean. “Aunt Fern said Mt. Rainer will crumble before this thing does,” she said, thumping the solid oak.

Gemma searched Cady’s face, not-so-subtly looking for evidence of the grief her best friend obviously thought she was hiding. “We can talk about it, you know.”

“I know,” Cady said.

“I mean, the funeral was only three weeks ago.”

Three weeks ago…today.

So that was the reason for her friend’s impromptu welfare check.

“I remember,” Cady said.

“She practically raised you.”

“Are you actively trying to talk me into a depressive episode, or are you doing shadow work again?”

Gemma’s eyes skated toward her shoes.

Guilty on both counts, Cady guessed.

“Anyway, she didn’t raise me,” Cady pointed out. “Aunt Fern took me in when I was sixteen. I’m not a real Townsendite, remember?” That she could joke about it now was a testament to time’s pain-dulling quality.

As an already self-conscious teenaged transplant, Cady had been handed the dubious task of penetrating social circles that had been in place since…since forever, really. Had it not been for Gemma, she likely would have graduated without anyone recognizing her face in the yearbook.

“And yet you pulled Townsend Harbor’s most eligible bachelor,” Gemma said, her dark eyebrow raised.

Cady huffed a whisp of hair away from her face in mock exasperation. She was immeasurably grateful for the subject change. “There will be no pulling of any kind where Sheriff Townsend is concerned.”

Together, they migrated toward the back of the shop, turning off additional lamps and pulling down the shades. Gemma held the swinging door that opened on a hallway leading to the narrow alley between buildings. Townsend Harbor’s postcard-quaint historic downtown area was full of these strange intersections, impractical collisions where buildings had sprung up to service the Victorian seaport before city planning was a thing.

“So things aren’t going well for the two of you, I take it?” Gemma asked.

“They’re not going at all.” Stopping at the landing at the bottom of the stairs that served as part storage, part work area, Cady tucked her armful of books into the box labeled FOX with large, marker-scrawled letters.

“I got a new shipment in today,” Cady said, attempting to re-change the subject.

“You did?” As predicted, her unfailingly curious friend floated over to the bench with her recent deliveries.

Too late, Cady saw which box her friend was reaching for.

“Not that one—”

Gemma shrieked and leapt back a full foot, her eyes wide as duck eggs and her cheeks pale as milk.

“Jesus.” Her best friend glared at her, a hand to her heaving chest. “What is wrong with you?”

From this angle, Cady had to admit the package’s contents looked pretty unsettling.

Poking up from the snowy mound of packing peanuts, a small pink paw stretched heavenward as if to catch a game-winning fly ball.

Seized by a fierce pulse of joy, she began digging through the contents. Her newest acquisition entered the world nose first, followed by a conical, black-lipped maw bearing yellowed teeth jutting out at odd angles, and, finally, two glossy onyx button eyes below small pink ear folds. The gray body was the size of a cat’s, but longer and…lumpier.

“This is Roderick,” Cady said. “He’s an opossum.”

Gemma shuddered. “Where do you even replace these things?”

“Etsy, mostly.” Cady carefully wiggled the stiff body back into the peanuts. “He was on—” A gasp stole her breath as her lower back tensed up. “He was on sale,” she continued after the unwelcome twinge had passed.

Concern creased her best friend’s face. “Astrid remodeling today?” The name she and Gemma had landed on after deciding that pronouncing ankylosing spondylitis stole too many seconds from their day, Astrid was Cady’s unwelcome tenant. The ever-present but always-unwelcome squatter who had moved in when Cady was seventeen and had been renovating her spine ever since. Some days, Astrid was content to chill and admire her handiwork. Others, she’d call up a few friends and annex Cady’s hips or neck.

Today had been the latter.

“A filthy cockbiscuit, more like.”

“One cockbiscuit eviction notice, coming right up.” Unsnapping her satchel, Gemma reached in and produced a box whose logo Cady immediately recognized.

“You went to Baked?”

“I thought you might be able to use some cannabinoid consolation.”

A relatively new and controversial addition to Townsend Harbor’s commercial makeup, the cannabis-based vegan bakery had proved an instant hit with tourists and a source of constant and very vocal consternation for its residents.

Cady’s would-be suitor among them.

But at only four dates in, it wasn’t like she owed him every detail about how she spent her free time.

Right?

“Couch and Kush cookies?” she asked, replaceing a weak smile.

“Now you’re talking.” Gemma began climbing the stairs, glancing over the banister when she noticed Cady wasn’t following.

“I can’t just leave him down here,” Cady said, motioning toward the box she didn’t dare lift in her present state.

“You’re right,” Gemma agreed. “We should put him in the alley so he can be with his own kind.”

Cady widened her eyes in a pleading look.

Her best friend exhaled a long-suffering sigh as she stomped back down and leveled a mock-serious look at Cady. “I’ll bring that thing upstairs under one condition.”

“What’s that?” Cady asked.

“You’re going to spill about you and the sheriff. None of this vague ‘it’s not going at all’ stuff. I want details. Times. Dates. Bases reached. Got it?”

“Deal.” She almost felt a little guilty for agreeing. Gemma was about to be incredibly disappointed.

With her arms stuck straight out in front of her and her face accordioned in disgust, Gemma picked up the box by its flaps and followed Cady up one flight to the front door of the two-floor living space she and her aunt had shared.

Until recently.

Cady opened the door and allowed Gemma to enter first so she could rid herself of her unwelcome cargo.

“Just set him on the kitchen table.”

“The hell I will.” Gemma set the load down on top of several file boxes stacked on a bench near Aunt Fern’s office. “I plan on eating in there at some point in our future.”

Guilt gnawed a pit in Cady’s growling stomach.

How long had it been since she’d invited her friend over? They’d grabbed the occasional drink at Sirens after work, slurped coffee together from the one semi-decent coffee cubby in town before starting their days, but they hadn’t had a proper hangout since before Aunt Fern’s diagnosis.

Stage four metastatic lung cancer, officially.

The decline had been so fast that Cady was still reeling from the hellish merry-go-round of medical terms, medications, well-meaning mourners. The evidence of her emotional vertigo littered nearly every surface of the lovely, lofty second-floor space that Aunt Fern had converted into her home.

Wilted condolence bouquets she hadn’t gotten around to tossing out sat on the dusty sills of high-arched windows. Piles of unopened mail littered the antique sideboard. Stacks of probate paperwork and file boxes huddled near the thick, intricately carved baseboards on a parquet floor badly in need of waxing.

“I’m sorry it’s such a mess,” she said, toeing out of her sneakers and kicking them near the front door before proceeding to the kitchen.

“You have been to my home, right?” Gemma set the Baked goodies on the counter and slung her coat and satchel on the back of a kitchen chair. Using it to balance, she wiggled out of her chunky patent-leather Mary Janes before padding to the dishwasher. “These clean?” she asked, holding up two wine glasses.

“Yep,” Cady said. “That’s pretty much the dish cabinet now.”

Her best friend placed them on the oversized kitchen island and grabbed a bottle of red from the small wine fridge tucked under the subway-tiled counter. “Mind if I do the honors?”

“By all means.”

Gemma made quick work of opening the wine and pouring them each a glass.

Cady gratefully accepted hers, waiting for the next part of their ritual to commence.

“If the ocean was beer and I was a duck…” Gemma began.

“I’d swim to the bottom and drink myself up,” Cady finished.

They clinked glasses and sipped in solidarity.

“Now then,” Gemma said, all business. “Wine is all you’re getting until you spill the tea, so you might as well get on with it.”

The French Cabernet was burgundy silk in Cady’s throat. Spicy and full of dark fruit. She willed it to loosen her tongue.

“About Ethan?”

Gemma waggled her brows suggestively. “Ethan, is it?”

“I mean, that’s his name. What did you think I call him?”

“Daddy, in a perfect world.” Her wine-kissed lips curved in a suggestive smile. “Or you iron-cocked Adonis, or— Balls!”

“No way am I calling him Balls,” Cady teased. “I don’t care what you say about the bulge in those perfectly pleated khakis.”

The gentleman dresses to the left. This information, her unhelpful brain had filed under Things I’m Trying Not to Know.

Gemma turned her leg to examine the runner in her opaque black tights. “You have any clear nail polish?”

Cady didn’t. But she knew who almost certainly did.

“I’ll check.” She drew in a deep breath, pointed her socked feet toward the living room, and continued down the hallway to the master bedroom. Sweat bloomed on her palms as she stared at the floral ceramic doorknob.

“I can do this,” she whispered to herself, flexing her fingers in preparation. “I can do this.”

Turning inward to replace some secret reserve of strength, she was surprised to replace Fox’s voice waiting for her.

I never doubt you.

That made one of them.

She got as far as closing her fingers over the smooth, cool shape before jerking her hand away as if it had burned her.

Nope.

Not yet. Not today.

The distance back to the kitchen seemed to have doubled.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t—” The words died on her lips as she spotted her best friend frantically pawing through one of the file boxes on the kitchen table. Cady folded her arms and leaned against the doorway. “Want to tell me what you’re doing?”

Gemma jumped, her lightly freckled cheeks flooding scarlet as her eyes darted around the kitchen.

“See, what had happened was, there’s been a lot of talk about the Townsend Building since Aunt Fern’s probate information has been published.”

An unlikely member of Townsend Harbor’s city council in her tender early twenties, Gemma had maneuvered herself into the mainline of constant, covert conversations that ran the town like the river beneath a mill.

Cady’s recent misfortunes had apparently upgraded it to hydroelectric.

“I can’t imagine who might be doing the talking,” Cady said, her face beginning to slide down her skull.

The Pacific Northwest’s near-constant drizzle hadn’t yet flattened the dirt on Aunt Fern’s grave, and already Cady had been fielding thinly veiled questions about what she intended to do with the building. Whether she would sell it back to the Townsend family, or perhaps sublease it to one of the many businesses clamoring to slide into the bookstore’s coveted Water Street spot.

The idea of Cady keeping it and running the bookstore on her own never seemed to be included in their potential plans.

Gemma straightened out the tassels of the kitchen rug with her stockinged toe. “Mayor Spewart did mention something about the property taxes being in arrears, and I thought if I could replace proof to the contrary, he might shut his stupid face.”

Ever since his appointment, Deputy Mayor Stewart (Deputy, because he’d been designated as interim by the city council and not by democratic process) had become Gemma’s official nemesis. A mansplainer of epic proportions, he’d made it his business to oppose her every idea and suggestion on principle.

As if he had any.

Cady deflated on an exhale. “In this case, Mayor Spew’s stupid face is right,” she admitted.

Her best friend chewed her lower lip. “If you need help—”

“It’s not that,” Cady said a little too quickly. “I’ve just been hyper-focusing on getting the business’s paperwork caught up. I promise, getting those taken care of will be the next thing on my list.”

Thanks to Fox’s purchase of a ridiculously expensive book at a healthy fifteen percent markup.

Satisfied, or pretending to be for Cady’s benefit, Gemma returned to her wine glass and grabbed the bakery box. “Shall we?”

“We shall.”

They shuffled into the living room and plopped down on the well-worn leather couch. The sticky-sweet scent of vanilla with a distinctive herbal undertone wafted up from the box as Gemma opened it and offered Cady a cookie.

“I thought I didn’t get one until after I tell you about Ethan.”

“I changed my mind,” Gemma said. “We both know your filter dissolves after even half of one of these.”

With the day she’d had, Cady wasn’t about to argue with that logic. She lifted one of the sugar cookies and bit through the thick blanket of pink icing.

Her friend swiveled on her cushion to tuck her feet beneath her skirt. “Let’s have it.”

Cady stretched her legs out and leaned back against the mound of throw pillows. The blessed relief of not having to support her own body weight was nothing short of a miracle.

“There’s really not much to have,” she said, fighting a topic-appropriate yawn.

“What did I say about the vagaries?” Gemma asked.

“That’s not a vagary.” Cady took a sip of wine to wash down the mouthful of doughy cookie. “That’s an empirical fact.”

A crumb fell from Gemma’s open mouth. “You’re saying he hasn’t touched you, like, at all?”

“He did brush my boob once, but I think that was really an accident.” Cady felt a flicker of fondness at the memory. The sheriff had mounted a rickety stepstool to reach the cobweb and dust-caked one-legged partridge on top of the long-neglected top shelf of Nevermore’s nonfiction section. He’d misjudged his reach by a couple cup sizes on the way down and spent the rest of the evening spurting apologies at odd intervals that Cady suspected coincided with his involuntarily reliving the moment.

Every time he did, his ears glowed like they’d been dipped in lava.

All because Townsend Harbor’s ginger Dudley Do-Right had been his helpful, gentlemanly self.

Glancing down at her graphic t-shirt, Cady willed her nipples to harden. Demanded that the telltale warmth gather behind the zipper of her wide-leg trouser jeans.

It was no use.

One man alone had mastered her body’s cheat codes, and she’d never even seen his face.

She’d imagined it, though.

Frequently. Feverishly. And usually with a battery-powered device within arm’s reach.

“Helloooo.” Gemma snapped her fingers near Cady’s face. “I asked you a question.”

Cady dug her socked feet beneath her best friend’s hip on the couch cushion. “Ask it again.”

“You’re telling me that I’m over here giving you all the space, being all sensitive to your grief by not asserting my right for the dirty details, and the whole time, there were no dirty details?”

Cady wiggled down on the cushion to adjust her lumbar support. “We’re taking it slow.”

“You’re taking it slow,” Gemma repeated.

“That’s right.”

“For this, I carried that rat up the stairs?” Gemma’s eyes took on a wild look as she stabbed a finger toward the entryway where Roderick’s paw was still visible above the cardboard flaps.

“He’s an opossum,” Cady pointed out.

“Have you given no thought at all to how this affects me?” Gemma demanded.

“You?” Cady snorted. “How could my lack of action with Ethan possibly affect you?”

“Here I am, a pillar of our community—” Gemma began.

“Who has twelve unpaid parking tickets.”

“I’m on the city council,” she continued.

“And were nominated as a prank.”

“I’m the founder of this town’s fastest-growing recreational organization—”

“Of women who you bribe with free booze.”

“—the best friend of the woman dating Townsend Harbor’s most eligible bachelor—”

“Who his mother set me up with,” Cady reminded her.

“—and you expect me to bring my constituency something as lame as ‘they’re taking it slow?’”

Cady shrugged. “Seeing as it’s the truth, yes.”

Gemma dramatically flopped back against her side of the couch. “This is a disaster.”

“You want me to flash him next time he comes to pick me up for dinner? Maybe straddle his lap at the Drunken Clam?”

Gemma brightened. “You’d do that?”

“Hell no,” Cady said, batting her friend with a pillow. “I may fake smiles for retail purposes, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to fake a lady boner.”

“You didn’t seem to be faking much while you were on the phone with Book Batman.”

Cady flushed with pleasure at the memory. “That was a genre-specific lady boner. We were talking about Mary Shelley’s speculative fiction masterpiece, and I don’t even want to know the motherfucker who doesn’t get moist for Mary Shelley.”

Gemma shifted to stretch her legs so they sat feet to hips. “What do you know about this guy, anyway?”

Cady had known this question was coming, had seen it in the dogged, determined focus her easily distracted friend had demonstrated downstairs while Fox was still on the line.

“I know he was raised on a ranch in Wyoming. I know that he has a younger sister who’s an architect in Cleveland. He doesn’t read literary fiction but likes it when I summarize the plots for him. He hates the desert but loves high Sierra sunsets. He can’t stand anything that’s orange- or grape-flavored. He loves Thursdays and hates Sundays. His favorite sound is rain on a tin roof. He hates the beach because he can’t stand the feeling of sand on his skin. I know he can quote the romantic poets and dissect story arcs. I know that he’s traveled all over the world, and he’s brilliant, and funny, and—”

“Is that all?” Gemma drawled.

It wasn’t, but it was all Cady could say without earning herself a new avalanche of questions from Gemma.

I know that his calls are the reason I didn’t go insane when Aunt Fern got sick. I know that just the sound of his voice makes my skin tingle and heart fly.

“His favorite color is blue,” Cady added, for all the other things she couldn’t tell her friend.

“It’s a good thing men don’t lie ever.” Gemma set her wine glass on the coffee table and reached for the remote. “And what does he know about you?”

The implication behind the question was clear and, if Cady was being honest with herself, not entirely ungrounded. Her conversations with Fox had started innocently enough but were definitely beginning to dip into the realm of flirtation as of late.

And flirtation with a man who had become her emotional anchor and the chief source of revenue for a business she was terrified of losing was, she admitted, not the best idea.

“The kind of things you replace out during a friendly conversation,” Cady said. Like the fact that she was into monster porn, apparently.

“See, the funny thing is, because I am your friend, I know what your friendly conversation voice sounds like, and that wasn’t it.”

Cady let her head drop back against the pillow, too tired to try to convince anyone of anything.

“Look, I totally get the man of mystery fantasy,” Gemma said, making air quotes with her fingers.

“It’s not a fantasy, Gem.”

Okay, so she might have the occasional daydream about being tied spread-eagle to the rolling ladder in Fox’s library—which she was a hundred percent sure he had—but what provincial governess wouldn’t be curious when the troubled and darkly seductive laird of a crumbling manse invited her to peruse his private collection?

“I’m just saying, I think you should be careful.”

“You’re one to talk,” Cady said around a yawn. “Remember that time you gave a ride to that hitchhiker just because he was wearing a yellow beanie?”

“Umm, yellow is my lucky color.”

Gemma and her signs.

“Right,” Cady said. “As in, you’re lucky you didn’t end up the pretty face on an episode of Dateline.”

“I was perfectly safe,” her friend assured her. “Someone setting out to do harm to another human would never accessorize with something so easily identifiable on a police sketch.”

“Have you shared this theory with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis division?” Cady asked, picking a crumb from the shelf of her breasts. “I’m sure they’d be riveted.”

A rolling cloud of mellow began to fill her limbs with warm honey, and her joints mercifully surrendered their grudges against general existence.

“Feeling better?” Gemma asked.

“Much,” Cady said.

“Stand-up or tits and dragons?” Gemma aimed the remote at the flat screen mounted above the fireplace mantel.

“You pick.” Letting her body become one with the couch, Cady felt a rush of gratitude. For the reprieve from Astrid. For cannabis cookies and her best friend’s comforting presence.

But especially for the man whose smoky voice chased her into dreams.