Once in a Lifetime

Page 3

“Look here,” he said, pointing to item number four. “Ben.”
“It’s Ben and Jerry’s. Ice cream,” she informed him. “Shorthand. Give me the damn notepad.”
Hmm. He might’ve been inclined to believe her, except there was that slight panic in her gaze, the one she hadn’t been able to hide quickly enough. Straightening, he skimmed the names and realized he recognized a few. “Cathy Wheaton,” he said, frowning. “Why do I remember that name?”
“You don’t.” Straightening as well, Aubrey tried to crawl up his body to reach the pad.
Ben wasn’t too ashamed to admit he liked that. A lot.
His jacket was open. Frustrated, she fisted a hand in the material of his shirt, right over his heart. “Damn it, Ben—”
“Wait…I remember,” he said, wincing, since she now had a few chest hairs in a tight grip. “Cathy…she was the grade in between us, right? A little skinny? Okay, a lot skinny. Nice girl.”
Keeping her hold of him, Aubrey went still as stone, and Ben watched her carefully. Yeah, he was right about Cathy, and he went back to the list. “Mrs. Cappernackle.” He looked at her again. “The librarian?”
With her free hand, Aubrey pulled her phone from her pocket and looked pointedly at the time.
He ignored this, because once his curiosity was piqued, he was like a dog with a bone, and his curiosity was definitely tweaked. “Sue Henderson.” He paused, thinking. Remembering. “Wasn’t she your neighbor when you were growing up? That bitchy DA who had you arrested when you put food coloring in her pool and turned it green?”
Aubrey’s eyes were fascinating. Hazel fire. “Give. Me. My. List.”
Oh, hell, no, this was just getting good—“Ouch!”
She’d twisted the grip she’d had on his shirt, yanking out the few hairs she’d fisted. She also got a better grip on the pad so that now they were tug-o-warring over it. “You could just tell me what this is about,” he said.
“It’s none of your business,” she said, fighting him. “That’s what it is.”
“But it is my business when you’re carrying around a list with my name on it.”
“You know what? Google the name Ben and see how many there are. Now let go!” she demanded, just as the door to the flower shop opened and a uniformed officer walked out.
Luke, with his impeccable timing, as always. Eyeing the tussle before him, he raised a brow. “What’s up, kids?”
“Officer,” Aubrey said, voice cool, eyes cooler, as she jerked the pad from Ben’s fingers. She shoved it into her purse, zipped it, and tugged it higher up on her shoulder. “This man”—she broke off to stab a finger in Ben’s direction, as if there were any question about which man she meant—“is bothering me.”
“Lucky Harbor’s beloved troublemaker Ben McDaniel is bothering you?” Luke grinned. “I could arrest him for you.”
“Could you maybe just shoot him?” she asked hopefully.
Luke’s grin widened as he gave Ben a speculative glance. “Sure, but there’d be a bunch of paperwork, and I hate paperwork. How about I just beat him up a little bit?”
Aubrey looked as though this idea worked for her.
Ben gave her a long, steely look, and she rolled her eyes. “Oh, never mind.” Still hugging her purse to herself, she turned, unlocked the bookstore, and vanished back inside it, slamming the door behind her.
“I thought the store was closed,” Ben said, absently rubbing his chest where he was missing those few hairs.
“It was,” Luke said. “Mr. Lyons is her uncle, and she rented the place from him and reopened the store. She’s gone with a soft opening for now because she needs the income from the store, but she’s wants to have a grand opening when the renovations are finished.”
“How do you know so much?” Ben asked.
“Because I know all. And because Mr. Lyons called. He needs a carpenter, so I gave him your number.”
“Mine?” Ben asked.
Luke shrugged. “Everyone in town knows you’re good with a hammer.”
“Yeah.” Ben’s phone rang, and he looked at the unfamiliar local number.
Luke looked, too. “That’s him,” he said. “Mr. Lyons.”
Ben resisted the urge to do his usual and hit IGNORE. “McDaniel,” he answered.
“Don’t say no yet,” Mr. Lyons immediately said. “I need a carpenter.”
Ben slid Luke a look. “So I’ve heard. I’m not a carpenter. I’m an engineer.”
“You know damn well before you got all dark and mysterious and broody that you were also handy with a set of tools,” Mr. Lyons said.
Luke, who could hear Mr. Lyons’s booming voice, grinned like the Cheshire cat and nodded, pointing at Ben.
Ben flipped him off. An older woman driving down the street rolled down her window and tsked at him. He waved at her in apology but she just waggled her bony finger at him. “Why not hire Jax?” he asked Lyons. “He’s the best carpenter in town.”
“He’s got a line of customers from Lucky Harbor to Seattle, and I don’t want to wait. My niece Aubrey needs help renovating the bookstore, and she needs someone good. That’s you. Now I know damn well she can’t afford you, so I’m paying, in my sweet Gwen’s memory.”
Well, shit.
“Oh, and don’t give Aubrey the bill,” Mr. Lyons said. “I don’t want her worrying about it. She’s going through some stuff, and I want to do this for her. For both my girls.”
Ah, hell, Ben thought, feeling himself soften. He was such a sucker. “You should be asking me for a bid,” he said.
“I trust you.”
Jesus. “You shouldn’t,” Ben said firmly. “You—”
“Just start the damn work, McDaniel. Shelves. Paint. Hang stuff. Move a few walls, whatever she wants. She said something about how the place is too closed-in and dark, so figure it out. I’m going on a month-long cruise with my new girl, Elsie, and I need to know before I leave. You in or not?”
Ben wanted to say no. Hell, no. Being closed up in that bookstore with the beautiful, bitchy Aubrey for days and days? The reality of that didn’t escape him. If he did this, surely one of them would kill the other before the work was done.
“Ben?”
“Yeah,” he said, facing the inevitable. “I’ll do it.”
Whether he’d survive it was another thing entirely.
Chapter 3
Two days later, Audrey opened her bookstore bright and early, much to Gus’s annoyance. He liked to sleep in. Ignoring the curmudgeonly cat’s dirty look, she took a moment to just look around. Despite her efforts, the store was still too closed-in and stuffy. She wanted to open it up by moving shelves back against the walls and adding a coffee and tea station. Definitely an Internet café and a comfortable seating area for a variety of reading and social clubs that she’d host here.
She wanted it more spacious. Sunny. Bright.
And God, please, successful…
Half an hour later, she welcomed her first customers of the day—a van of senior citizens. She’d coaxed the senior center into driving them over here two mornings a week for their book club.
“Hey, chickie,” Mr. Elroy said, leaning heavily on his cane. He was decades past a midlife crisis, but he still managed to be quite the lothario at the senior center. “Which aisle has the sex stuff?”
He meant the how-to manuals. Anticipating him, she’d hidden any and all books on sex on the bottom shelf of the self-help aisle. No one ever went to that aisle. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t have any.”
“Really? Didn’t anyone ever tell you that sex sells?”
Mr. Wykowski had come in behind Mr. Elroy. “You need a manual?” he asked Mr. Elroy. “All I need is a little blue pill.”
And so went the morning.
When the seniors were gone, a bus full of kids showed up, as Aubrey had also made a deal with the elementary school.
The kids managed to find the sex manuals. Luckily, Aubrey was quick on the uptake and confiscated the explicit reading material before a single book spine got cracked. By the time they left, she was exhausted. In the past week, she’d learned several vital facts. One: Seniors and kids were a lot alike. And two: She wasn’t making enough money for this.
By lunchtime she was back to daydreaming about the “bean” part of Book & Bean. Right now she was using a back corner, which was really a storage closet, to make tea and coffee. She wanted to remove the door and wall and replace them with a curved, waist-high counter that would create a coffee and reading niche. She ate a PB&J while perusing the Internet for affordable bar stools for the spot.
But for now, most everything she wanted was out of her budget. She knew she could ask her father for help, but she’d have to choke on her own pride to call him, and she wasn’t good at that.
So instead she’d gone to the local hardware store and bought a book on renovation. She’d read it from beginning to end and thought she could handle some of the easy stuff on her own. She planned to tear out the closet herself, and she’d brought in the crowbar from the back of her car to do just that.
Clearly, it’d be far easier to suck it up and call her dad, but she rarely took the easy route. Her parents had divorced when she’d been ten and her sister, Carla, eight. Her father, William, retired from being an orthopedic surgeon, was a consultant now, but still he had a hard time talking to mere mortals. Not her mom. Tammy was an ex–beauty queen working as a manicurist at the local beauty shop, and she loved to talk. In the divorce, she’d gotten Aubrey, and William had taken the child prodigy, Carla.
An unorthodox custody arrangement, but it’d allowed the divorced couple to stay away from each other and avoid arguments. It’d also alienated Aubrey from her father, who’d recently remarried and had two new daughters now. Plus Carla had followed in his footsteps and was a first-year resident at the hospital, heading toward the same brilliant career path as her dad.
And then there was Aubrey. Living with Tammy had meant that the pressure of an Ivy League school and a medical career were off the table, but there’d been other pressures. Tammy had been the ultimate beauty queen and had turned into a beauty-queen mom, entering Aubrey in every beauty pageant and talent competition she could afford. There’d been many—at least until Aubrey had gotten old enough to put her foot down and refuse to put on one more tiara. She’d been thirteen when that had happened.
That’s when the pressure to be a model had begun, but after a few disastrous auditions, even Tammy had been forced to admit defeat. Not that she’d ever given up impressing upon Aubrey the importance of beauty, the right lipstick color, and posture. Aubrey had taken every dance class known to man and also gone to grace school. Yes, there really was a school for that. Her mother’d had to work two jobs to pay for it all, but she’d been happy to do it. Or so she’d claimed every single night when she’d come home, kick off her shoes, and sag in exhaustion onto the couch.
Sugar, could you make Mama a gin and tonic?
Aubrey had hated those classes. Hated. But her mom had given up so much for her, so she’d done it. She’d learned early how to primp, walk with a thick book on top of her head—even if she’d rather be reading it—and look ready for the camera in fifteen minutes. And in spite of herself, she’d even managed to get a BA degree in liberal studies from an online institution. She had the tuition loans to prove it.
The last time she’d talked to her dad, he’d questioned her as though she were a three-year-old. “A bookstore, Aubrey? In today’s day and age? Why don’t you find a better use of your money—say, like shredding it?”
But she loved books. Maybe she wasn’t exactly a traditional bookworm, but she could quote Robert Louis Stevenson poems, and she loved mysteries. She’d always been a big reader, back from when she’d been a child and had come here after school.
Her aunt would serve her tea and cookies and let Aubrey curl up in a corner and just be free—free of wondering why she wasn’t good enough to be wanted by her own father, free of her mom’s pressure to look perfect and be something she wasn’t. Free of trying to fit in at school and failing. Back then, she’d huddled here in this warm place and inhaled books to escape. She’d started with the classics but had quickly found thrillers and horror, which she still loved to this day.
But back then, being here, being left in peace and quiet…it’d been her idea of heaven.
And maybe, just a little bit, she’d reopened the store hoping for that same safe place to curl up and lick her wounds.
Not exactly the smartest reason to open a bookstore. She knew better than anyone that memories and sentiment didn’t a business plan make, and that a business certainly shouldn’t be run from the heart.
But Aubrey had rarely, if ever, operated from her heart, and it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. Time to try something new. The bookstore was new thing number one.
Her list was number two.
The door to the store opened, and Aubrey smiled a greeting at the woman who entered. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for some fiction. Historical fiction.”
In one short week, Aubrey had learned that “historical fiction” didn’t usually mean the classics. Instead, it almost always meant the romance section. She pointed the way and, a few minutes later, sold a copy of the Fifty Shades trilogy.
During a late-afternoon lull in business, Aubrey went to work on demolishing the closet wall.