Ryder leaned out of the room and glanced down the book-lined hallway. Then he popped back in, held up four fingers, and squinted at Maisy.
“Safe to assume there are four more rooms like this one?” he asked.
“Not quite as full, but, yeah, pretty much the same and then there’s the former domestic’s apartment on the top floor, which is also crammed with books. I’ve been clearing that space out first since I plan to live above the bookstore,” she said. “But my thought was to take all of these books and house them in an addition, you know, like a turret.” She gave him side eye to see if he picked up on her Idea!
“Whoa,” Ryder said. His drawl was thicker and Maisy watched his eyebrows rise up on his forehead. “You want to build a turret?”
“Isn’t it a great idea?” she asked. She hugged her arms to her chest. A romance bookstore in an old Victorian house simply had to have a turret.
Ryder opened his mouth and then closed it. He cupped his chin with one hand and pursed his lips. He looked as if he was struggling to find the words. Finally, he said, “Adding on a turret is going to be a huge expense.”
“So?” Maisy asked. “I have a budget.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said. “And I’m sure at your age, building an addition before you have the business up and running—”
“What do you mean ‘at your age’?” Maisy asked.
“Nothing,” Ryder said. “It’s just that you’re pretty young yet.”
Maisy leaned back and put a hand on her hip. “I’m not that young.”
“Sure, you’re not.” The amused smile that parted his lips looked like one he’d give his daughter if she did something adorable.
Maisy bristled. She knew she was a little sensitive, given the recent events in her life—loss of a promotion to an underqualified man being number one—and she knew Ryder’s first impression of her had been, well, unimpressive and her petite size and round face made her look much younger than she was, but she had never tolerated being talked down to because of it and she wasn’t going to put up with it now. Plus, she was a little disappointed in him. She’d thought better of Ryder Copeland. He hadn’t seemed the sort of guy who would mansplain.
“I’ll have you know, I’m twenty-nine,” she said. “I have two master’s degrees, I’ve been published in Tin House and Room magazine, and I don’t take crap from anyone.”
Ryder blinked in surprise. Maisy felt a surge of satisfaction and she pushed her glasses up onto her nose while she waited for his reply.
“Well,” he said.
“Exactly.” She gave him a curt nod and strode out of the room, leaving him and Perry to follow or not.
Chapter Six
“NOT to be all Captain Obvious about it, but you really blew that,” Perry said. She gave him a roll of the eyes with the sort of utter disdain only a teenager could execute and stepped around him to follow Maisy down the hall, leaving Ryder to mull over his own stupidity, because wasn’t that always a good time?
He wanted to call Maisy back and apologize. He’d been a complete tool in assuming she was barely out of college, but in his defense, with her enormous brown eyes, and head of impish curls, she looked like she was barely out of high school, never mind college. And on their first meeting, with her in her oversized sweatshirt he’d been sure she was an undergrad.
Maybe he should pass on the job. What he’d thought would be a great work distraction for the summer was becoming an emotional complication. He hated emotional complications. He was an architect. He met with clients. He listened to their visions. He drafted plans to execute their visions and made sure the plans came to fruition. End of story.
Sure, he’d had some strange requests over the years, usually from people who had more money than sense. He hadn’t thought Maisy fell into that category. He did not want to be the architect who took her money for a bit of whimsy that left her with no operating capital.
But how did he have this frank of a conversation with her, especially now that she was pissed at him? It was clear she wasn’t his usual client. She was a dreamer. A person who thought adding a turret to an existing structure was perfectly reasonable. It wasn’t. She had an irrepressible spark of life about her that he found more beguiling than he should. Dang it, he did not want to have to spend the next three months trying to squash his attraction to her. Still, the house was hard to resist.
Ryder glanced at the windows on the far wall and his gaze was captured by the stained glass window sashes on the upper part of the windows. Multicolored panes of ruby red and sapphire blue winked at him. This house, full of books as it was, was also a treasure trove of original Victorian architecture. The thought of walking away from the opportunity to help refurbish and preserve this dignified old lady to her former debutante glory was unthinkable.
Despite his better judgment, he wanted to help Maisy Kelly create her bookshop, and he wanted to see the great beauty hidden beneath the clutter and disorder of the house’s present state fully revealed. He wanted it bad. Without overthinking it, Ryder charged after Maisy and Perry. He found them in the last bedroom. Maisy was handing Perry a book.
“You’ll like this one,” she said. “Trust me.”
“That’s what the school librarian told me when she handed me the latest young adult bestseller,” Perry said. “All the characters died at the end. All of them. Seriously, why would I want to read that? I cried for four days.”
Maisy smiled and patted the cover of the book. “No one dies. In fact, in this entire house the only endings are happy ones, because truly, isn’t life hard enough?”
“I’ll say.” Perry nodded.
Ryder glanced at the book. Scrolled across the front cover was the title Pride and Prejudice. He glanced in question at Maisy.
“Great-aunt El gave me that very book when I was Perry’s age,” she said. “It’s a classic.”
“Really?” he asked.
Maisy studied his face as if she was trying to decide if he was teasing her or not. “You have heard of Jane Austen, haven’t you?”
“Um . . . yeah, the name sounds familiar,” he hedged. “She’s the heroine of the book, right?”
“More accurately, the author.” Maisy crossed her arms over her chest. “The heroine is Elizabeth Bennet.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he said. He was bluffing. While he’d heard of Jane Austen, he had no idea what she’d written, and Perry was no help as she flipped open the book and began to read, completely ignoring him.
Maisy shook her head at him. She was not fooled by him, not even a little. Of course, this perversely made him want to tease her all the more.
“You’ve never read it,” she said.
“Sure, I have,” he said. “Bennet works in an office, helping . . . er . . . spies on their missions. She’s in love with one of the spies and when he goes missing, she jumps into the spy game to save him.”
Maisy stood staring at him with her mouth hanging open. It took everything Ryder had not to laugh.
“Oh, my God, you just described a Melissa McCarthy movie. So not only have you not read it, you haven’t seen the movie, either,” she said.
“There’s a movie? Chick flick, am I right?”
“Date movie,” she countered. She looked outraged. “How have you missed one of the greatest love stories of all time?”
He shrugged.
“Dad, pro tip, it’s set in Regency England. There are no spies,” Perry said. She didn’t glance up from the book.
“Pity,” he said.
But his daughter was absorbed in reading and ignored him. It was a bit jarring to see Perry holding a book that wasn’t required reading instead of her phone, so he said nothing, not wanting to express an opinion on the chance it would cause his daughter to set the book down. Teenagers being contrary and all.
Perry stepped around him, still readi
ng, and threw herself, as loose limbed as a rag doll, onto the one chair in the room and continued reading. Her eyes darted across the page and Ryder felt his mouth curve up. He almost felt like taking a picture; it had been so long since he’d seen his daughter read for pleasure. Maybe he was a bad father for not making her read more, but he’d never wanted her to view reading as a chore. He’d hoped that she’d find her way back to books on her own and maybe, just maybe, this was her first step.
He put a finger to his lips and gestured for Maisy to lead the way out the door. Perry never even noticed their departure.
Maisy waited for him in the hallway. He gestured with a thumb back at the room.
“Small miracle there,” he said.
“She’s not a reader?” Maisy asked.
“She was,” Ryder said. “Her mother and I read to her every single night, starting when she was still in the womb, and our weekends were spent at the library checking out stacks of books, beginning with picture books all the way through young adult mysteries and anime, but at some point in the past few years, she just stopped. I blame her phone.”
“A lot of kids read on their phones,” Maisy said. “I’m a fan of paper and ink myself, but many of my students carry their entire personal library on their devices.”
“Students?”
“I’m an adjunct professor of English literature at Fairdale University, or I was.”
“Professor,” he said. “Is that how you got my name? From my work at the university?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t look like a professor.”
“What do I look like?” she asked.
“Really, hadn’t thought about it,” he lied. He gazed into her brown eyes and realized he would go to his grave never admitting to her that he’d pictured her as a student and not a professor.
“Adjunct professor,” he said. “Does that mean that dingleberry maneuvered his way into a full-time position that should have been yours?”
“Excellent powers of deduction there.” She heaved a sigh. “He used his relationship with me to cozy up to the head of the department. Turns out dingleberry is a scratch golfer and our department head was in need of a fourth at his club. Never mind that I have two years’ seniority, have been published, and am the better teacher. Ugh, it still makes me furious.”
“If you ask me, it’s dingleberry’s and the university’s loss,” he said. “You’re too good for the both of them.”
She studied him as if trying to see if he was just giving her lip service or if he really meant it. He did. Very much so. Ryder knew he was about to give himself away, so he spoke, quickly, hoping to distract her. “So, that’s why Austen is so near and dear to you. You’re a serious book lover.”
“Book nerd of the first order,” she said. She gave him a mock salute. “And while I appreciate the classics, it’s genre fiction that is my guilty pleasure and my first love.”
He felt like he had just learned something significant about her, but he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Her big brown eyes sparkled behind her glasses, and he noticed a spray of faint freckles on the bridge of her nose. She was ridiculously cute, an observation he was certain would get him a knuckle sandwich, or at the very least a severe frown of disapproval if he was stupid enough to utter it, which he wasn’t. She was adorable, though, of that there was no question.
He thought back to the girls who’d been book nerds when he was at school. Sallie Jane Hewitt popped to mind. She’d always had her nose in a book and a scowl of disapproval on her face. Maybe she should have read more books with happy endings. She certainly hadn’t turned his head like Maisy Kelly, warming him up from the inside out with her generous smile.
“Well, you’re not like any other book nerd I’ve ever met,” he said.
Maisy tipped her head to the side and one of her eyebrows lifted as if she was trying to decide if this was a compliment.
“It is,” he said. “That’s what you’re wondering, right? If it was a compliment?”
She looked surprised and then a grin split her lips and hit him like a blast of sunshine right in the solar plexus.
“I was,” she said. She glanced away. “Thank you.”
She looked flustered by his ability to read her mind. A very delicate pink stained her cheeks and Ryder found himself fascinated by the embarrassed blush as he watched it bloom across her face. For a woman of twenty-nine, she had an authenticity that was rare and special. It lured him in.
He forced his gaze away before he said or did something truly stupid, like blather on about how refreshingly unexpected she was. He stepped toward the wall and ran a hand over the, dear God, burnt orange, floral damask wallpaper that was visible above the books.
“Keeping?” he asked. Please say no, he thought.
“No,” she said. She gave a mock shudder. “That travesty is from the 1970s when brown, yellow, and orange were all the rage. I have no idea what Auntie El was thinking. Bleck.”
And now he liked her even more.
“No idea,” he said. “It’s the stuff of nightmares. This isn’t even that bad. I once worked on a house that was decorated in shades of avocado green, aqua, and gold, and to make it even more appalling, they papered right over the original wainscoting and put avocado shag carpeting over the hardwood floors.”
Maisy put her hand over her mouth and made a fake retching noise that made him laugh.
“And I thought faux–dark wood paneling was bad,” she said.
“She didn’t,” he said. He gave her a pained look.
“’Fraid so.”
“Show me.” He buried his smile behind a woebegone look, but by the way her eyes twinkled and her lips twitched he knew she’d caught on that he was joking—mostly. She spun on her heel and led him back down the stairs to the rooms below.
Ryder kept his gaze on the thick dark curls where they bounced at the nape of her neck. He refused to let his gaze stray to her very womanly figure. Okay, it slid down once, following the delicate line of her back—okay, maybe twice—but he yanked it back up before it could linger on the nip of her waist or the sweet curve of her—
“What are you going to name the bookstore?” The question flew out of him, derailing the trajectory of his thoughts. He wanted to pat himself on the back for the save, but he needed to remain vigilant and not let his focus stray.
Maisy glanced at him over her shoulder as she stepped onto the floor and turned to lead him down a narrow hallway, in the opposite direction of the rooms he’d seen before, also crammed with books.
“I don’t want to say,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“You’ll think it’s dumb.”
“How do you know? Maybe I’ll love it.”
She said nothing. Instead she flung open a door to the right and stepped inside. Ryder followed. Amazingly, the room was empty. It was also covered floor to ceiling in dark wood paneling. He felt his heart sink at what had likely been beneath the paneling: vintage wallpaper, plaster moldings—it could have been anything, really. Anything but paneling. He glanced down. Faux redbrick linoleum from the Dark Ages, or so it appeared, likely glued to the wood floor below. It was enough to make a grown man cry.
“I did warn you,” she said. “This was the first room I cleared out, figuring I could use it as an office to oversee the bookshop. I thought whoever took on the reconstruction job could use it, too.”
Ryder had a brief vision of working here in this room alongside her. It was a more inviting daydream than it ought to have been, given that she was a potential client and, ugh, the paneling and linoleum. He tried to picture her with the human equivalent of faux paneling, conjuring up an image of her with warts, halitosis, and body odor. He almost had a lock on it when she walked past him and the subtle scent of sweet peas wafted his way, curling around him in a hug of feminine warmth. Damn it.
He moved away from her, walking fast, not running, at least he hoped he wasn’t running. He peered out the middle of the three arch-shaped windows that overlooked the far end of the porch. He checked the frames. They were solid. As was the glass. No chips or cracks. He felt a tingle of excitement as he noted the intricate glasswork at the top of the arches.
He wanted this job. He really did. The raw details were all here. Depending upon what she envisioned for the bookstore, he could do the restoration work and still be out of here before the end of the summer. As for his attraction to her, he could totally handle it. He’d just bury himself in his work like he always did. No big deal.
“Between the Covers,” he said.
“What?” She froze.
The look of alarm on her face was comical. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her what covers she had in mind, but that would be flirting and he wasn’t going to do that.
“The name of your bookstore,” he clarified. “Between the Covers?”
“Oh, ha! Funny,” she said. She looked so relieved that he wasn’t hitting on her that he was surprised she didn’t melt into a puddle on the horrible linoleum floor. He wasn’t sure whether to be offended or not.
“No? How about The Open Book?”
“No.”
“Turn the Page?”
“I’m sensing a punny theme here,” she said. She tried to look prim by pushing her glasses up, but the dimple in her right cheek gave her away.
“Wait!” he said. He spread his arms wide for dramatic effect. “I have it. Once Upon a Book.”
Her eyebrows lifted and she tipped her head to the side, as if considering. “That’s not it, but I really like it.”
“Aw, come on, tell me,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ll just keep guessing and, believe me, they’ll only get worse.”
She pursed her lips. She had a nice pout. He glanced away, up at the ceiling, in fact. There were no cracks or stains. It was in remarkably good shape for a house this age. He found that encouraging.
The Good Ones Page 5