by Cathie Linz
“Forget about David. Here…” Anastasia unlocked the door, opening it with a flourish. “Welcome to…Have you decided what to name your ice-cream parlor yet?”
“Not yet.” Claire rushed inside. Standing in the middle of the snowflake-patterned terrazzo floor, she twirled and shouted, “Mine! All mine!”
Anastasia laughed at her friend’s exuberance. Like Claire, she could see the possibilities here even though the vacant storefront wasn’t looking its best at the moment. The previous owner of the building had passed away last year and his heirs had argued amongst themselves before finally deciding to sell the property.
They hadn’t bothered fixing up the storefront, but the two apartments above were in good shape. The three-story red-brick building, built in the 1920s, was located in the northern suburb of Evanston, a hop, skip and jump from Chicago’s city limits. Situated on a corner, it got enough passing traffic to bring in customers, without too much congestion to make it difficult to park. The storefront was also close enough to Northwestern University’s campus for students to frequent it as well.
All in all, it was the perfect place to make dreams come true. And Anastasia was determined to do whatever she could to make Claire’s dreams come true.
“What the hell is going on here?” The furious question came from a glowering but gorgeous guy standing inside the front door they’d both forgotten to lock. He looked mad enough to do serious damage to someone.
“Back off!” Anastasia’s voice was powerful and curt, just as her self-defense teacher had taught in his class. Ever the city dweller, she reached into her oversize purse for a can of pepper spray. Keeping her eyes fixed on the man’s face, she aimed it in his direction. Better to be safe than sorry. “Stay away!”
Far from being intimidated, the intruder had the gall to give her a mocking look. “Or what?” he drawled. “You’ll suffocate me with shaving cream?”
Looking down, she realized she’d grabbed the can of lady’s shaving cream she’d picked up at the drugstore earlier that day.
“David, what a surprise!” Claire exclaimed, coming closer to give him a big hug. “I thought you were still at that conference in Buffalo.”
“I just got in and heard your garbled message on my answering machine. It sounded as if you said something about buying an ice-cream parlor…”
“I left this address, but 1 didn’t think you’d drive all the way over here to see the place yourself. And as soon as you got home, too. What a dear boy you are.”
Boy? Anastasia thought in disbelief. There was nothing boyish about this man. He had Black Irish good looks, with dark hair and eyebrows. His wonderfully thick lashes framed incredibly blue eyes. Although it was only three in the afternoon, his angular jaw was shadowy with a hint of stubble. He looked tired and a little disreputable, as if he’d had a rough trip.
He was dressed in jeans that had seen their fair share of wear and a denim shirt that molded his broad shoulders. The rolled-up sleeves displayed his tanned arms. He was well-built, more on the lean-and-mean side than the pump-iron muscular side. She guessed him to be about six-two.
“What’s going on here?” David demanded again.
“This—” Claire gave a sweeping motion around the dusty storefront “—is my future.”
“No, it’s not,” David immediately corrected her. “Your nest egg in the bank is your future.”
“Not any longer. I traded it in on this.”
David paled beneath his tan. “You did what?”
“You don’t have to shout, dear.” She shot him a mildly reprimanding look. “I may be in my seventies, but I’m not deaf yet.”
“I can’t believe you’d do something like this without consulting me first,” he said disapprovingly.
“You’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t wanted to bother you.”
Was that a flash of discomfiture Anastasia saw on his face or was it just a trick of the lighting? She couldn’t be sure because now his expression was one of total anger. “You shouldn’t have done this. Tell me, what exactly have you done?”
“Bought this building.” Claire patted a wall fondly.
David looked as if his grandmother had hit him with a two-by-four. “Bought it,” he carefully repeated. “As in paid money for it?”
“That’s right. And got a mortgage on it,” Claire added.
“What on earth possessed you to do that?”
“I’m going to open an ice-cream parlor. I told you on your answering machine.”
“An ice-cream parlor. Did some fast-talking franchiser get hold of you and con you out of your money?”
“Of course not. My ice-cream parlor will be a throwback to earlier times, when the ice cream was homemade,” she said proudly.
“Don’t you think it’s a little late in life to be starting a project like this?” he said. “Running a business these days is more trouble than it’s worth. You should be spending your retirement years enjoying yourself, not tied down to working here all hours.” David spoke to his grandmother as if he was admonishing a stubborn child, infuriating Anastasia on Claire’s behalf.
The big galoot had his nerve! Anastasia was too angry to speak. Luckily Claire was calm and eager to convince David of the wisdom of her action. Personally, Anastasia thought it was a waste of time. The guy clearly had a closed mind. Closed, hah! It was locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
“The two apartments upstairs are in good shape,” Claire was telling him, “but the storefront does need a little work.”
“A little work?” David repeated, looking around in disbelief. “It needs a miracle!”
“I thought that maybe you could help us fix it up.” Claire gazed at him expectantly. “You’re starting your leave of absence now, right?”
“Right, but…”
“I plan on having my grand opening, in six weeks, on October first,” Claire said with excitement.
David’s voice dripped with gloom. “Even I know that’s long past the high-demand period for ice cream.”
“Ice cream is always in demand,” Anastasia said finally. “Besides, properties like this in such a good location are rare and Claire couldn’t just wait around until next summer.”
David focused his angry gaze on Anastasia. “And you are…?”
“Oh, please excuse my poor manners,” Claire exclaimed, pressing her hands to her flushed cheeks before fluttering them in his direction. “David, this is Anastasia Knight, a friend of mine. You remember, I told you about her.”
“No, you didn’t. Just like you didn’t tell me about this place.”
“I most certainly did tell you about Anastasia. I don’t have all that many friends.”
“The only friend you told me about is that mousy children’s librarian.”
Claire frowned. “Mousy?”
David shrugged. “I forget exactly how you described her, but all librarians are the same. I think it’s great that you found some old woman to hang out with.” He paused, belatedly aware of the hostility in the room. Maybe he wasn’t the most silver-tongued guy on the block, but then tact wasn’t exactly his strong suit. And he’d had a hell of a trip from Buffalo. He attempted to regain lost ground. “I meant it’s great you found an older woman to, uh, befriend you.”
His normally sweet-tempered grandmother was shaking her head in irritated disapproval. What, now his grandmother was going to object to him calling her old? Then what was the politically correct term? “A preretirement woman to be your buddy?” he tried hopefully.
The two glares he received in return let him know he wasn’t even in the ballpark. And the impatient tapping of Anastasia’s orange gym shoes gave him the impression that she was particularly offended by his comments.
“I never said my friend was old, older or preretirement age,” Claire firmly stated. “Nor did the adjective mousy ever come into the conversation.”
David was getting a bad feeling about this.
“Let me guess,” he said.
“I�
��m the mousy old librarian,” Anastasia confirmed for him.
2
SHE SURE DIDN’T LOOK like any librarian David had ever seen. Not that he spent much of his time hanging out in libraries. He’d never had the time or the inclination.
His job as an arson investigator had consumed his life for the past few years. Investigating fires that had often resulted in families losing their dreams or even their lives was enough to turn even a starry-eyed optimist into a cynic, and David had never been starry-eyed or an optimist. Not since his parents had been killed in a car crash when he’d been a kid.
His parents had been dreamers. His dad cashed in his life insurance policy on a get-rich-quick scheme, leaving nothing but debts. He knew that his grandparents had faced many financial and emotional hardships, although they never said or hinted that he was a burden to them.
Ever since David had been a kid, he’d been hardworking and practical, scoffing at the other kids’ grandiose dreams of being a basketball star or rock singer. When he’d heard a fire chief give a speech at his school’s career day presentation, he’d known that he’d found his line of work. After college he’d started out as a firefighter and then moved up in the ranks until he was transferred to the arson investigation division.
His cynical outlook had increased with every year he’d worked. What was the point of even having dreams when they could go up in a puff of smoke? When they could blind you to the reality of life, the way they’d blinded his father, leaving him and his grandparents to pick up the charred pieces afterwards? Over the years too many bad things had happened to good people for David to believe in much of anything anymore.
He’d taken this leave of absence at his boss’s request, to get a better perspective on things and to use the vacation time that had been piling up for the past eight years.
Problem was, the thought of doing nothing drove him up a wall. He wasn’t the type to sit around contemplating his navel and pondering why the Cubs hadn’t won a pennant in his lifetime.
So he’d planned on spending some time making sure his grandmother was set up for her retirement. She was his only family, and he felt badly that he hadn’t spent much time with her lately, but he was here now and he wasn’t about to let someone take advantage of her sweet disposition. His instincts told him that Anastasia was definitely a bad influence on his grandmother, a woman who hadn’t changed banks or hairdressers in umpteen decades. Buying a rundown building with the crazy idea of opening an icecream shop was totally out of character for her.
But not for the wild woman who’d threatened him with a can of shaving cream. He had a feeling this sort of thing was just in a day’s work for her. He suspected she’d played a major role in his grandmother’s totally uncharacteristic act of blowing her retirement nest egg. As his grandmother herself had admitted a few minutes ago, she didn’t have that many friends, so there weren’t many people who would have that kind of influence over her.
He gave the librarian another look, a male-to-female one this time. She wore confidence like a championship ring. Only a confident woman would get away with an outfit like the one she had on. The yellow sleeveless dress was long enough to brush the tops of her orange gym shoes, but she made it look sexy. For some reason, the dress made him think of sultry summer nights, cool lemonade and stolen kisses.
Her long brown hair was gathered up into a ponytail, accentuating her unusual golden eyes. She was tall, probably five-eight, which meant the top of her head came to just beneath his chin. Not that he saw himself getting that close to her. She had the attitude of a woman who was used to getting her own way. She was beautiful, but definitely not his type. And he didn’t trust her.
David tried to keep blatant suspicion out of his voice as he said, “So, Anastasia, you’re here as a buddy to help my grandmother fix up this place, is that it?”
“Actually, I live here. Well, not down here in the storefront, obviously,” she added, her ponytail bouncing like a teenager’s as she turned her head. “I meant that I live in one of the apartments upstairs.”
“That’s handy,” he noted mockingly. So, his instincts had been on the mark. “And I suppose you were the one who recommended that my grandmother buy this…” He was going to say “broken-down dump,” before deciding that might not be the best thing to do. “This old building.”
Claire answered on Anastasia’s behalf. “When Anastasia told me she’d found the perfect place for my ice-cream parlor, I couldn’t believe it at first.”
“I don’t blame you,” David murmured, deciding then and there he wouldn’t believe anything Anastasia said without checking it out for himself first. The little con artist had probably talked his grandmother into buying this building in order to get her as a landlady, for one thing. How handy to have a landlady who was also a close friend, someone who wouldn’t mind if you were a little late on your rent, or even if you didn’t pay your rent at all. “What else have you been doing for my grandmother, Anastasia?”
“I went with her to the real-estate closing this morning.”
David cursed silently. So the closing had only been a few hours ago. Dammit! If his originally scheduled flight hadn’t been canceled because of bad weather, he would have gotten home early this morning and might have been able to stop his grandmother from this foolishness.
He had no doubt buying the building was a mistake. What kind of security was there in owning an ice-cream parlor? Let alone opening it in the fall. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the idea was a stupid one.
“As I said before, Gran, owning a business might sound like a fun thing to do, but the reality is something else again. There are so many issues to deal with—hiring help, doing bookkeeping, taxes.” He went on in detail for some time before ending with, “It really isn’t a practical proposition.”
“Sure it is. Anyone with the least bit of imagination could see that.”
It came as no surprise that the heated words came not from his grandmother but from Anastasia. A shaft of golden sunlight was shining on her from the front window, creating a halo around the tousled strands of her long brown hair. But there was nothing angelic about her appearance. She looked passionate and exotic. She looked like the type of woman to disrupt a man’s peace of mind and fill an old lady’s head with foolish ideas.
“How did you meet my grandmother?” he asked Anastasia.
“We met at the library where I work, along with a bunch of other mousy old librarians,” she added tartly.
David grimaced. So she wasn’t about to let him off the hook. Fine by him. She wasn’t exactly on the top of his hit parade at the moment, either.
“Your grandmother saved my neck,” she said with a fond look at Claire.
Which he translated to mean that his grandmother had probably lent her money. He might not know much about librarians, but he’d heard that they didn’t get paid much.
“Now, dear, don’t tell him that story,” Claire protested.
Bingo, David thought to himself. Something they didn’t want him to know, which meant it was something he needed to find out. “Why not? I’d love to hear how you saved her neck, Gran.”
“Well, it’s a little embarrassing.” Claire chuckled self-consciously. “You see, things are kind of tight at the library, what with the recent budget cuts and all. Anastasia often kiddingly says that being a librarian is like taking a vow of poverty.”
Unless you find a rich elderly friend you can con into buying the ramshackle building where you live, David cynically thought. Maybe she was in cahoots with the previous owners. No doubt Anastasia, the little con artist, had even more self-serving schemes in mind for his grandmother.
“So I volunteered for the storytelling hour,” Claire was saying. “That’s where we first met.”
“How did that save your neck?” David directed his question to Anastasia.
“Obviously you’ve never tried to read a story to twenty-five preschoolers,” she replied.
David shuddered at the ve
ry idea. His experience with very young kids was very limited. He was more accustomed to working with them when they were older, old enough to hit a home run in the Little League baseball games he helped out with.
“I actually had two sets of twins in the group who were particularly rambunctious,” Anastasia was saying, her smile a mixture of humor and horror. “They were running wild, making me wish I had ten more hands. I used to have an assistant to help out, but when she quit, her position wasn’t filled. Attrition, they call it. I call it shortsighted stupidity, but hey, don’t get me started on fiscal policy.”
“I won’t.” He doubted his views on monetary responsibility matched hers.
“Anyway, your grandmother, sweetie that she is, stepped in and prevented Terry the Terrible, one of the twins, from cutting my hair with a pair of scissors he’d somehow managed to confiscate. Claire is great with the kids. And she tells them the best stories.”
Claire was shaking her head as she smiled. “Not as good as Anastasia’s stories. She makes up her own, you know.”
I’ll bet she does, David thought.
“About a trio of fairy godmothers,” Claire added. “She even does some drawings to go with her story. I’ve told her she should submit them, that they’re good enough to be published.”
“So you really want to be a writer, Anastasia?”
“No. I’d really like to be independently wealthy so I could afford to be a writer,” she said with an impertinent grin.
I’ll bet you would. David was about to tell her that there was no way she’d get wealthy at his grandmother’s expense, when Claire distracted him by grabbing his arm and tugging him to one side of the storefront. “David, take a look at this marble countertop—” she ran her hand over it “—and the snowflake-patterned terrazzo floor. Isn’t it the cutest thing? This place really has tremendous potential. I was thinking that we need to open this room up, get rid of these extra strange little walls that chop the place up. I want to put the kitchen in the back.”