Spark Of Desire

SPARK OF DESIRE

CHRISTA MAURICE

LYRICAL PRESS

http://lyricalpress.com/

KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/

To Rox, who believed in me even when I didn't.

Chapter 1

Jessica Decker had just started alphabetizing Weddings for the second time this month when she sensed a crowd gathering outside of the Reference section. It sounded like they’d rounded up the entire staff. Pulling out her ponytail, she tidied up her shoulder-length chestnut hair, knowing one of them would have a camera and not wanting to look like a slob in yet another picture in the bookstore photo album. Who’d leaked today was her birthday? Short list. She’d hoped to forget it herself, but she’d had a lot of fun at others’ expense on their birthdays so she had to be civil about this, no matter how unpleasant and painful it promised to be.

About the time she’d worked her way to the D’s, they started.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Jessica, happy birthday to you!” The entire staff clustered around the end of the shelf, all grinning and laughing. Jessica noted Bess and Diana were absent. Probably stuck at the register and information. Tony started the
how old are you now
verse but Mindi started clapping to drown him out. As the probable source of the leak, she’d better keep control of it. Mindi might throw her under a bus for cake, but she’d better be prepared to call the paramedics.

“Happy birthday, Jessica.” Mindi leaped forward and hugged her as Karen snapped a picture for the album. “We got you a cake. It’s in the break room.”

Jessica forced a smile. Yup, cake. Chocolate cake with huge sugary roses. “Thanks. You can start without me.”

Mindi mocked a frown. “But it’s chocolate.”

Jessica sighed. Definitely Mindi. “Let me finish this, and I’ll come back. If I leave Weddings half alphabetized, I’ll have to start all over when I come back.”

Mindi bobbed her blond head. “Well, okay. I’ll save you the piece with the big rose.”

Jessica watched the rest of the staff filter away. Mindi would end up with the rose anyway. She sat down on her stool and pulled out the book about wedding flowers. If she stayed out here long enough, the first round of revelers would eat their cake and get back to work before she had to deal with questions about her age. The wedding flowers book should burn a good chunk of time. Normally, she liked looking at the beautiful pictures of other people’s weddings and imagining her own. Today, she shoved the book back on the shelf where it belonged before she’d even gotten past the second chapter. A thirty-year-old virgin with no romantic prospects on the horizon, trapped in her job. Sighing, she worked her way through Weddings knowing she’d be doing this again in about two weeks.

She’d never meant to still be working at the bookstore six years after she took the job, she’d just never left. When she took the job, she’d innocently hoped she’d meet some nice, good-looking, intelligent guy who would inspire her to get herself together and do something constructive with her life.

So far Mr. Right had not appeared to get her life together for her. It wasn’t much of a plan anyway.

At the end of Weddings, she turned the corner and started work on the Careers section. Maybe she needed to move. California would be nice. She took down the San Francisco job almanac and started leafing through it. There had to be lots of things she could do with a degree in biology. Somebody had just been telling her California had a huge teacher shortage. What if she ran away and became a teacher. How hard could it be to be a teacher? Jessica shuddered remembering the torture she’d put her own teachers through in school. Maybe that wasn’t a good idea.

She put the almanac away and scooted her stool over a shelf so she could work on the test study guides. Looking at those books, she decided going back to school wouldn’t be bad either. The problem wasn’t lack of options, it was too many options.

“Excuse me. Do you work here?” A deep masculine voice spoke behind her.

Jessica turned around, smiling. “Can I help you?” Ah yes,
him
. He hung around the store all the time. Dark hair threaded with gray. Deep, dark brown eyes that matched his voice. Powerfully built without being cumbersome. Five years ago, he would have been interesting, even attractive enough to make her tongue-tied. Of course, five years ago, he still would have been much older than her. Too bad. He seemed nice and wasn’t bad to look at, but she guessed him to be about forty-five. Too old.

“Do you have any books on Gaelic?”

“Gaelic.” She turned to the foreign language shelf behind her. “You thinking about learning the language?”

“I’m toying with the idea of going to Ireland.”

“You know you don’t need to speak Gaelic to get around in Ireland. They speak really good English. It’s amazing. You’d think it was their native tongue.” She glanced at him, but he didn’t laugh or even smile to make her feel better about such a bad joke. Did that mean he was stupid, or that he had good taste? “You might be better off with a travel guide if you really want a book.”

“No, I like the music too, and some of the old songs are in Gaelic.” He shrugged. “Besides, I’m not going for a long time.”

“Let’s see.” Jessica ran her fingers along the edge of the oak bookshelf. “The languages are in alphabetical order, so Gaelic should be…” She slid the book out and handed it to him. “Here it is. And Irish is right over here, on this second shelf from the bottom. It looks like there’s only four books there.”

“What’s the difference between Gaelic and Irish?” He opened the Gaelic book and scanned the table of contents.

“Beats me. I always wanted to shelve them together, but I used to work with a guy who terrorized me into keeping them apart. He swore they were different languages. I can’t tell them apart. Was there anything else you needed?”

“Do you know if any of these is better than the others?” He looked over the dozen or so books on the shelf with the glazed expression of the overwhelmed. It made him look sort of helpless and cute.

Jessica sneered to herself. Her birthday was going to her head if she was feeling sorry for the customers. Most days she wanted to hold them off with a whip and a chair. She smoothed her hair off her face. “It depends on you. I think each one is written to a different learning style. You’ll just have to look through them and see which one suits you best.”

He put the first book back and took down another one. “Okay. Thank you.”

Shoving the stool over to another case, she started shelving the SAT books. He’d picked a good time to come over. A few minutes earlier and she’d have had to retreat to the warehouse to wait for him to go away. Now she could keep working without crowding him out of the section.

“So when are you planning on going over?” she asked. At least he didn’t know it was her birthday and she was trapped and single. She wouldn’t have to bear his ribbing or his pity.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Sometime before this day next year.”

Jessica laughed. “Sudden decision?”

“I guess so. A friend of mine just proposed to his girlfriend, and I realized I was spinning my wheels.”

Jessica decided she could listen to his voice all day. It sounded like velvet, and not the modern synthetic stuff, either. Antique velvet. Soft and smooth and warm. Probably single, too. Not that it mattered, as old as he was. “I can understand that. Are you planning on going in high season or low season?”

“What’s that?”

“High season runs from about April to September or October, I forget. Everything’s open and the weather’s nicer, but the prices are twenty or thirty percent higher.” Jessica finished test study guides and started on vocational study guides. “Low season you get better prices and fewer crowds, but you risk bad weather. Wet, cold, really unpleasant. After a while you start to feel like a mushroom.”

“You went to Ireland?”

“About three years ago. It was incredible.” She sighed, remembering the trip, taken at one of those points in life when everything seemed possible. Slouching down on the stool, she reached for the lower shelves. “I’d love to go back.”

“Why don’t you?”

She shrugged, not turning around to look at him. “Lack of money, lack of get-up-and-go, don’t really want to go alone again. You know?”

“You went alone?” He sounded shocked. Most people were.

“Yes.”

“But you went with a tour group.”

“No.” She tucked her hair behind her ear again and put the LSAT books back into alphabetical order.

“How?”

Jessica turned around to look at him. With his expression more animated, he seemed younger. Maybe thirty-five. She smiled. In younger days, he must have been a lady killer. Ten years ago she would have been a week getting her tongue untied if she’d tried to talk to him. “I bought a ticket, got a train pass, and stayed at hostels every night.” Every time someone reacted this way it reminded her of what an accomplishment it seemed to most people.

“Wow. Weren’t you worried? A woman traveling alone.”

Jessica stood up. “I’m not exactly a little girl.” Standing beside him, she decided he must be about six foot, which made him two or three inches taller than her. She was nobody’s idea of a delicate female.

“I guess not.”

She sat down again. “I’m the store bouncer,” she added. Men always got that expression on their faces when they took a good look at her. That
She could beat me up!
look. Not that she thought she could beat this guy up. He was in good shape, on closer inspection. His shoulders were nice and broad. Not like an over-muscled gym diva, but he could certainly pin her in a wrestling match.

A sudden, unexpected heat raced up her throat at that thought. She focused on the CPA test guides, hoping it would go away before he noticed.

“Jessica?”

She looked up. The general manager, a thin nervous man, fidgeted in the aisle beside her.

He crouched. “I’m sorry about this.”

“What is it, Eric?”

“It’s Julie.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. At least this topic distracted her from the thoughts of wrestling that had been flashing through her mind. “Now what?”

“It’s just the usual. Could you talk to her?”