The Bookshop on Autumn Lane (25 page)

“Watch out!” A large branch lay across the road and he swerved to avoid it.

* * *

Several minutes later I stared at a sea of white in front of us and wondered if this night could get any worse.

The world was off-kilter.

And we were in a ditch.

I tried to recover from the shock. Not from the accident, but from the fact that Kit had an unusually broad vocabulary of swearwords. My ears still rang from the string of words he had unleashed when we landed in the ditch.

I shifted uncomfortably. “Do you mind getting off my lap?”

“Are you hurt?”

“I don't think so. But between your driving and your swearing I'll be both paralyzed and deaf before I get out of this truck.”

“Shite.”

“Are you done cursing?”

“Bugger off, Trudy!”

He braced a hand on the windshield and tried to lift himself from my lap. He winced.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah. I just can't move very bloody well.” Unfortunately, the way the truck was tilted toward the passenger side, it was impossible for him to take all his weight off me.

I shoved his elbow out of my face. “You shouldn't have removed your seat belt.”

“I was trying to open the door so I could get out.” Kit fiddled with the door lever.

“Why are you still trying to open the door?” I asked.

“So I can see what can be done about this.”

“I'll tell you what can be done about this. We call a tow truck.”

He fished his phone out of his coat pocket where he had put it after the dispatcher handed it to him as we were doing paperwork. “It's dead. Yours? Never mind. No cell phone, right?”

“I already heard the speech about being responsible and growing up. Don't start another monologue.”

“What a load of rubbish. Who doesn't carry a cell phone these days?”

I kicked him. But as he was squeezed up next to me, the power of my boot was diminished. I shoved him with both hands. “Get off me!”

“I can't. Okay? Your seat belt is in the way. This truck feels like I'm stuck on a waltzer.”

“What is a waltzer?”

“You know, that carnival ride with the tilting cars that spin.”

“You mean a Tilt-a-Whirl?”

“Are we really having this conversation?”

He was right. My legs were going numb. I might never have the use of them again. “Let me get on the other side of you. I'm lighter.”

“Fine.”

We struggled to switch positions and my knee landed near his groin as we shifted.

“Ummph! You did that on purpose.”

“Ooop—sorry,” I said with a satisfied smile. Once we were more comfortable, with me sitting on the high side, I reached over to the dashboard.

“What are you fiddling with now?”

“I'm putting on the hazard lights. And I think this model year comes with an automatic nine-one-one call when there's an accident. Someone will come soon.”

“What if they don't?”

He wrote a word that looked like
H-E-L-P
on the foggy window beside him. “Oh, for God's sake, Kit. This is a county road. We aren't going to be stuck in mile-high snowdrifts in the wilderness.”

“It happens,” he said with a clip to his tone.

“Only in places like Montana or North Dakota. Northern Michigan isn't that kind of place.”

“Says a woman who lived here for what? All of one whole year?”

I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut. For the next few minutes we sat, watching our breath cloud up in front of our faces. Kit had cut the engine after the accident. Despite our close proximity, the air felt frigid. I turned on the engine and let the cabin heat for several minutes.

“Don't use up all the gas,” he said.

“Ten minutes an hour will be fine. You have half a tank of gas still.”

“When did you become such an expert?”

“I know cars. Handling them in emergencies comes with the territory. If the snow were deeper, I'd get out to clear the tailpipe. But it's not.” I shut the engine off again. I was feeling downright comfortable for the first time since I had set out in the rain and wind looking for Moby.

“Is that the seat-warmer I feel?” My backside felt quite cozy.

“No. It's me,” Kit said. His arm had strayed around my waist because he had nowhere else to put it. I was tired of straining my neck to keep from touching him, so I let it rest on his shoulder. I lost interest in looking for headlights on the road. The cabin had fogged over completely, and I was feeling groggy and comfortable. The anger and bitterness that had saturated the small space just a short time ago was dissolving. Our breathing synced and Kit's hand pulled me closer.

I took the chance that he wasn't mad anymore.

“Kit?” I asked in a small voice.

“Hmmm.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Hmmm.”

I raised my head and looked sideways at him. His eyes were hooded as if he was waiting for something more. “I dragged you into this tonight and it was all my fault you ended up in jail.”

He looked away as if he was disappointed by my apology. “Forget about it.”

I let my head rest again. “I can't. You were right. I should have taken better care of Moby. He needed more than an occasional meal and a bed. He needed me to do the right thing and give him to someone who could take care of him.”

“
You
were taking care of him.”

“I don't know how to take care of anyone, Kit.”

“That's a piss-poor thing to say.”

I sat up and shifted off his lap. “How did a professor get such a colorful vocabulary?”

“Every teenage boy makes it his duty to learn four-letter words. As a student of the English language, I took the job very seriously.” He put the arm that had been around me on the back of the seat and lifted his chin. “Don't change the subject.”

“I don't remember what we were talking about.” I wasn't sure I had the energy to keep any conversation going.

“About you and taking care of things. I am mad because you actually know a lot about nurturing, Trudy. You have a mind like an engineer. You can build stages and create props. Look what you did with the house of horrors.”

I pushed myself away from him and felt the warmth leave me.

“And you own a whole wardrobe full of clothes that were made in the last millennium.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I slipped and shifted back to him. It was hard to stay on the high side.

“Clothes don't keep unless you take care of them. You care for your clothes the way a mother cares for her children.”

I had never thought about it that way. “I only cared for them because I needed them to last.”

“And your car. That crazy old bug that should never in a million years have made it this far across the country . . . you take care of that like it's a baby bird. You practically hand-feed that thing every time you get near it.”

He was being overly dramatic.

“You know how to take care of objects, Trudy Brown. Why are you so scared of living things?”

“I don't know,” I whispered.

“Come here.” Kit pulled me back down into his warm lap and I didn't object. I stared at the white windshield.

“For a guy who spent the first few weeks lying to me, you sure have found your honesty now.” My comment was supposed to be sarcastic. But I was very pleased. Kit was honest to a fault now. He didn't know it, but he was just as charming when he dropped the polite act and was himself. More so.

I curled into him and the cab of the SUV felt downright cozy. After several minutes Kit asked, “How did she die?”

I don't know why he asked. Maybe it was always there for him to see. An old wound that I never let heal. I let his question settle in the cold air until I could say the word.

“Cancer.”

The white windshield reminded me of her hospital room. White walls. White sheets. Her pale face. “Mom was so busy moving us into our new house in Germany that she put off getting the lump checked out.”

“I'm sorry. That must have been really rough.” He stroked my hair.

The ticking of the hazard lights blinked off and on. “When she was diagnosed she promised us she would be fine.”

“Us?”

“My dad, my brother, and me.”

“You don't talk about your brother much.”

“Afghanistan. Land mine.”

Kit's hand stilled. I didn't want his pity. I didn't want to see the expression on his face. That look that says
You poor, poor thing. They are almost all gone. And now it is just you.

Then I took a deep breath and relaxed. It wasn't just me. It was hard on everybody.

“My dad lives in New Jersey. He remarried and has two kids. Girls. I have half-sisters.” I wasn't completely orphaned.

“Do you see them?”

“I met them once. I was working in a theater in Connecticut and I went down for a weekend. Dad's wife wanted me to come. Get to know my half-sisters. He met her in Korea. She's from there. She's really nice.” I kept talking in small sentences. Anything longer made breathing hard.

“You visited just once?”

“Well, they were a new family. I'm not really part of it. I felt . . . weird.”

“And the only other relative you had was Aunt Gertrude?”

“Well, now that I think of it, it wasn't so easy on her. She was just really frustrated. I didn't want to learn. And I didn't stick around long enough to let her figure out the problem.”

“Ah, yes. The running-away part when you were . . . what?”

“Fifteen. She never actually said I was stupid. She just made me feel that way.”

“That's a power you gave her. You didn't have to let her get to you.”

“I was fifteen.”

“And now you're—what?”

“I get what you're saying.” At twenty-seven, maybe it was time to get over my anger. The lightness I felt clutching
Cyrano de Bergerac
yesterday morning wasn't enough. It wasn't just about the books. I had to stop blaming poor brokenhearted Aunt Gertrude for things that were beyond her control. I was tired of being mad at the rest of the world because they could do something I couldn't. No matter how much I would ever work on reading, it would always be a challenge.

I thought about Jenny and her haphazard cheerleading team. The moment they ran out in front of the crowd and began to cheer had terrified me. I didn't want to see them made fun of. But the girls were so brave. What was it Jenny had said? “Don't worry, Miss Trudy. We're used to it.”

Maybe I could be that strong. I turned to Kit. “You didn't have to defend me to that jackhammer dude, either. His words didn't hurt me at all.”

“He bothered me, though,” he said. In the red glow of the blinking hazard lights I could see the tenderness in his expression. He kissed me with a gentleness that made my chest hurt. It was a kiss that held something strong. A gift that I could almost—but not quite—understand.

Kit took off his glasses and studied my face. “Trudy Brown. Do you think you are ready to take responsibility for yourself?”

“Can't I just start with you and Moby?”

“That. Would. Be. Lovely.” He kissed me in between each word. His lips moved to my neck. “You take care of me and Moby. We'll help you with the rest.”

I understood the feeling that felt like it was ready to burst out of my chest, now. It could be described with a single four-letter word. Not like the ones Kit had used earlier. But one that filled me with such happiness it made me want to scream it to the world. I turned into Kit's lap and wrote the letters with my fingertip on the frosty window behind his head.

Suddenly I was too busy to think. I clung to his jacket and let him trace lines across my shoulder with his lips. Our hands wandered inside each other's clothes, staying warm, and memorizing the feel of each other in the dark.

A light flooded the cab. I shielded my eyes from the brightness and groaned. “We should have turned off the hazard lights.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Kit, giving me a quick kiss.

Doc's voice greeted us from outside. “Hey, you two look like you could use another few minutes.”

His flashlight ran along the side window and above Kit's head I could see the outline of the word I wrote under
H-E-L-P
. It was
L-O-V-E.

I
sat in a chair, watching dawn breaking over Echo Lake. It was a bright morning and the light from the rising sun made the ice and snow-coated trees shimmer. I had never seen anything quite like it.

“You look like Venus with the radiance from the sun in your hair,” Kit said from the bed behind me.

I tilted my head back and enjoyed the scenery on the bed as well. He was tousled and sexy, lying in the sheets. “Good morning.”

“Up so early?”

“It's such a beautiful morning. I didn't want to miss any of it.” I was getting used to early mornings. Last night, I had slept like a baby. The bed had been soft and the pillows felt like—no, they actually
were
—real down. And the warm man beside me felt like he belonged there forever.

Kit rose from the bed and joined me.

“Did last night really happen?” I asked when he lifted me into his lap.

“I think so. I have a piece of paper that says we have an appointment with a judge.”

I moaned.

I peeked at the clock on the nightstand. The Furry Friends Rescue Shelter wouldn't open for a couple of hours. It was going to be hard to wait that long.

Last night Doc had pulled the truck out of the ditch for us. He couldn't have been nicer when he found out about Moby and the rest of our horrible evening. “That's about as fine a dog as any I've ever seen, Trudy. Don't worry, no one would let any harm come to him.”

I must have looked cold because Doc made me sit in the cab of his tow truck and forced me to eat some of his candy corn while he hooked up Kit's truck and pulled it out of the ditch. I tried not to laugh at Kit as he walked around the truck and attempted to look knowledgeable about ditches and trucks and such. Kit nodded when Doc talked about traction and how to pull the truck out of the ditch. His glasses fogged up in the cold and when he took them off, I knew he couldn't see a thing.

When we finally crashed in his four-poster bed, we were too tired to do anything but fall into an exhausted sleep.

Kit nuzzled my neck and bit my ear. But I was thinking of a dog who was the only thing missing from my perfect morning. “Do you think Moby will be happy to see me?”

“Of course he will,” Kit answered, wrapping me in his arms.

“Do you think he'll be mad at me?”

“Why would he be mad?”

“Because I ignored him when he was afraid of the storm. Because I let him down.”

He chuckled. “I don't think dogs carry grudges.”

“How do you know?”

“I grew up with dogs. They think in very simple ways. Kibble. Petting. Sleeping. Defecating—or pooping, if you prefer. And rabbit.”

“Rabbit?”

“Or squirrel, as it is in the States. Whatever happens to be around to chase.”

I put my hands on either side of his face and squeezed. “My dog is smarter than that.”

“Your dog? I like the way you say that.” He pulled my hands away and kissed me.

“Do you think they'll believe he's my dog?”

“I'll vouch for you. And so will Doc. I'm guessing he's already called half the town.”

I kicked my feet back and forth impatiently. “I can't wait until ten, Kit.”

“Perhaps I can help you pass the time?”

Much later, after we took a shower, I stood in Kit's closet looking for something to wear.

“How can I help you, love?”

I held up a tweed sports coat. “Oh my God! Your clothes even smell wonderful. For once, I don't have a clue where to start.”

He helped me with my decision. I borrowed a pair of running leggings, a button-up, and the sports coat with the sleeves rolled up.

When I finished, Kit came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his middle. “You look bloody hot.”

Damn. Still not as amazing as him.

When we wandered to the kitchen, he made me coffee and started a pot of oatmeal. A real bed in a real house. Breakfast. I never imagined waking up to such a domestic scene.

The only thing needed to complete the bliss was an old sleeping dog in the corner.

I made my way to the dining room and sat down among all the papers and pictures of Robin Hartchick.

When Kit carried our breakfast in, I was lost in the mystery. “So, other than the Dumpster where the cheerleaders may have tossed it, where do you think the lost manuscript could be?”

He shook his head. “I think she found a way to hide it.”

“How?”

“She could have kept it in a secret place. The basement. The rafters. In a floorboard. She might have stored it among all those personal papers that were scattered in the apartment. She might even have typed it up and disguised it to look like something else. Was she tech-savvy? Microfiche and old floppy discs. She could have done a million things with it. But one thing is certain. She did not throw it out.”

“How do you know for sure?”

He tensed. “Do you think I'm crazy too?”

I put my hands around his neck and removed his glasses. “Easy, Dr. Darlington. I believe in you. I'm taking care of you, remember?” I used my own version of a cockney accent that made him smile.

His shoulders relaxed. “A woman who turned into a hoarder would not have thrown out a priceless manuscript written by her ex-lover.”

Ex-lover. That picture of my aunt as a woman younger than I was now. It made my skin crawl to think of a man like Robin Hartchick using women, riding fame, and of my aunt knowing about his success later on. All his other loves. Never recovering from a pain that happened at such a young age. It was almost haunting.

“Aunt Gertrude could have made millions after Robin Hartchick's death. Your story doesn't explain why she never claimed the lost manuscript.”

“It doesn't. But then again, maybe the money didn't motivate her. My guess is that she loved it too much to let it go.”

“He sounds like he was a jerk. Does the world really need more Robin Hartchick?”

“He
was
a jerk. But his words were beautiful. They were inspired by your aunt. In some ways I've become more interested in
her
story than Robin's.”

“You think his story was about her?”

“It's a real possibility.” His shoulders sagged. “But I'm at the end of the search. You have a store to sell.” He looked at his watch. “And a dog to claim.”