Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor Book 1)

Thunderstruck

(THŬN′DƏR-STRŬK′) ADJ. AFFECTED WITH SUDDEN ASTONISHMENT OR AMAZEMENT.

It was a dark and stormy night…

She’d always wanted to say that but, like, for real.

Townsend Harbor’s resident weather vixen had predicted a record-breaking squall, complete with likely flooding from the overenthusiastic king tide.

Bob spent the entire afternoon storm-proofing Nevermore while Cady ventured into the Black Friday-esque hellscape that was the local co-op. Shoppers driving their carts like Fast & Furious extras, Tokyo-drifting into the wine aisle to grab the last bottom-shelf econo-size box-wine blends—nearly hamstringing one another in their haste to get at the last of the fresh produce.

Cady’s back still ached after her frantic scurry home. She held a four-pack of single-ply toilet paper tucked under her coat, lest the rabble who had nearly denuded the shelves be tempted to take it off her by force.

She’d learned what became precious when a community was threatened by disaster.

She had never really understood the concept of marriage until Bob met her at the door with a hot toddy in one hand and a heating pad in the other. At that precise moment, she would have gratefully borne him an entire rugby team of barbarian babies, giant, chubby fists and all.

Outside, the wind’s howl had been muffled to a dull roar by the storm shutters Bob had secured to keep the coastal gusts at bay. The effect was strangely cozy amid the candy-colored, glowing lamps and silent menagerie of the bookstore.

Cady lay wrong-end-up on the chaise longue, her socked feet dangling from the inclined headrest and her head propped on a throw cushion to relieve the tension in her lower back.

“We’re friends now, aren’t we, Bob?”

“S’pose so.” The rocks glass clutched in his meaty paw looked like something out of a toy kitchen.

“Friend to friend, can I ask you something?”

Bob swallowed with an audible gulp. “Sure.” His already raspy voice was smoky from his scotch.

She let her face roll toward him. “Why do men suck?”

He stared down into the amber pool of his drink as if expecting the Lady of the Lake to emerge from it, Excalibur in hand.

“Present company excluded, of course,” she added.

Bob swirled the cut crystal glass in his hand. “I wouldn’t be excluded, if you knew me better.”

She rolled onto her side to set down her mug. Lemony steam fogged her glasses when she took a sip. “And what have you done that’s so terrible?”

“I don’t have the energy, and you don’t have the time.”

“Oh yes I do,” she countered. “What else are we supposed to do for the next three hours?”

Her lighthearted question landed heavy in the space between them, thickening the air.

It wasn’t like she’d never thought about it. In fact, the morning after the roof incident, she’d woken still in the grips of an exceedingly vivid dream where Bob and Ethan were doing a lot more than just measuring their respective appendages.

She blamed the reverse harem bestseller that the BNBC had chosen for their next read.

Sleep-splooshing aside, she had definitely registered the change in the temperature of their conversations. In the length of their looks. The tingle when skin accidentally brushed skin in the close quarters of the fall festival booth. The pop of pleasure it had brought her when she’d realized Bob was jealous of Fuckboi McSkinnyJeans.

“How about we stick to your original question?” Bob’s eyes lasered a hole through the floor. “This about the sheriff?”

Cady wished. Unlike so many men of his age and station, Ethan had mastered the fine art of fucking off. He’d left her entirely alone and resumed his polite ignorance of her general presence following the almost-fistfight with Bob.

“You remember the phone guy?” she asked.

Bob nodded. “What about him?”

Cady pivoted on her heating pad to bring her feet to the floor. How to tell him about this without telling him about this… “We have this kind of standing call? Anyway, things got a little—intense the last time we spoke.”

“Mmhmm.”

“I thought that we, um…finished on a positive note,” she said, searching for a truth that didn’t sound obscene, “but I haven’t heard from him since.”

The chair’s wooden legs groaned in protest as Bob sat back. “When did this intense conversation happen?”

“Two weeks ago, tonight.”

“He ever missed a call before?”

Cady shook her head. “I literally set my mantel clock by him.”

Bob scraped his palm over his beard, and the tendons did a magical dance beneath the hair-roughened skin of his forearm. “Then he must have a good reason.”

Hope flickered in her heart like a foolish little flame. Why was it that she could attempt to convince herself of this between eleven p.m. and three a.m. to little effect, but when a very large man who nailed things to other things with his hands said it, some of her was willing to believe? “You think?”

“I’ve never met the guy—”

“Neither have I, technically,” she pointed out.

“But it seems like something about him has you upset a lot of the time.”

Wrapping her hands around the mug, Cady sank back against the pillows. There was something about Fox, all right. Something that invaded her every third thought. Something that lingered on her skin even though she’d never felt his touch. Something that had grown roots into her soul. “I guess you could say that.”

Bob finished his drink and set the glass aside. “May not be what you want to hear, but maybe he needs the distance.” The floorboards creaked beneath his battered boots as he scooted forward in his seat. “Could be he has some shit to sort out.”

He sounded so incredibly tired and sad when he said this that Cady felt a pinprick of guilt. All this time he’d spent fixing her roof, patching her walls, repairing her psyche, and even being her booth bouncer, for crispy Christ’s sake. But other than money, showers, and the occasional meal, she’d never given any thought to what he might need help with. What other plans he might be putting off for her sake.

“Bob?”

“Hmm?”

“Is there something you need to sort out?”

A crease appeared in his formidable brow. “Why do you ask?

She took another sip of her now-tepid toddy, a slice of lemon bobbing against her lips. She had debated with herself hotly whether to bring up what Gemma had revealed on the opening night of the fall festival. Having matriculated from the school of Mind Your Own Fucking Business, Cady strenuously avoided providing unsolicited advice or information.

But having earned a masters in toxic positivity, she also knew that those who needed the most help were often the least likely to ask for it.

“I know this is none of my business, but, seeing as we’re friends now and all, I just wanted to make sure you were aware that, if you did need to sort some things out, you’re fully covered under the Acts of Fuckery policy.”

“Don’t follow,” he said.

“Say, like, it’s three o’clock in the morning and you’ve been out at a bar when some neckbeard decides to get handsy with a waitress, so you relocate his gonads to his rib cage, only to discover that one of his trucker-hat-wearing friends is actually an off-duty cop in a town where the breeding pool is more like a breeding puddle and you end up in jail?”

Bob snorted. “That’s a very specific example.”

“I’m just saying, under the Acts of Fuckery policy, you could call me for bail money.”

“Good to know.” His jaw had taken on the stone set that often preceded his descent into less verbal realms.

“Or, like, if you end up roughing it outside a tiny town fueled by gossip and a paper mill that smells like cabbage farts once or twice a month, and the local sheriff who’s actually a good person at heart but definitely has deep-seated daddy issues around authority decides to make it his personal mission to run you out on a rail because he doesn’t understand that people do desperate things when faced with survival—your policy entitles you to a warm place to stay, at least part-time work at a bookstore as long as the maybe-owner still maybe-owns it, and all the toddler-sized burritos you can eat.”

“Cady—”

“You’re a good man, Bob.”

He grunted as if he’d just taken a gut punch. His eyes slammed shut, and his mouth drew tight in a grimace. “No, Cady, I’m not.”

She scooted to the edge of the chaise to force him to look her in the eye. “Yes,” she insisted, “you are. You can try to convince yourself of that all you want. But you’re not going to convince me. Where you came from, what you did—it doesn’t matter to me.”

“It would,” he ground out, pushing himself to his feet. “If you knew.”

Cady rose and padded over to him, all too aware of their height differential.

“Next you’ll be telling me I’m too naïve. Too trusting. Well, I’m not naïve, Bob. I know there’s a reason you’ve never told me your real name. I know that you wouldn’t choose to live the way you do if there wasn’t something that made you choose it. I know that I like having you around and that I feel safer with you here. I know that I don’t want you to go.”

His wide shoulders rounded forward on a short, sharp exhale that usually accompanied a sucker punch.

Cady had seen him after taking a potted plant to the head from three stories up. She had seen him after smashing his thumb with a rubber mallet, nearly taking off the tip of his finger with a box cutter.

But until now, she’d never seen him in pain.

Where had he been, this gentle giant? What had he seen? What doors had her words opened in the maze of his mind?

“I have to, Cady.” The bronzed tips of his lashes lifted from his weathered cheeks, and he gazed at her with a look of such tormented longing, it threatened to cleave her chest in two. “You’ve been kinder to me than I had a right to ask.”

“But you’re not asking,” she insisted. “I’m offering. You belong here.” Closing both of her hands around the brick of his fist, she squeezed it, subconsciously injecting it with the warmth for him in her heart. “With us.”

Bob’s nostrils flared as his chin lowered to his chest. “I don’t, and you know it. Your sheriff may have gone quiet, but he hasn’t given up. I’m only going to make more trouble for you by being here. It was selfish of me to stay as long as I have.”

Only when the rough pad of his thumb brushed her cheek did Cady realize a tear had escaped her brimming eyes. A man in her life, a good, kind man who helped her, who made her feel safe, was leaving.

“Would it help if I trotted out my daddy issues?” she asked through a watery sniffle. “Tell you about the string of terrible boyfriends my mother had growing up? You should definitely stay at least until I’ve had a chance to do my shadow work. You know, how to make myself feel safe instead? That’s what Gemma says I need to do, anyway. Which I totally plan on as soon as I figure out whether or not I am going to lose my bookstore. Oh!” she said, having a sudden flash of inspiration. “Are you absolutely positive that angle isn’t enough? Because I could definitely leverage that if it would make any difference.”

His sad smile held equal parts tenderness and resignation. “My being here isn’t gonna help you keep your shop. In fact, I’m pretty sure my working on your roof is the reason someone targeted you a second time.”

She folded her arms across her chest and cocked her head at an angle that made looking up at him less of a strain on her neck. “But if you really feel someone is targeting me, wouldn’t that be even more reason to stay?”

A shadow fell across his features. “There are ways of making sure nothing bad happens to you without my being here physically.”

“If you’re talking about another rent-a-cop, I have to tell you, I’m not in favor.”

“I’m not,” he said.

Cady plucked the glasses from her face and wiped the smeared rims on her shirttail. “Okay, fine. I’ll allow you to go, but on one condition. You can’t go tonight.” She motioned toward the darkened window. “You saw how disgusting it was out there.”

The shutters rattled against the windowpane at that precise moment, helpfully illustrating her point.

“Seen worse.”

She hugged her emotional support blanket tighter around her. “They don’t give out trophies for the most shitty weather survived by a rugged but stupidly stubborn outdoorsman in a single season, you know.”

“I know.”

Translation: he’d already made up his mind.

Something began to ache deep within her. “Am I allowed to ask why?”

Bob searched her face as if committing it to memory, gaze slowly moving from her hair to her forehead, from her eyes to her cheeks, her chin, and at last her mouth.

An electric tether arced in the air between them.

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The world beyond his face blurred as he lifted his large, warm hands to lightly cup her chin. His fingertips fanning on the sensitive skin just below her ear, his thumbs brushing her damp cheekbones. “Because I want these tears be your last for me, Cady Bloomquist.”

She closed her eyes as he leaned in. Peat fires from the scotch on his breath mingled with the comforting scent of old books and rain rising from his clothes. Firm, feverish lips brushed over her forehead, and his beard tickled her jaw line as he moved to her ear.

“Thank you, Cady.”

She stood there with her eyes closed until the shop’s bell tolled his departure, determined to keep her fingers away from phones both analog and digital.

She lasted all of about five minutes after he was gone.

A good four of them were spent standing at her register, staring at the phone, willing it to vibrate. Willing the ringing in her head to spread to her ears.

When her mental prowess proved to be insufficient, she turned to her cell phone. Holding it in her hand while she held Fox in her mind produced an instant flashback to their last conversation. How she’d fallen asleep with the line still connected, and woken with the phone on the pillow beside her, a smile on her face.

She wasn’t smiling now.

Cady pressed the callback button, only to be informed by a mechanized voice that her call couldn’t be completed as dialed.

She tried it again.

And again.

And again.

Each time, her anger rose like the tide, carrying her further out to sea.

A flash of lightning plated the sea and sky silver seconds before a deafening clap of thunder rattled the windows. The rain sounded like a spray of tiny bullets strafing the glass from ever-changing angles governed by the gale-force winds.

The ghost of Cady’s face floated in the second-floor living room window, the wind-whipped waves in an endless stretch of swarming black beyond her reflection.

It has to let up. It has to let up. It has to let up.

She had repeated these words until they’d become a mantra in the hours since Bob’s abrupt departure.

She hated storms. Had as long as she could remember.

In the small, manufactured Kansas home she had shared with her mother for the first fifteen and a half years of her life, every stiff wind made her feel like they might wake up to find Munchkins peering in the windows. The floor was forever threatening to disappear from beneath her feet.

When she first came to Townsend Harbor to live with Aunt Fern, she’d felt like a hotel guest. Always taking care to put her clothes neatly back into her suitcase. Leaving her loft as empty of her presence as possible so as not to be a nuisance. Slowly, patiently, Aunt Fern had made this place feel like theirs. When she got sick, she kept promising to show Cady where all her paperwork was, “when it was time.”

Time came before she could.

Aunt Fern had to go and catch a regular old cold that turned into pneumonia that shut down her entire body within two days.

The one place that had ever felt like a real home to Cady, and the bookstore that had become her whole world, could be slipping away at this very second. The thought shot a renewed wave of anxiety through Cady as she paced the length of the living room.

If only she could find something.

Only one place she hadn’t yet looked.

And she really didn’t want to look there.

A hundred times, Gemma had offered to do this with her. A hundred times, Cady had turned her down.

But if the storm caused the kind of damage to the building she was afraid it might, the possibility of waging a legal battle to hold on to Nevermore would be more unlikely than ever.

Just go in there now and get it over with.

If nothing else, it would be a different kind of fear.

Cady took one step. Then another. Then another. Across the living room. Down the hall. Her damp palm hovered over the doorknob, closed over it, and turned.

The door creaked open with a dramatic horror-movie whine.

Just as she’d left it.

Aunt Fern’s mug still sat on the side table next to her reading chair. The small white flag of the tea bag fluttered in the draft from the overhead fan they kept on to combat the chemo-induced hot flashes. Her house slippers sat exactly where she’d stepped out of them on the way to her closet. She had insisted on changing for the paramedics, despite Cady’s insistence that they didn’t care what she was wearing.

“One of them could be a handsome divorcee,” Aunt Fern had insisted. “You don’t know.”

Which had struck Cady as exceptionally odd. Her aunt had often spoken of having a wealthy suitor who provided the capital for her many home improvement projects, but Cady had never actually met him.

Astrid’s onset only a year and a half into their cohabitation had meant that Aunt Fern spent more time with doctors than with gentleman callers.

Yet another source of guilt.

Another flash of lightning made lanterns of the windows. Cady jumped, almost dropping her cell phone.

Just stay, she told herself. Just breathe. The same words she had spoken to Bob what felt like a million years ago.

How she wished he was here now. A big, comforting presence hovering in the doorway, anchoring her to a world beyond her panic.

Thunder boomed so loud she let out a little shriek and leapt back, knocking her aunt’s ceramic music box off the shelf in the process. Cady watched it fall in slow motion, hit the parquet floor, and explode in a shower of ceramic shards.

As she stared down at the rubble, her chest hitched once, twice, and a sob tore free.

Another mess.

Another way that her body, her budget, her brain had fallen short.

Sinking to her stiff knees, she swept the shards into a pile with gentle fingers.

Her breaths were getting away from her, her heart fluttering like a nervous bird.

She needed someone. Anyone. A human voice on the other end of the line to let her know that it only felt like the end of the world.

Too late to call Gemma.

With shaking hands, she reached for her phone and dialed, already preparing herself for the automatic shunt to voicemail.

“Cady.”

“Fox?” she asked, almost nauseated with relief. “I…wanted to give you another week. He said I should, but I can’t—”

“Cady, slow down.”

“I’m… The storm. I just—” Her words were coming out in fractured pieces in time with their hectic exhales. “You didn’t call. Why didn’t you call?”

“…wanted to… I—” The line hissed and crackled with static, and for a terrible moment, she thought the call had dropped.

Scrambling to her feet, she hobbled out of her aunt’s room and into the living room in hopes of improving the signal. The lamps flickered, dipping into an amber glow before brightening again.

Shit. The power.

Every time Townsend Harbor was hit by a Big Blow, she could almost count on at least one blackout. Bob had prepared a box of emergency supplies, which, of course, Cady had left downstairs in her angry rush up to the second floor to distract herself.

“Cady? Are you there?” Fox’s voice grated through the speaker.

“I have to…get—” She gasped as darkness enveloped her. She froze on the stairs, but her eyes refused to adjust. The murky light that usually spilled in from the alleyway was blocked by one of Bob’s shutters.

“Cady?”

“I’m here,” she said. “We lost power.” Sandwiching her phone between her ear and shoulder so she could keep both hands on the railing, she continued her descent. After what seemed like an eternity, her socked foot hit the linoleum at the bottom of the stairs. Cady shuffled along with one hand out, feeling her way to the shop’s alley-side entrance.

“Where are you now?” Fox sounded like he might be on the move too; his voice was modulating in time with crunching footsteps.

“I’m at the side door to the shop.”

“Take a deep breath for me.”

Cady closed her eyes, adding voluntary darkness to the involuntary abyss. She breathed, found the handle, and allowed muscle memory to take over.

Click.

The lock opened.

“I’m in.”

Anchored by the familiar scent, her heart began to slow.

How many times had she counted these steps on days when it was bad? On days when it was the worst. Measuring time not in minutes, but in the distance between her and relief.

Just a few more.

The side door to the oversized leather reading chair where arthritic Myrtle always sat to record their BNBC minutes.

Five steps and I’m there.

From the chair to the railing by the register.

Three more, and we’re done.

One…two…

Her foot kicked something where the last stair should be. She grabbed for the railing and caught the edge of it, but her clammy fingers slid off and the phone clattered to the floor as she went down hard with a startled cry.

“Cady?” A hot wire of hysteria had crept into Fox’s voice. “Cady,” he roared. “Answer me.”

Vertigo smeared her vision, blurred her senses. The various stimuli were profoundly disorienting in the inky dark.

His voice was so loud. Loud enough to create an eerie echo shattering into shards off the buildings outside.

Outside?

Couldn’t be.

Cady struggled to her feet and steadied herself against a bookshelf, her head reeling. She blinked at the faint rectangle of light spilling across the floor, a dark shape spreading within it. A silhouette.

There, at the back door. A man.

A man calling her name.

A man with Fox’s voice. A man with Fox’s voice and Bob’s face.

The world shifted on its axis.

Fox.

Steam rose from beneath the collar of his sodden jacket. His deep chest heaved as white clouds escaped into the downpour. Water hung in droplets from the dark hair stuck to his forehead and glued his long lashes into clumps, beaded on the prominent cheekbones and dripped from his nose.

Their eyes locked.

The questions asked with hers were answered in his.

Yes, he was here.

Yes, he was real.

Yes, he had lied.

Yes, this was the truth.

Yes, he had come for her.

Yes. This was happening.

Her fingertips floated up to the translucent barrier separating them. Her tongue broke free from the cement binding it to the bottom of her mouth.

“Hi.”