Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor Book 1)

Contrition

(KƏNˈTRꞮƩƏN). NOUN. SINCERE PENITENCE OR REMORSE.

“What do you think he’s doing?” Gemma’s coffee-scented whisper tickled Cady’s ear.

They stood behind the credenza/register, sipping their lattes and watching Sheriff Ethan Townsend…sheriffing. Lean in khakis and a sky-blue dress shirt, he stood immobile and erect, the muscular wedge of his torso diminishing into the black utility belt circling his waist.

For the last seven minutes, he’d done nothing but stand there, motionless, silently staring at the sprawling chaos of books and papers before him, one knuckle notched beneath his chin cleft.

“Beats me,” Cady said. “Catatonic episode of some kind?”

“You think he’d notice if I tried to hit that freckle on the back if his neck?” Gemma asked, picking up the feather quill pen and aiming at the neatly shaved, Marine-precise hairline at Ethan’s nape.

“Which one?” Cady shrugged out of habit and sucked in a breath as lava flashed down her arm. The cumbersome canvas sling she’d been strapped into after being diagnosed with a dislocated shoulder at the Townsend Harbor Allcare Clinic had so far failed to remind her not to move it.

And yet, clipping her aunt’s ancient bookshelf hard enough to cause a posterior subluxation while reaching for a book to use as a weapon was by far the least humiliating consequence of the previous evening.

Nope.

That unique and dubious honor belonged to her having to assist the man she’d been dating reconstruct the scene of a maybe-crime while trying to remember if she had accused Fox of having a Quasimodo cock.

…I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with it, she heard herself say in a voice dripping with sass.

Shame scalded her anew.

How the hell had they gotten from a flirty back-and-forth about the store’s tax paperwork to conjecturing about Fox’s man-root?

Why, oh why, had she allowed Myrtle to talk her into a third round of beer pong? Cady didn’t even like beer. Or pong. Or anything that could be played with a ball, for that matter.

She forced herself to continue the process of dredging her sludgy memory despite the other various horrors it continued to produce.

It will be so fun.

Make your soul jizz.

Send me pictures of your dick.

How hard?

Gemma’s pointy elbow dug into Cady’s ribs on the side of her body the bookshelf hadn’t attempted to pulp in its epic face plant.

She glanced up to see Ethan’s clean-shaven jaw angled over his shoulder, a sandy brow lifted in question.

“I’m sorry, what?”

Ethan’s lips tugged downward at the corner. “I said, how hard did you hit the bookshelf?”

“Um…pretty hard?” Her insides lurched, and Cady wasn’t sure if it was gas or her soul attempting to escape her body. “I was trying to get to a copy of War and Peace to use as a weapon and I must have misjudged.”

Send me pictures of your dick?

Oh dear God. No no no no no. Had she really requested dick pics from the customer single-handedly keeping her in business at this point?

Worse, what if Fox had actually sent them, but she hadn’t responded?

What if—trapped in the pulverized remains of her cell phone—right now, this very minute—nay, second—there were pictures of Fox’s rigid, perfectly veined—

“Which side?”

Cady blinked to clear the screen of her mind from another man’s imaginary penis before returning her attention to Ethan. “What was that?”

The translucent tips of Ethan’s lashes lowered as he squinted at her. “Which side did you run into?”

“The side that’s closest to the register?” she said, sounding exactly like the kid in class who’d been fiddling on a device instead of paying attention.

“Right.” Ethan turned to face them, his posture so stiff he looked like he was rotating on his own personal axis to the earth. “So why’d it fall in this direction?” he asked, gesturing toward the pile.

Whether it was the weed hangover from Myrtle’s “Skunk-beer,” or a goodly section of her temporal lobe still making frantic queries of her codeine-addled memory, Cady couldn’t quite follow his logic.

Noting the ponderous crease in Cady’s crumpled forehead, Ethan pivoted and held out a hand to Gemma. “Come here.”

“Me?” Gemma’s dark brows vaulted up by an inch.

“You.” The palm he held out to her was wide and callused by years of engaging with his hobby of choice.

Woodworking. Making hand-crafted benches, to be precise.

She and Gemma had nearly torn something the other night howling about potential taglines should he ever decide to open a storefront.

Smooth enough to satisfy, hard enough to last.

You’ll never want to sit on anything else once you touch our wood.

Get knotty on our porch swings.

Gemma discreetly kicked Cady’s ankle coming out from behind the register. Payback, she guessed, for her being drafted into service on her best friend’s behalf. Hesitantly, Gemma picked her way around the sprawl of books and placed her hand in Ethan’s.

His fingers closed over hers in a flash, and, in a move that made Cady dizzy, he looped Gemma’s arm over her head to twirl her to face the rectangular patch of wall where the bookshelf used to be.

“You were here,” he said, glancing back at Cady.

Her teeth clicked as she snapped her gaping jaw shut. “Mmhmm.”

His hands were anchored at Gemma’s waist and swiftly rotated her hips toward the stairs. “Like so?”

Cady’s tongue had turned to taffy.

“Or like this?” he said, and Gemma’s pleated skirt flared as he spun her a quarter turn toward his chest.

She shot Cady a look over the shoulder of her eggplant-purple cardigan.

Cady widened her eyes in a silent I know, right? She’d never seen Ethan so…in charge. So…in control. So…I can move your body however I want you, and you’ll like it.

And it wasn’t not working.

“Like that,” she agreed, not wanting poor Gemma to get vertigo before he could finish his reconstruction.

Ethan’s voice dropped to a conversational register as his hand hovered near her shoulder. “May I?”

“Please do.” Gemma sighed dreamily.

He carefully lifted her braid and moved it to her opposite shoulder, guiding her torso forward with a hand planted between her shoulder blades.

“The impact happens here.” His piercing blue eyes locked on Cady’s. “Then what?”

He would ask that of a woman with weed-addled memory.

“I kind of bounced off.” And let fly a flash flood of fucks.

Ethan hooked his hands under Gemma’s armpits and lifted her until the patent-leather toes of her Mary Janes barely kissed the wood floor. “Here?”

“I mean, I wasn’t exactly recording geo-coordinates by that point, but roughly, yes.”

Ethan set Gemma down. “Then?”

“Then I heard a cracking sound and realized it was tipping toward me.” Closing her eyes, Cady allowed herself to drift back into the moment. The sense of a shift in the darkness. The hair standing up on her arms a split second before the impact. “I tried to jump out of the way, but it caught my shoulder and knocked the phone out of my hand.”

“You were on a call with a customer at the time of the incident,” he observed in a flat, just the facts, ma’am monotone.

“Yes.”

“And he was the party who placed a call to 911.”

“Yes,” Cady confirmed.

“Do you recall about what time that was?”

Sometime after I insulted his manhood but before I proved Gemma annoyingly right about the bookshelf didn’t feel like an exceptionally helpful answer.

Cady conjured what she hoped was a thoughtful expression. “Hmm…”

“I heard he sounded like a cross between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jason Momoa.” This helpful tidbit was offered up by none other than Myrtle, who looked surprisingly none the worse for wear—relatively speaking—despite having thrown a rager that had half her guests yarking on her ceramic-animal-littered lawn. “One of those voices that comes with a hand around your throat. But a hand that knows just how hard to—”

“That’ll do, Myrtle,” Ethan interrupted.

“Not a local, either,” she added, leaning in the doorway. She, like many of the town’s core residents, had been milling around the shop’s exterior, hoping to catch a snatch of gossip through the old and not very thick plate glass window. Unlike many of the town’s other residents, Myrtle had had the stones to slip in via the front door. “Judy said that—”

“Judy said that she’s going to keep her mouth shut if she wants to retain her job as a county dispatcher.” The suddenly thunderous swell of the sheriff’s voice dropped all three women into stunned silence. “That’s confidential information, and I’ll thank you to keep it that way.”

Myrtle’s crepey neck contracted on a swallow. “And I’ll thank you not to raise your voice to me,” she said, drawing herself up to every inch of five-feet-two. “I was fighting fires in Canada before you’d figured out how to properly point your pecker at a toilet bowl, and I’ll say what I want, to who I want, when I want. Got it, kiddo?”

In addition to a frequent lack of discretion, Myrtle’s take zero shit policy was the stuff of legend in Townsend Harbor. Because, Cady supposed, the woman had plenty of her own. As the proprietress of Fertile Myrtle’s Manure, she moved it by the ton and wasn’t about to add a single turd to the pile.

Not even for a town hero like Ethan Townsend.

“Beg your pardon, Mrs. LeGrande,” a reddened Ethan said with a deferential duck of his head. “But if you’d be so kind as to let me finish my investigation, we can get things back to normal as soon as possible.”

Which was, as everyone knew, Ethan Townsend’s prime life directive.

Myrtle gave them a curt nod before turning on the sole of her leopard-print rain boot and scuffing out.

Ethan folded his arms across his chest, the thick-soled boots he favored when he was working planted at a just try to move me distance. “This customer you were talking to, he always call so late?”

“Usually it’s at eight p.m.,” Gemma offered before Cady had a chance to answer.

Suspicion darkened Ethan’s eyes to the color of lake water. “Usually?”

Cady eased her weight onto the leather stool to prevent herself from lobbing it over the counter at her best friend.

“As Myrtle so helpfully pointed out, he’s from out of town,” she said. “He calls to place an order every week.”

“A huge order,” Gemma said, glancing up at Ethan. “Don’t you just love a man who reads?”

Judging by the scowl hardening Ethan’s already stony features, Cady guessed he did not.

“I’m going to need his name,” Ethan said, reaching for the phone clipped to the utility case on his hip. “And address.”

“Didn’t Judy get that?” Cady’s arm had begun to itch and sweat within its canvas prison. She hadn’t showered since before Myrtle’s party, and she longed to dissolve the swampy film on her skin in the paradise of a long, hot bath.

“Called from some kind of sat phone,” Ethan said. “He didn’t give his name. Only reported there’d been a break-in at this location.”

“And threatened to rip out the spine of every officer in Townsend Harbor if they didn’t get there within the two minutes,” Gemma added.

Cady’s heart fluttered like a spastic bird. Surely Fox wouldn’t be promising musculoskeletal rearrangement if he was upset at her for insulting his dick, would he?

“Sorry,” Gemma said sheepishly, ducking her dark head. “I ran into Judy at the Coffee Spot this morning.”

That was when it clicked. Her gossipmongering traitor of a best friend was trying to make Ethan jealous.

His eyes narrowed to slits as a walnut-sized knot appeared at the hinge of his jaw.

“I’ll have that name now.”

Cady cleared her throat. “Fox.”

“First or last?” Ethan asked.

“Ummm…yes?”

Ethan’s thumbs ceased their typing. He looked at her from beneath a furrowed brow. “Come again?”

“She’s not sure which,” Gemma helpfully supplied.

Cady dearly wished they were behind the register still so she could pinch the back of her best friend’s arm. “He mentioned that he would prefer not to disclose it for security reasons.”

“What sort of security reasons prevent a man from providing a bookseller with his full legal name?” Ethan asked.

“My money is on the witness protection program,” Gemma said. “Otherwise, why wouldn’t he be able to provide an address?”

“How is it you’re shipping books to this man on a weekly basis if you don’t have his address?” Ethan pinned her with a skeptical look.

A bead of sweat trickled down Cady’s ribs.

“I box them up and leave them in the delivery area by the alley. My regular UPS guy picks them up, and from there, I’m not really sure how they get to him. I just assumed they have some kind of arrangement.”

“Arrangement.” Ethan spat the word like it had just peed in his mouth.

She nodded, beginning to feel the first prickles of irritation. “Frankly, when someone places an order that big, I don’t concern myself with how they’re getting their books or why they don’t want me to know their private information. I just respect their privacy and thank my lucky stars for the revenue.”

And she had.

Fervently.

For the third time since he’d arrived, Ethan reviewed the details she’d provided, point by point, before jamming his phone back into its holster and shaking his head in disgust.

“This scene makes absolutely no sense.” And Ethan Townsend was a man who liked things to make sense.

He stalked the length of the storefront, moving with athletic efficiency. “You locked your doors, but someone gets in without there being any sign of forced entry?”

Mostly true.

She thought both doors were locked. But she’d also been tripping balls. One of the facts she had decided not to share with Sheriff Townsend.

“You’re on the phone, you hear a noise, you attempt to get to the stairs but run into the bookshelf on the south side, but it somehow falls in the opposite direction.”

Admittedly, that part had her stumped as well.

Ethan stormed over to the credenza and yanked out the vintage attaché case her aunt had used as a makeshift cashbox.

“You insist that not a dollar was taken. No merchandise was stolen. And not a thing is missing from the premises. So, our working theory is, an incredibly sophisticated thief is able to access your secured store for the sole purpose of—what? Un-shelving books and breaking a lamp?”

His gaze burned a hole in the atmosphere between them.

“Is he asking us?” Gemma asked out of the side of her mouth.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to talk,” Cady whispered back.

She had never seen him so perturbed. Not even when they’d exited a movie theater to find a drunk tourist relieving himself on the tires of Ethan’s immaculately maintained county-issued SUV. He had merely told the guy to zip it or lose it before opening her door and driving them through the Suds Studs after-hours auto-wash.

Frankly, he seemed more bothered by the somewhat suggestive wash options in the automatic drive-through.

He’d gone with the Quickie, naturally.

As swiftly as it had gone, Ethan’s mannered calm returned, transforming his features into a stoic mask. “You mind giving us a minute, Miss McKendrick?”

Gemma glanced between them, self-satisfaction smeared all over her elven features. “Not at all,” she chirped. “I’d be happy to. Delighted, even. I’ll just be in the back.”

Eavesdropping on every word they spoke.

When her clunky footsteps receded, Ethan turned to Cady.

“If you weren’t the target, I’d say this had to be something personal.” He met her eyes as his ears began to flush a candy-apple red. “Can’t think of a single reason anyone would want to hurt you.”

Damn if his kind words didn’t make her feel like the shittiest shithole who ever shat…

“I can write you a list, if you want,” she said, deflecting the compliment. “Take Roy Dobson.”

“Wish someone would,” was Ethan’s deadpan reply.

They both glanced across the street, where a man with silver hair and an epic scowl shooed people away from the section of the sidewalk in front of a drab and unadorned storefront. The windows had been (poorly) tinted, silver bubbles pockmarking the dingy glass with (also poorly) painted letters.

You Want It, Take It.

Below it, in a smaller and more insistent font:

No refunds

No exchanges

No exceptions!!!

The last was underlined twice and punctuated with not one, but three exclamation marks. One of those emphasis dots had become a drip that meandered a good ten inches down the filthy window.

Ethan’s grunt of disgust likely had more to do with the store’s untidy exterior than its occupant, who Cady herself doubted was responsible for her current predicament.

His feud with her Aunt Fern had been legendary, but typically contained to perma stink-eye and sternly worded letters to the city council.

“Until we figure out who got in here and how, I’d feel a lot better if—” Ethan halted abruptly, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing above the neatly creased collar of his shirt. “What I mean to say is—” he began again, then froze.

Feeling a surge of warmth for the decent, earnest man before her, Cady rested her hand on his wrist. “Go ahead,” she encouraged, not at all convinced she wanted to hear what he was about to say.

“I have room—I mean, we have room. At the house.”

The house.

A vast understatement of the sprawling Victorian manse looking down its nose at the town from its perch high on the hill. Yet another reminder of the Townsend family’s indelible ties to the town’s history.

“You could stay with us,” Ethan continued. “Just until we get this resolved. You’d have your own suite. Plenty of privacy. Even has a kitchen. In fact—”

“That is so, so incredibly generous of you, Ethan.” Welling panic made Cady squeeze his firm forearm a hair harder than she’d intended. “And if I didn’t have so much work to do around here—”

“You’d have help with that too. Half the town is already out there,” Ethan said, jerking his head toward the window. “Soon as I’m gone, they have the okay to put this place to rights.”

Cady glanced at the gathering of loitering onlookers, glad she’d heeded Gemma’s suggestion to grab a couple boxes of doughnuts as a bribe.

“I mean, I really, really appreciate that, but Gemma and I already have some people coming.”

His face fell, and with it, her heart.

At times, she wished she could dig the empathy out of her brain with a grapefruit spoon. Being able to identify the precise moment Ethan Townsend registered her rejection of his offer of kindness as a rejection of himself blew soggy chunks.

“Maybe you could call me later, though?” she said, knowing he was bright enough to recognize it as a consolation prize.

Ethan nodded, his lips pressed into a tight line.

“Just not too late,” she added. “I’m going to try to turn in early tonight.”

And work up my nerve to call Fox and apologize.

“Copy that. I’ll let you get to it, then.” Ethan kicked the rock Myrtle had slid into the front door to keep it cracked on his way out.

Gemma’s footsteps announced her arrival, but Cady kept her eyes on the mix of locals on the sidewalk across the street.

“Not that I ever seek to align myself with uptight lawmen, but I really don’t like the idea of you being here alone,” Gemma said as she returned.

“I’ll be fine,” Cady promised. “The door to the upstairs has a deadbolt and a security chain.”

“That you also never lock,” Gemma pointed out.

“Tonight, I will,” Cady said.

“I know you will,” her friend said. “Because I’m going to lock it.”

Cady picked up the attaché case cashbox and slid it back beneath the counter. “That’s going to be hard to do from your house.”

“Which is why I’ll be staying with you,” Gemma said.

“As much as I appreciate the offer, I’m looking forward to a long bath and a short evening.”

Gemma set the boxes of doughnuts on the entry table next to the front door in preparation for soliciting help from the rabble outside. “Seven years of friendship and you still think you can lie to me.”

“About what?” Cady laughed despite the deep, angry ache waking within her shoulder.

“The reason you don’t want me staying over.” Popping open the lid of the bakery box, Gemma helped herself to a glazed doughnut. “You’re going to call Fox.”

Sometimes, it really sucked to have someone who knew her so well present for these pivotal moments of potentially regrettable decisions.

“He probably thinks I’m dead.”

“For all we know, you’re lucky that you’re not.”

“Gem, I was literally right here and practically blind after I knocked the glasses off my own face. If someone had wanted to hurt me, it wouldn’t have been hard.”

What she’d meant to be a reassurance for her friend suddenly made Cady’s stomach feel hot and queasy.

Were it not for Fox, she’d have been an even easier target.

Gemma wiped flakes of glaze from her fingers and squeezed the wrist of Cady’s uninjured arm. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“No,” Cady admitted.

But after tonight, she would.

By the time the early dark found its way into her windows, Nevermore had been mostly “put to order,” as Ethan had described it. Broken shelf hauled away by a Goliath-sized passerby who’d watched two grown men wrestle with it for the better part of half an hour. Books neatly packaged into boxes to wait until she found a suitable successor. Volunteers rewarded by effusive thanks and pastry bribes. The locks on both the front and back doors replaced by Ethan himself, and every last living soul evicted from the premises.

Bathed and in her comfiest yoga pants and oversized book-nerd-themed t-shirt, Cady could at last retire to her cozy room on the third floor of the building, and wait.

Which, she was one hundred percent terrible at.

Buzzing with nervous energy from the day, she crossed to the window of her loft and wrangled her blinds open one-handed. A half-moon hung in the clear night sky, grinning a Cheshire Cat smile at her from the star-studded bolt of deep blue velvet.

Her gaze drifted down to the empty street, and her mind played tricks with the moonlight.

Were it not for two columns of bluish smoke rising from the mouth of the alley next to You Want It, Take It, she might not have seen them at all.

Two shadowy figures just outside the pool of jaundiced yellow security lights mounted on the side of the old brick building.

Cady removed her glasses, breathed on them, and polished the lenses with the tail of her well-worn t-shirt. Squinting through the darkness, she could just make out the distinctive vertical swoop of a hairstyle favored by a certain nineties late-night TV host.

Mayor Stewart?

Since when did he join Roy for an evening cigar?

She jumped when her phone rang, smudging the glass with her nose.

Glancing down at the glowing screen, she saw three letters that sent a frisson of excitement shimmering through her.

Fox.

“Hey there,” she said, trying not to sound out of breath by the simple act of being startled.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

The expletive was bellowed from the receiver at a decibel level that would rival a rutting elk. All the anxiety that a day of worry and physical labor and a hot bath had evicted returned to her in a single, searing rush.

“You.” The syllable was raspy and vehement enough to make her spleen shrivel into a raisin. “Do you have any idea…any idea at all”—the word was strangled out by a sound she’d describe as something between a growl and a grunt— “how relieved I am that you’re okay? Christ, woman. I’ve been fucking sick with worry, you know that?”

Her own relief was so powerful that it dragged a surge of nausea in its wake. “Actually…no. I thought you were upset with me.”

“Upset?” he scoffed. “What the hell would I be upset with you for?”

If his fear that someone may have un-alived her had erased her errant comment about his meat puppet from his short-term memory, Cady certainly had no intention of reminding him.

“Because I didn’t call you back sooner?” she suggested.

“On second thought, yeah. I’m willing to be pissed with you about that,” Fox said. “You could have ended my agony hours ago.”

Her toes curled into the shaggy bedside rug as he dipped into the lower register that turned her blood to warm honey in her veins.

Now or never.

“What do you think about ending it in person?”

A pause.

A very, very long pause.

“How’s that?” he asked.

Cady let her eyelids fall closed and filled the four corners of her lungs with a long, slow breath. She had to do this. Had to know what they were.

Or what they weren’t.

She scrunched her face into a grimace that made her infinitely grateful he couldn’t see her and commenced with shooting her shot. “Do you think it’s time we meet in person?”