Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(12)

“You’ve probably seen me before,” I reply tightly.

“No, I mean—”

“Why’d you come in here?” I interrupt. “You saw the door was open, boxes in the foyer, surely you could guess the situation.”

“I…just did,” she replies, which isn’t a good reply at all. “I was looking for your dog. She came barreling into the road, so I stopped to try to get her. I thought she was lost or something.”

“And when she went into this house?”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. She hesitantly glances down the hallway toward the bathroom, and finally settles on “…I don’t know.”

I run my fingers through my hair aggravatedly. “I don’t see what you people bloody want from me.”

“Nothing,” she says, surprised. “In fact, I really like—”

The door to the library opens and Elias steps out again, thumping his cell phone against his chest. He has a drawn look across his face that is never a good tell. About the same time, her father comes back from the bathroom saying, “That is a beautiful painting. Where did you get…” He trails off, though, when he sees the grim look on Elias’s face.

Elias presses his lips together and says, as if he’s delivering fatal news, “So, that book. It turns out it was, well…”

“A first-edition Starfield original,” the girl fills in glumly. “I know.”

Her father balks. “You must be joking. The only book in the Starfield-verse that has that kind of collector’s tag is…” But then he trails off and, peculiarly, he and his daughter exchange the same look.

They know something. About the book. Something secret between them.

Coming in here to look for my dog, my ass.

Elias hesitates and glances to me, as if I can somehow possibly get him out of whatever he’s about to say. I don’t know books. I have no idea what any of that means. I wrap my arms tighter over my chest and stand from the piano bench. Whatever, I’m going back to my room.

As I start toward the stairs, he says, “The worst part is, the owner of the house—which is neither of us—might want to press charges for the damages.”

I freeze at the bottom of the steps and glance over to them on the couch. The girl curls her fingers into the edges of the towel tighter, knuckles turning white.

Her father clears his throat. “How much are we talking here exactly?”

“Fifteen hundred,” Elias replies.

“Oh, dear,” he mumbles.

His daughter has gone pale, which is already quite a feat seeing as how she looks one shade off from a ghost already. “We…don’t have that.”

Her father, on the other hand, is already reaching into his tweed jacket. He pulls out a checkbook. “Fifteen hundred?” he asks to clarify. “Does anyone have a pen?”

“Dad!” the girl hisses.

He mumbles something to her, and she growls something back, and they stare at each other in a standoff until, finally, he closes his checkbook and she turns back to Elias. Her mouth works as she searches for something to say. And then, unexpectedly, she finds the words. “This is my mistake, not his.”

“Well, then that leaves us in a conundrum,” Elias replies patiently.

She agrees. “I’ll work off the debt, then? I’ll do whatever you want—cook, clean, garden. Until I pay you back.”

“Rosebud, you barely clean your own room,” her own father says, ratting her out.

She wilts. “I can try?”

I resist the urge to snort—not because she couldn’t do those things, because obviously I’m not any better—but because she would even offer to do things she quite possibly sucks at. “We don’t need any of those things,” I say instead.

She wilts so much she almost fades into the couch. “Well, I…”

“Do you like books?” Elias asks. When I shoot him a look, he refuses to meet my gaze. Don’t encourage her, I want to scream, until I notice that she is no longer wilting.

In fact, she is positively radiating.

“More than Carmindor loves the view from the observation deck,” she replies. “More than Picard loves his model starships. More than Darth Vader loves the Dark Side. More than Sond—”

“We get it,” I interrupt.

“Well…” Elias tilts his head thoughtfully, glancing from her father back to her again. “We do have that entire library, and it would be nice to fix it up for Na—the owner of the house. I was going to have it be your job, Vance, but because of this recent occurrence it might be nice for you to have some help. In exchange, perhaps we could cover the cost of the book.”

I stare at Elias, for he has betrayed me far more than I could have predicted. “You’re joking.”

Because first, I wasn’t going to organize a library. What did he take me for, a maid?

And second, I certainly wasn’t going to do it with her.

But she, on the other hand, seems absolutely ecstatic about this turn of events.

“Really?” She sits up, her eyes wide.

Her father shakes his head. “You have work after school, Rosie.”

She winces at that and turns to him. “Well, um, actually…”