Rock Chick (Rock Chick #1)(3)

Don’t get me wrong, Liam Nightingale still has killer good looks only slightly marred by a small, crescent moon scar under his left eye. He also still has a killer bod that looks great in jeans, great in sweats, great in suits, great in anything. He also still has a killer smile on the odd occasions he flashes it. And finally, he also still likes women with lots of T&A and lots of hair (and I was still a woman just like that).

But he’s also dangerous.

I don’t know how to explain this, he just is, trust me.

* * * * *

These days, I still go to rock concerts. I still listen to music way too loud. I still wear my red hair long and wild in a tangle of waves that fall in a deep V down my back. I still have some serious T&A. Let’s just say, my body is my gift and my curse. A body like mine isn’t difficult to maintain, just feed it loads of crap to keep the curves but keep in shape because you’ve got to lug it around everywhere.

These days, though, my parties have real, home cooked hors d’oeuvres and bowls of cashews and nobody passes out in my bed or pukes in the backyard anymore.

These days I’m also the owner of a used bookstore located on Broadway (not the Broadway in NYC, the other Broadway, in Denver, Colorado, US of A).

My grandmother left me the store when she died. It would seem a rather staid profession, owning a bookstore. You’d think I wore tortoise-shell glasses and had my hair back in a bun. This isn’t true about my bookstore or me, by any stretch of the imagination.

You see, my grandmother was a hellion, she’d raised a hellion in my Mom, Katherine, and she and Dad carefully oversaw raising the third-generation hellion that was me.

My bookstore is on the southeast corner of Broadway and Bayaud. Not the greatest neighborhood, not the worst. In the times of my grandmother, the ‘hood had been in decline, now it’s on an upswing.

My inheritance came with half a duplex one block down on Bayaud in the Baker Historical District. I live in the east side of the duplex, a g*y couple live in a west side, another g*y couple live east of me and another behind me. This is why Baker is safe, it’s populated mainly by g*y couples, DINKS, hippies and Mexicans. When I, a single white female who looks like (and is) a rock ‘n’ roll groupie of the highest order, moved in, they all called each other and said “there goes the neighborhood”.

My bookstore is named Fortnum’s. There was no reason for this except Gram had gone to Fortnum and Mason’s in London the year before she opened it and she thought it sounded high brow.

There’s nothing high brow about Fortnum’s.

In the day (that was Gram’s day), it was a hippie hang out and still, in a way, is. Harley boys often came there too, don’t ask me why. Now, it’s also filled with preppies, yuppies and DINKS trying to be trendy and boarders and goths because it is trendy.

It has a bunch of mismatched shelves, stuffed full of all sorts of used books and tables piled high with vinyl records. It’s a rabbits warren of organized disorganization, every once in awhile punctuated by a fluffy, overstuffed chair. Most people come in, find a book, read in a chair and leave without buying the book, maybe coming back the next day to pick it up again and read some more.

With the shop, I also inherited Gram’s two employees which, shall we say, diplomatically, are just as eccentric as she was.

Jane’s my romance (our biggest seller) expert, she’s six foot and weighs in at about one-twenty, painfully thin, painfully shy. She keeps her nose in a novel nearly every minute of the day when she isn’t buying them off people hawking their books for our shelves or selling them to people with mumbled recommendations. She’s told me she’d written over forty novels herself but never had the gumption to try to get them published. She didn’t even have the courage to allow me to read them and I ask all the time.

There’s also Duke. Duke’s a Harley man, all leather and denim and a big ole gray beard and loads of long, steel-gray hair with a bandana tied around his forehead. He talks rough, lives rough and is tough as nails but can be soft as a marshmallow if he likes you (luckily, he likes me). He used to be an English Lit professor at Stanford before he dropped out and moved to the mountains. He’s married to Dolores who works part-time at The Little Bear up in Evergreen where Duke and Dolores own a tiny cabin.

Gram loved Fortnum’s, looked at it kinda like her own personal community center. She was not an especially good business woman but she was happy to make do and play hostess to her eclectic group of pals. Gramps brought in an okay salary and, when he died, left her with a decent pension, so she didn’t have much to worry about.

Fortnum’s smells musty and old and, just like Gram, I love every inch of it.

When I wasn’t at the police station, with the Nightingales or out with Ally, I was at Fortnum’s with Gram and Duke, and then came Jane. It was always one of my homes away from home and those come with being a motherless child, believe you me.

But the way I’d inherited it, it sure as hell wasn’t going to keep me in my cowboy boots, Levi’s and huge, silver belt buckles attached to tooled-leather belts (my signature outerwear, my signature underwear was strictly sexy-girlie lace and silk, Gram said that looking like a cowboy-inspired groupie on the outside was one thing but every girl had to have a secret and Gram said sexy underwear was the best secret a girl could have).

Now the front of the store is where I do my business. There are a bunch of comfortable couches and arm chairs and a few tables. I invested in an espresso machine and I coaxed my favorite barista, Ambrose “Rosie” Coltrane, from the chain coffee store down the road.