Deep (Pagano Family #4)(91)

“No. I was yelling at the cat. She plopped on the keyboard and put Excel into a seizure.”

Katrynn was definitely not a wiseguy. Bev had hired her own manager—a college graduate with a degree in English. She’d been in town for the Farewell Summer Festival over Labor Day weekend and had seen the poster Bev had put up in the front window. Katrynn had no more management experience than Bev had—zero—but they’d both done their time in retail. Katrynn had even worked in a bookshop before.

And Nick’s cousin Luca was helping Bev learn the higher-level business stuff, so she thought she’d be okay.

Now that she was in Chris’s records, she didn’t think she could do much worse than he had. It was like he had put effort into not making money.

That made perfect sense, in fact. Chris had liked his shop, and he’d loved spending weekends combing through estate sales. Bev had been on scores of Sunday road trips going through people’s old belongings. Though he’d kept new stock, too, his real love had been used books, the kind that people had read and loved already. The shop was just a way to fund his estate sale habit. And feed himself. He hadn’t wanted more than that. Thinking of her rumpled friend, she smiled. It was getting easier to remember him as the friend she’d thought she had without thinking about what he’d kept from her. That revelation mattered less every day.

At first, she’d felt certain that she would keep the shop exactly as Chris always had. But in the two weeks since she’d taken possession of the shop and the rest of her inheritance, she’d decided that she wanted to find a way to make it her own now, while still honoring the way it had been his.

Chris’s personality had been more downbeat than hers, and the shop reflected that. It was in one of the older buildings in Quiet Cove, with heavy, low ceilings and wide-plank wood floors. Chris had covered the floor with mismatched estate sale oriental rugs, all of them dark and threadbare. The plaster walls hadn’t been painted in as long as he’d had the shop. They were dingy and unadorned. She’d always thought it cozy, but once Bev started looking at it with a more critical eye, the place was downright gloomy.

She was using the life insurance money for a remodel and to pay Katrynn’s salary until they reopened. With the season ending, she’d decided to keep the shop closed until the spring. That would give her time to learn the business and make it her own. She wanted to keep the cozy but lose the gloom. Katrynn agreed.

But first, they needed to make sense of the stock. And the books. And today, after hours and hours of going through the thousand and one different, seemingly random ways Chris kept his records, Bev was beginning to think burning the place down was the only reasonable plan.

“Anything I can help with?”

Bev sighed and frowned at the screen. “No. I’m going to have to sit down with Luca and see if he can help me connect some dots. Right now, it’s giving me a migraine.” She looked up. “Anything cool in those boxes?”

Katrynn shook her head and reached back to retie her blonde ponytail. Bev had noticed that was a tic of hers—she retied her ponytail three or four times an hour, whether it was loose or not. “Pretty basic stuff. There is a box of old kids’ books. Really old. Dick and Jane readers and stuff like that. Oh—and a stack of Playboys from the 70s.” She snickered and plopped in the ratty armchair in front of the desk. “Okay, yeah. There’s some cool stuff in there. Hey—I was thinking…”

“Yeah?” Bev closed the laptop. She couldn’t look at indecipherable numbers for another second. She’d just call Luca and see if he could make sense of Chris’s nonsense.

“You know how you were saying you didn’t want to lose the flavor the shop had when your friend owned it? Well, how about turning the side stockroom into a reading room? There’s plenty of unused space in the back, and that room is small and awkward for backstock anyway. Call it the ‘Chris Mills Room’ or something. Shelve the kind of books he liked best in there, and set up that old green chair and some floor lamps.”

Bev swallowed back the lump in her throat. “I like that idea. I like it a lot. Thank you.”

Katrynn beamed. “No problem. Thank you for the job. I love it. I’m having a blast. When we reopen, it’s going to be amazing.”

“I hope so.”

Lady Catterley jumped back up on the desk, sat on the closed laptop, stretched one furry, white leg into the air and began to lick her butt.



oOo



It was late when Bev got home. She was tired and dirty, so she walked past Nick’s door and went to her own. She needed a shower.

It had been almost three weeks since he’d asked her to marry him, and though they were more or less okay, they hadn’t talked about the future. That unanswered question hung between them because Nick refused to engage in any conversation that might lead to its answer. He seemed to have decided to live in limbo rather than get an answer he might not like.

But she wanted to give him the answer he wanted. When he’d asked her to marry him, her first feeling had been a joy that had filled her to her toes. It had felt like karma’s apology for letting her get raped and maimed. The word ‘yes’ had leapt onto her tongue and done a pirouette. And then she’d thought about kids. She wanted children, a lot of children, at least three, and she had absolutely no idea if he did. He was a lot older than she was. If he’d wanted kids, he probably would have had them by now. Or maybe not. She didn’t know.