Once in a Lifetime(7)

Ben flipped him off. An older woman driving down the street rolled down her window and tsked at him. He waved at her in apology but she just waggled her bony finger at him. “Why not hire Jax?” he asked Lyons. “He’s the best carpenter in town.”

“He’s got a line of customers from Lucky Harbor to Seattle, and I don’t want to wait. My niece Aubrey needs help renovating the bookstore, and she needs someone good. That’s you. Now I know damn well she can’t afford you, so I’m paying, in my sweet Gwen’s memory.”

Well, shit.

“Oh, and don’t give Aubrey the bill,” Mr. Lyons said. “I don’t want her worrying about it. She’s going through some stuff, and I want to do this for her. For both my girls.”

Ah, hell, Ben thought, feeling himself soften. He was such a sucker. “You should be asking me for a bid,” he said.

“I trust you.”

Jesus. “You shouldn’t,” Ben said firmly. “You—”

“Just start the damn work, McDaniel. Shelves. Paint. Hang stuff. Move a few walls, whatever she wants. She said something about how the place is too closed-in and dark, so figure it out. I’m going on a month-long cruise with my new girl, Elsie, and I need to know before I leave. You in or not?”

Ben wanted to say no. Hell, no. Being closed up in that bookstore with the beautiful, bitchy Aubrey for days and days? The reality of that didn’t escape him. If he did this, surely one of them would kill the other before the work was done.

“Ben?”

“Yeah,” he said, facing the inevitable. “I’ll do it.”

Whether he’d survive it was another thing entirely.





Chapter 3



Two days later, Audrey opened her bookstore bright and early, much to Gus’s annoyance. He liked to sleep in. Ignoring the curmudgeonly cat’s dirty look, she took a moment to just look around. Despite her efforts, the store was still too closed-in and stuffy. She wanted to open it up by moving shelves back against the walls and adding a coffee and tea station. Definitely an Internet café and a comfortable seating area for a variety of reading and social clubs that she’d host here.

She wanted it more spacious. Sunny. Bright.

And God, please, successful…

Half an hour later, she welcomed her first customers of the day—a van of senior citizens. She’d coaxed the senior center into driving them over here two mornings a week for their book club.

“Hey, chickie,” Mr. Elroy said, leaning heavily on his cane. He was decades past a midlife crisis, but he still managed to be quite the lothario at the senior center. “Which aisle has the sex stuff?”

He meant the how-to manuals. Anticipating him, she’d hidden any and all books on sex on the bottom shelf of the self-help aisle. No one ever went to that aisle. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t have any.”

“Really? Didn’t anyone ever tell you that sex sells?”

Mr. Wykowski had come in behind Mr. Elroy. “You need a manual?” he asked Mr. Elroy. “All I need is a little blue pill.”

And so went the morning.

When the seniors were gone, a bus full of kids showed up, as Aubrey had also made a deal with the elementary school.

The kids managed to find the sex manuals. Luckily, Aubrey was quick on the uptake and confiscated the explicit reading material before a single book spine got cracked. By the time they left, she was exhausted. In the past week, she’d learned several vital facts. One: Seniors and kids were a lot alike. And two: She wasn’t making enough money for this.

By lunchtime she was back to daydreaming about the “bean” part of Book & Bean. Right now she was using a back corner, which was really a storage closet, to make tea and coffee. She wanted to remove the door and wall and replace them with a curved, waist-high counter that would create a coffee and reading niche. She ate a PB&J while perusing the Internet for affordable bar stools for the spot.

But for now, most everything she wanted was out of her budget. She knew she could ask her father for help, but she’d have to choke on her own pride to call him, and she wasn’t good at that.

So instead she’d gone to the local hardware store and bought a book on renovation. She’d read it from beginning to end and thought she could handle some of the easy stuff on her own. She planned to tear out the closet herself, and she’d brought in the crowbar from the back of her car to do just that.

Clearly, it’d be far easier to suck it up and call her dad, but she rarely took the easy route. Her parents had divorced when she’d been ten and her sister, Carla, eight. Her father, William, retired from being an orthopedic surgeon, was a consultant now, but still he had a hard time talking to mere mortals. Not her mom. Tammy was an ex–beauty queen working as a manicurist at the local beauty shop, and she loved to talk. In the divorce, she’d gotten Aubrey, and William had taken the child prodigy, Carla.

An unorthodox custody arrangement, but it’d allowed the divorced couple to stay away from each other and avoid arguments. It’d also alienated Aubrey from her father, who’d recently remarried and had two new daughters now. Plus Carla had followed in his footsteps and was a first-year resident at the hospital, heading toward the same brilliant career path as her dad.

And then there was Aubrey. Living with Tammy had meant that the pressure of an Ivy League school and a medical career were off the table, but there’d been other pressures. Tammy had been the ultimate beauty queen and had turned into a beauty-queen mom, entering Aubrey in every beauty pageant and talent competition she could afford. There’d been many—at least until Aubrey had gotten old enough to put her foot down and refuse to put on one more tiara. She’d been thirteen when that had happened.