A Bookshop Christmas by Rachel Burton

Author:Rachel Burton [Burton, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781801100557
Publisher: Head of Zeus

*

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Xander’s voice was cold and clipped. It was the voice he’d used in the supermarket the first time we’d met. I hadn’t meant to start reading the manuscript and now I’d been caught.

“I moved this bag and the pages fell out,” I began. “I thought it was your latest manuscript. I only…”

“Don’t,” he said icily, snatching the papers from me and stuffing them back into the leather satchel.

“I shouldn’t…” I tried again.

“No, you shouldn’t.” He snatched the car keys out of my hand and closed the storage space at the front of his car. He took Gus and settled him onto the back seat.

“Well, get in then,” he snapped at me. “I really haven’t got all day.”

I knew I shouldn’t have looked at the manuscript. I’d worked with authors for years and I knew how precious and personal those first drafts can be. The first draft, as I always told my authors when I worked at Rogers & Hudson, is for them and only them. The first draft is their version of the story, where they get to know their characters and the adventures they are to go on. Even if that had been a first draft of Xander’s next book, it shouldn’t have crossed my mind to look at it. I should have stuffed the papers back in the satchel and ignored them.

But it hadn’t been Xander’s next manuscript. It had been a new unpublished Ruby Bell manuscript – perhaps the one that hadn’t been published this winter, for whatever reason. What was Xander doing with it? Did he know who she was? I had so many questions but the look on Xander’s face when I got in the car stopped me from asking any of them. Gus had buried his head under his paws in an attempt to keep out of it.

“Do you make a habit of going through other people’s private papers?” Xander asked as we drove out of the gates of Graydon Hall.

“I wasn’t going through them on purpose,” I said, but my excuse sounded whiny and pathetic even to me. I took a breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have even thought about looking.”

He didn’t respond and I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed even more tired than he had at breakfast and his knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel so hard.

“I realise that you are probably full of all kinds of questions about why I have a manuscript by your beloved Ruby Bell in my car,” he said after a while. “But I’m not at liberty to tell you.”

He had changed back to the man I’d first met, as though everything we’d shared last night hadn’t happened, as though… and then the penny dropped. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it straight away.

“There’s only one reason why you’d have a Ruby Bell manuscript, though, isn’t there?” I asked with more confidence than I felt. “So there aren’t really that many questions.

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