A Misty Harbor Wedding by Marcia Evanick

Author:Marcia Evanick [Evanick, Marcia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2014-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Juliet looked at the man who was her father and tried to picture what he had looked like twenty-seven years ago. Gordon Hanley must have been devastatingly handsome, but not in the pretty-boy, Brad Pitt way. Gordon was too thin and angular to be classically handsome. He resembled a tragic poet of old, except for the retro fifties-style shirt and the tinted glasses.

Gordon had been only twenty-nine when her mother had had him for a professor in college. Juliet understood the attraction of a young, good-looking professor. She had had a crush on one or two herself over the years. Her mother had not been nineteen or twenty, but a full-grown woman of twenty-six when she had met Gordon in her junior year.

Victoria Knox didn’t do crushes. Her mother had worked her way across America and then traveled through Europe before heading off to college. Juliet hadn’t inherited her mother’s sense of adventure. Stepping into Gordon’s shop two days ago was probably the bravest thing she had ever done.

“Are you sure this is going to look right?” Gordon finished shoving the last of the empty eight-foot-tall mahogany bookcases into place.

“It’s looking great.” They had spent all day yesterday and a good part of the previous evening rearranging the shop on paper. Today was moving day. “I don’t know what creaked more, the bookshelves or your knees,” she teased. “How old did you say you were?”

“I didn’t,” Gordon huffed, not because he was insulted by the question. He was just out of breath. “These things weigh a ton, and they probably haven’t been moved since before I was born.”

Considering the age of the shop, he was probably right. “You’re the one who wouldn’t let me help.” She had shown up at the shop by seven, two hours before he usually opened. She had worn an old pair of jeans and an old T-shirt that advertised a Shakespeare festival that had happened three years ago. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail and she hadn’t bothered putting in her contacts. Between the dust in the shop, the smoke that still clung to everything, and staying up late into the night reading a book Gordon had recommended, her eyes were a mess.

She was a mess.

The shop was a bigger mess, but at least it was smelling better. She had opened both front doors and all the windows before setting to work. The cool morning temperature was somewhere in the sixties, but after emptying all the shelves of about a ton of books, she was sweating. A red welt marked one cheek, where a book had tumbled off a high shelf and she hadn’t been quick enough to catch it.

It was half an hour before opening time, and a customer wouldn’t be able to walk through the place. She didn’t think it mattered much. Gordon’s shop hadn’t been bustling with customers for the past two days. Most of the people who had stopped in were more curious as to who she was than they were interested in buying anything.

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