Such Devoted Sisters by Eileen Goudge

Author:Eileen Goudge [Goudge, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1799722
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

ANNIE STARED AT THE empty store with the FOR LEASE sign in its boarded-up window. Definitely not a great neighborhood—Ninth Avenue between Fourteenth and Fifteenth—and it was stuck between a dreary-looking Hispanic barbershop and an appliance-repair store with a pair of old TV sets throwing a flickering bluish glow over the snowy sidewalk below.

Could this be the right place? Shivering as gusts of wind whipped around her, Annie glanced at the address Emmett had given her, which she’d scribbled on the back of a grocery receipt. This was it, all right. But, God, what a dump! She noted the empty half-pint bottles littered in front of the door, and her heart sank even further.

A former coffee shop, Emmett had said, and it supposedly had a very large kitchen in the back. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Maybe once he showed her the inside ...

The last place she’d looked at, down on Hudson Street, had seemed almost ideal. It was a charming Village location, and it would have needed hardly any renovation. But it was also three times the rent.

Annie glanced at her watch. Quarter to twelve. Emmett would be here any minute. All of a sudden, she couldn’t wait to see him. To hear his voice explaining how if this or that wall were ripped out, what a magnificent space this could become.

Annie marvelled, not for the first time in the past four months, how lucky it was that at what had to be the lowest point in her life, Emmett Cameron had showed up. She remembered him calling, a couple of weeks after that awful night with Joe. He was in New York, he told her; he’d gotten a job in a friend-of-a-friend’s real-estate firm through some connection he’d made in France. Could she meet him for dinner that night at the Chelsea Hotel?

Seeing him waiting for her, beer in hand at El Quijote’s massive old-fashioned bar, wearing that cowboy grin, she’d felt something in her let go, as if she were stepping off some shaky platform she’d been trying to hold her balance on. An hour, maybe two ... she could escape for that long, couldn’t she? And then Emmett was walking over, hugging her, so solid. She’d felt safe, grounded, and at the same time, oddly charged, every circuit in her body suddenly alive and crackling.

Then they were in a booth with a pitcher of sangria, catching up on everything ... Emmett’s terrific deal on a furnished studio just down the street, opposite London Terrace, and this great chance he had to make a go of it in the real-estate business, where a lot of guys his age made six figures just from leasing office space. Not that he regretted his time at Girod’s. Just the experience of living in Paris was well worth Pompeau’s slave-driving. But chocolate making, he’d realized, was not ever going to be his thing.

She, in turn, had told him how excited she was about going into business for herself .

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