Читать книгу Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop - Annie Darling - Страница 6

It was morning. Apparently. Weak shafts of sunlight were doing their best to penetrate the gloom of the little flat above the Happy Ever After bookshop.

Nina O’Kelly cursed the sun streaming feebly in through her bedroom windows then cursed herself for not closing the curtains the night before. In fact, she was amazed that she was in her own bed, because she had absolutely no memory of how she’d got home.

She wasn’t hungover. Not exactly. Fragile, sleep deprived, and the sound of her flatmate, Verity, walking from her bedroom to the kitchen sounded like an elephant had been let loose, though generally Verity was quite light-footed.

With an unhappy whimper Nina turned over. Another ten minutes couldn’t hurt. Maybe fifteen. Perhaps she should open one eye very slowly just to check the time, or perhaps she should keep both eyes closed and just doze ever so lightly …

There was a gentle knock on the door. ‘Nina? It’s nine o’clock. It takes you an hour to do your make-up alone,’ Verity cooed softly. ‘I’m coming in. I want feet on the floor.’

Nina wasn’t fooled by the gentle cooing; Verity was not a woman to be messed with. One morning when it had been much later than this and Nina was still in bed, Verity had shocked her awake with a glass of water. It had played havoc with Nina’s hair.

Though every muscle in her body protested, Nina levered herself to a sitting position and swung her legs round so that when Verity opened the door, all ten of Nina’s toes, adorned with a nail polish in a jaunty aqua green, were touching the floor.

The inevitably pained expression on Verity’s face was a blur to Nina who still couldn’t fully open her eyes. ‘I’m up,’ she grunted, taking the mug of coffee that Verity handed her and opening her mouth so Verity could shove a piece of toast in it, because she was actually the best flatmate ever.

Then, because she was a skilled multi-tasker, Nina drank her coffee while having a shower and not getting her hair wet. Her hair was currently baby pink and arranged in Marilyn Monroe-style pin-curled waves. Each Monday and Friday lunchtime Nina went to the old-fashioned nana hairdresser around the corner to have a shampoo and set under a hood drier that was twice as old as she was. Very little could wither her hair between visits. All it needed was a little teasing at the roots and a generous spritz of Elnett, and Nina was good to go.

Well, not quite good to go. She hadn’t taken her make-up off before she’d collapsed into her bed and because time was marching on – Verity had already gone downstairs to the shop to start her working day, though technically they weren’t on the clock until ten and it was only nine fifty-seven – Nina decided to use yesterday’s make-up as her base.

A generous dollop of foundation, primer and ungodly amounts of concealer, then she got to work with liquid eyeliner, mascara and then more liquid eyeliner. A sweep of blusher and then several coats of deep-red lipstick, and Nina had done all she could do with her face. Not that it was a bad face. Nina had all the regular features – eyes, nose, mouth, chin arranged in the usual order – and now she had transformed herself into a vision of retro glamour.

There was just time to don her hated grey work T-shirt with ‘Happy Ever After’ scrawled across her chest in a pink cursive script. It was very hard to dress around the T-shirt: frocks were a no-no, Nina rarely did jeans, but she wriggled into a tight pencil skirt, slipped on her day heels and by the time she tripped down the stairs into the shop, she was only …

‘Fifteen minutes late!’ complained Posy, the owner of Happy Ever After, in an unnecessarily loud voice. ‘You live above the shop. You have a ten-second commute, so how come you’re still fifteen minutes late?’

‘Obviously, my body clock runs fifteen minutes later than yours,’ Nina pointed out. ‘I can’t be responsible for my biological needs. Talking of which … coffee!’ It was a plaintive moan. ‘Be a love and nip to the tearooms and bring me back the largest mug of coffee possible.’

‘I am a love but I’m also your boss,’ Posy said sternly, but she never could pull off stern. Her softly pretty face just wasn’t made that way. ‘Just the one sugar?’

‘Better make it two,’ Nina decided. ‘As it is, I wouldn’t expect too much from me until after lunch, Pose.’

Posy shook her head in despair as she headed through the arch that led to a series of anterooms, which in turn led to the tearooms from where the heavenly scent of freshly brewed coffee and cakes just out of the oven wafted through the shop.

And what a lovely shop it was. Happy Ever After was the only bookshop in Britain, maybe even the world, dedicated to books about love. ‘Your one-stop shop for all your romantic fiction needs’ as it said on the bookmarks Nina tucked into every book she sold.

Even before she lived above the premises, Happy Ever After had always felt like home to Nina, and from where she was perched on a stool behind the counter, she surveyed her domain. In the centre of the main room were three sofas in varying stages of sagging decay arranged around a table heaped with books. There was a wall of new releases and bestsellers, the top shelves accessed by a rolling ladder, while the opposite wall had yet more books and a series of vintage display cabinets full of romantic fiction-related gifts, from mugs to cards, T-shirts and jewellery.

Then on either side were the arches which led to a series of smaller rooms, all stuffed from floor to ceiling with yet more books. It was the kind of shop where you could spend an hour browsing contentedly – although at that moment, Nina was far from content.

‘That coffee you made me this morning, not that I’m complaining, was as weak as a kitten’s fart,’ she shouted to Verity, who was at her desk in the office at the back of the shop, behind the counter. The door was only slightly ajar, hence the need to shout. ‘Is Tom in today?’

‘It sounds quite a lot like complaining to me, and no Tom today, he phoned to say he was having a footnotes emergency with his dissertation,’ Verity called out. ‘And Posy has a meeting with her accountant this morning, so you’ll have to hold the fort single-handed.’

‘Yeah, well, if it gets really busy, you’ll just have to help in the shop.’ Nina was going to be very firm about that. Verity couldn’t skulk in the office and leave Nina to completely fend for herself if they were suddenly overrun by customers. Though – she squinted out of the shop’s bow-fronted windows – it was a damp, grey Tuesday morning and so Nina hoped they’d be quiet until after she got her second wind.

From experience, when she was this fragile, her second wind didn’t usually make an appearance until she’d consumed at least three baked goods and had a kill-or-cure fry-up for lunch. And there was Posy, back with Nina’s coffee and a muffin the size of her head.

‘Is that muffin for me?’ Nina asked hopefully.

It was and it was studded with blueberries, which any fool knew were a superfood, so it was a very healthy muffin, Nina thought to herself as she stuffed huge chunks of it in her mouth and started to tackle the teetering pile of books waiting to be shelved that were on the counter in front of her.

‘Don’t get muffin fingers on them,’ Posy warned but Nina had been eating cake and handling new books in a professional capacity for three years, so she ignored her employer.

It wasn’t as if she were turning the pages. All she was doing was reading the back-cover blurbs so that when a customer came in and said that she was looking for a paranormal romance featuring a time-travelling, shape-shifting duke/werewolf and that it probably had a blue cover, then Nina would be able to point her in the right direction.

Once digested (the blurbs rather than the muffin), Nina separated them into different piles for easier shelving. Historical, Regency, which had its own section, Erotic, YA …

‘What exactly are you doing?’ asked a voice to Nina’s left. It was a male voice. They didn’t get many male voices at Happy Ever After and this wasn’t Tom’s world-weary tones or Posy’s husband, Sebastian’s haughty posh-boy drawl. It was a soft voice; polite, curious and yet it had a steely undertone that instantly made Nina bristle.

She turned to see a man behind her counter. He had red hair, an auburn-y, russet-y, Rita Hayworth shade of red that Nina had tried and failed to replicate on her own hair a few months before. To go with the hair he had pale skin liberally dotted with freckles, and green eyes, which admittedly were quite nice, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that he was standing behind her counter.

‘What am I doing?’ Nina asked incredulously. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Observing,’ the man said, glancing over at the small pile of erotic-romance novels that Nina had been looking at (she was pretty sure that at one point she’d said, ‘Oooh! I love a threesome scene’ out loud) and making a note on his iPad. ‘Just pretend that I’m not here. You’ve done a pretty good job of it so far. I’ve been standing here for the last half hour.’

‘You should have said something,’ Nina protested. She felt … violated. She’d been sitting there stuffing her face with muffin, maybe even chewing with her mouth open, slurping her coffee, making lascivious comments about the books, and the whole time this random man had been standing there. ‘Observing what? Observing me? There are laws about this sort of thing.’

‘Actually, this is a public space and …’

Nina couldn’t stand people who began a sentence with ‘Actually …’ when challenged. It meant that their argument was weak and that they were about to drop some more multi-syllable words at her.

‘It’s private property,’ she snapped. ‘You’re here at the owner’s invitation, and talking of which … POSY!’ Bellowing like a Billingsgate fishwife wasn’t enough. Nina was forced to jump down from her stool, always a tricky manoeuvre in a tight pencil skirt, to push open the office door as the flame-haired usurper made another note on his iPad. ‘POSY! Some strange bloke is trespassing.’

The strange bloke muttered something under his breath, the pale skin beneath his freckles pinking up. ‘I have every right to be here,’ he said stiffly, and Nina was sure that he reminded her of someone but she couldn’t think, for the life of her, who. Maybe that ginger bloke from last year’s Great British Bake Off?

‘Yeah, he does,’ said Posy, sticking her head round the office door. ‘This is Noah. Didn’t I introduce you?’

‘No, you didn’t.’ Nina swept another glance over this Noah. He was wearing a suit – a navy-blue suit, a white shirt and a narrow navy-blue tie. Honestly, who wore a suit and tie in this day and age? Apart from Posy’s husband Sebastian, but at least he accessorised his suits with polka-dot handkerchiefs or brightly coloured socks. Not like this guy, who coordinated his suit with his tie. Why would anyone do that?

‘Well, I’m pretty sure I did. I definitely introduced him to Very and it serves you right for being fifteen minutes late,’ Posy said implacably. ‘Noah’s a business analyst. He’s here to analyse the business. We did cover this in the staff meeting yesterday.’

‘That was yesterday. Have you any idea how much vodka I’ve drunk since then? Anyway, you know the business side of the business isn’t any of my business.’

Nina was genetically designed to tune out certain words like ‘business’ and ‘analyst’. And also ‘index-linked pension’, ‘slippers’ and ‘early night’.

‘Nina!’ Posy said with a sigh. ‘You knew we were looking at ways to grow the business. Working smarter. Digital whatnots. All that jazz.’

Noah, the business analyst, that Nina was still pretty sure she hadn’t been told about, had been silent during this exchange, but now he took a step forward.

‘I’m just here to observe your best business practices,’ he said, though Nina wasn’t sure she had any of them. She just turned up, clocked in, sold some books then trooped upstairs to get ready to go out and blow her wages on boys, booze and um, something else beginning with b.

‘It’s very creepy to just stand there and watch someone when they obviously don’t know you’re there,’ Nina persisted.

‘I did say hello, but you were shouting about coffee so perhaps you didn’t hear me,’ Noah said. ‘Anyway, it’s been established that I’m Noah and you’re Nina. Posy filled me in on the rest.’

‘I did,’ Posy said blandly, which could mean anything. It wasn’t as if Nina had led a blameless life. Far from it. ‘Nina, I’ve really got to go to the accountant’s now. He gets very stroppy if I’m even a minute late.’

Nina was feeling very stroppy herself and maybe Noah got the message because when Posy left in a panicked scramble, he decided to relocate to the office. Verity, though quiet herself, was sure to take a very dim view of being quietly observed, but as Nina perched on a stool and waited for the first customer of the day, she could hear unsettling noises from behind her.

Verity was chattering away. Laughing. Once, even snorting with mirth. It was very unlike Verity, who rarely chattered, or laughed, or snorted with mirth in the presence of strangers. ‘Can you believe that we still input stock into a ledger?’ she giggled.

‘You mean you write it down in a book?’ Noah, the so-called business expert, asked incredulously.

‘Yes, and then when we sell a book, we tick it off in the ledger.’

‘I didn’t notice a barcode scanner on the counter and your till … it belongs in a museum, doesn’t it?’

Nina patted the old-fashioned till affectionately. Bertha was at least forty years old and a little temperamental. Her drawer tended to stick but there was a particular spot you had to thump when she did, and then she was right as rain.

‘Lavinia – who owned Bookends, and left the shop to Posy, who turned it into Happy Ever After – was quite set in her ways,’ Verity was explaining earnestly. ‘Especially after her husband Perry died. She didn’t like things that beeped, and I like that the shop is quite quaint and charming but … but …’

‘But what?’ Noah prompted. ‘You can tell me. I’m just an observer. No judgement, no consequences.’

‘Don’t trust him!’ Nina wanted to yell but at that moment the door opened, the bell tinkled and two women came into the shop, so she was forced to stop earwigging and pin a smile on her face. ‘Welcome to Happy Ever After. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you were looking for.’

The women were middle-aged and in sensible shoes, slacks and pac-a-macs, but Nina knew not to try and second guess any customer’s reading preferences from their outward appearance.

‘Vampire erotica?’ One of the women queried, proving Nina’s theory right.

‘Erotica section is the end room on the right. Paranormal erotica on your left as you go in, then the vampire fiction will be on the top two shelves,’ Nina told her. ‘We’ve had a new book in last week by a woman called Julietta Jacobs about a vampire mafia boss. It’s pure filth.’

‘Oooh, sounds just my thing,’ the woman said, and she and her friend went through the arch on the right.

Meanwhile Verity was still happily complaining to Noah about how rubbish the shop was. ‘… it all has to be inputted manually so everything takes three times as long as it should. Stocktaking, inventory, cashing up; it’s a bit of a nightmare really.’

‘Yeah, it doesn’t sound very time-effective,’ Noah said in a sympathetic voice even though he wasn’t meant to be offering opinions.

Already Nina didn’t like him and she had famously low standards when it came to men. Her scowl was interrupted by another customer; Lucy, a pretty woman who worked at the council offices round the corner, came through the door. She read a romance novel a day, three on the weekend. Nina worried that there might come a day when Lucy had read every romance novel ever published.

Not today though. ‘Are those the new releases?’ Lucy asked, her eyes gleaming at the sight of the pile of books on the counter.

‘They are,’ Nina agreed. ‘Have at ’em!’

Verity was giggling again – she hadn’t been right since she fell in love a few months back – and Noah was murmuring again, but the bell was tinkling, more customers piling in, and Nina’s hangover had abated enough that she felt well enough to leave her stool and actually venture onto the shop floor to help them.