Finding Love at the Magical Curiosity Shop (The Ever After Street #5)

Chapter 1

There are two types of people in the world – people who appreciate the value of stuff , and minimalists. I’m the former. An unfortunate number of my customers are the latter.

‘Oh my God, this place is ah-maze-zing!’

I hadn’t heard a customer come in, and I shriek in surprise at the unexpected voice behind me. I was on my hands and knees, trying to grapple a butterfly-shaped side table into a space in the window display after a customer had ransacked it, and I push myself onto my feet and pop out from behind a canvas painting of a fox dressed up like a Tudor king. My movement dislodges a bucket containing stems of dried flowers, and they go crashing down. The giant sunflower hits the floor with such force that the flowerhead explodes, sending seeds skittering noisily across the shop.

The customer is a young girl, probably teenage-ish, and her hands are clasped over her mouth to cover a gasp as she spins on the spot, looking around in awe as her eyes flit from the rainbow mosaic horse’s head on the wall, to the drapes of vintage fabrics hanging from the ceiling, to the vast array of unusual ornaments and oddities that cover every available surface.

Now that is the reaction I want my customers to have. Maybe business would be better if more of them did.

The girl’s eyes flick from me to the scattered sunflower seeds still pinging across the floor. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump.’

‘It’s okay, I should know my way around without bumping into things by now.’ I wave towards the rest of the shop, slightly perturbed by a young girl coming in alone. Most of my customers are antique collectors and curiosity hunters, and the only youngsters I usually see are bored ones, being dragged along by parents and complaining all the way. ‘Feel free to look around while I clear this up.’

She glances at the door behind her, almost like she’s waiting for someone to come after her.

I grab the dustpan and brush from behind the counter and start sweeping, trying to keep a furtive eye on my visitor because there’s something off about this, I’m sure of it.

‘I’ll help.’ She crouches down and starts gathering the dried sunflower seeds with her hands, and I can’t help noticing that she’s sort of backing behind a display table, and she keeps glancing at the window, almost like she’s trying to hide.

‘Are you waiting for someone?’

‘No.’ She says it quickly and when I continue looking at her expectantly, she huffs with a typical teenage eye roll. ‘Just my dad. He’s sooo boring, he’d hate a place like this. He said I could come in on my own. He doesn’t mind.’

There’s something in her tone that makes me wonder if that’s the whole truth, but before I can work out what to do about it, the door suddenly flies open with such force that it nearly tears off its hinges and a man rushes in. ‘Have you seen a— ow !’

He’s in such a flap that he doesn’t see my hanging birdcage candle holders and crashes smack-bang into one, and I cringe as the sound of metal connecting with his very handsome face reverberates through the shop.

He lets out a yelp and a hand flies up to his forehead at the point of impact. His eyes scan the shop and fall on my young visitor. ‘Ava! Thank God! Don’t you ever do that again! You can’t just disappear like that! I didn’t know where you were.’

I knew she wasn’t telling the whole truth there, and underneath the hand he’s still holding to his injured forehead, her dad looks so flustered and panicked that he must have been racing around Ever After Street, frantically searching for her.

‘We were watching the carousel and I turned around and you were gone!’

‘I didn’t want to go on the carousel! It’s for babies!’

‘You can’t sneak off like that! I thought something had happened to you! And you !’ He turns to me. ‘Why are you harbouring a young girl on her own? You must’ve known she’d run off!’

‘Me? How would I know something like that?’ I feel myself bristling instantly. ‘She told me you’d said she could come in by herself.’

‘Oh, she did, did she?’ He goes to raise an eyebrow and then winces when it obviously hurts the head injury.

‘I don’t want to hang out with you!’ Ava gets to her feet and folds her arms. ‘You’re boring! And this place is sooo cool!’

‘This place is a hellhole! Who leaves hanging things right in the doorway?’

‘Oi! That’s my shop you’re talking about! And it’s not in the doorway, it’s to the side of the doorway – you weren’t looking where you were going.’

‘I panicked, okay?’ He twists around to glance back at the doorway and the birdcage candle holders beside it. ‘I thought my daughter had been kidnapped! I didn’t know if I was ever going to find her again! Anything could’ve happened!’

He puts a hand on his chest, forcing himself to take deep, calming breaths as he looks around. ‘And now I see she’s been swallowed up by the local junk shop, so I was right to be concerned.’

‘It’s a curiosity shop. It’s not junk, they’re curiosities, see?’ I resist the urge to poke my tongue out at him. He’s not the first customer who doesn’t understand the concept of a curiosity shop, he undoubtedly won’t be the last.

‘Dad, shut up! It’s a Treasure Trove!’

‘The clue is in the name. Treasure wouldn’t be treasure if you didn’t have to hunt for it.’ I point to the sign behind the counter where, admittedly a little bit obscured by all the other things hanging on the wall, The Mermaid’s Treasure Trove shop sign is displayed, and I trill a line I’ve said to many customers who complain about the… well, they call it clutter, I call it beloved items just waiting for their new owner to find them and give them the home they deserve.

‘Just ignore him, he was raised by wolves,’ Ava says to me and then shoots an angry glance at her father. ‘Unpolite ones!’

‘It’s im polite,’ he corrects her, still grimacing underneath the hand held across his forehead.

‘Wolves that are sticklers for grammar, apparently.’ I try to ease the tension I can sense between them. I should probably keep my mouth shut, but anyone who calls my shop a hellhole deserves everything he gets. ‘And actually, both are correct. The word started off as “unpolite” but that spelling has become obsolete over time and “impolite” has become the more accepted usage, but that doesn’t make it wrong.’

She gives me a look that suggests she’s about to burst with joy, and he gives me a look that suggests he’d quite like to roast me into a pile of ashes on the spot with his strikingly blue eyes.

‘You are the coolest person ever! And this is the coolest shop ever! And look at your hair! I love your hair!’ She comes over and picks up a lock of my long red hair. ‘Oh my God, Dad, look at this. Someone put colour in their hair and no one died!’ She tucks the lock back into place and turns back to me. ‘No one died, right? When you went to the salon and had colour put in your hair? Nothing bad happened?’

Right now, my cheeks are arguably redder than my Ariel-red hair. I’ve never been considered cool before and I’m really not used to strangers touching my hair without permission. ‘I, er, don’t go to a salon, I do it at home over my bathtub.’

‘And nothing catastrophic happens afterwards? No natural disasters? The world doesn’t end? No police? No serial killers?’

‘Er, no.’ I feel awkward because I’ve clearly got myself into the middle of an ongoing father-daughter argument.

‘Well, this random stranger is in her forties. When you’re?—’

‘I’m thirty-eight!’ I snap indignantly.

The man sighs before reluctantly correcting himself. ‘Well, this random stranger is in her late thirties. When you are thirty-eight, Ava, you can do what you want with your hair. Until then, nope .’

She rolls her eyes and huffs. ‘At least not everyone’s got a stick up their bum like you, Dad!’

‘You’re way too young to be talking like that!’ He shakes his head in despair. ‘Where do you even learn these things?’

I stifle a giggle as she stomps off into the other half of the shop without answering. It used to be a storage room, but when my father ran the place, he got the doorway widened so we could expand the shop space, and the staff area upstairs became a storage area instead. Back then, it was just me and him, and the house is within walking distance, we didn’t need a staff area, and now it’s just me, I’d rather use the space we do have for my beloved objects.

‘Sorry about that. And the age thing. I didn’t mean to insult you.’ The father’s eyes flick in the direction his daughter went. ‘Blame my tired eyes rather than your wrinkles. Not that you have wrinkles. Or not that I’ve noticed if you do.’ He makes a noise of frustration and scrubs a hand over his face, pulling my eyes to the way his fingers catch on the dark stubble covering his jaw. ‘I’m going to stop talking now. Sorry.’

When he takes his hand away from his forehead, I grimace at the sight of a bleeding cut and what will be an angry bruise tomorrow. ‘Stay there, I’ll get you something to clean that up.’

I race up the stairs, grab a cloth from the kitchen and soak it under the hot tap, and then run back down to find him hovering in the same place near the door. He takes the cloth from me and holds it to his head.

‘Is it bad?’ I step away to give him some space and accidentally back into a life-size resin model of a flamingo and steady it as it wobbles precariously.

‘What, the gaping cut or the thumping headache?’ He takes the cloth away and checks it for blood. ‘I’ll live, probably. Today has been stressful enough without the added head injury though, so thanks for that.’

It’s totally sarcastic, and after how insulting he’s been so far, no one would blame me for ignoring his earlier apology, but I’m intrigued by how utterly weary he sounds, and he’s still got a slightly panicked look about him, like he hasn’t quite recovered from Ava’s disappearance yet. He keeps looking in the direction she went, like he’s worried there might be a back entrance she can sneak out of and vanish again. ‘Long day?’

He looks at his watch. ‘Well, we left the house three hours ago, and I feel like this afternoon has lasted for three months. I thought this would be the perfect father-daughter outing to kick off the summer holidays but, apparently…’ He raises his voice to ensure his daughter overhears. ‘…Ever After Street is for babies and is seriously uncool !’ His voice lowers again as he looks at me. ‘So I’ve been told 24,601 times so far today, anyway. This is the first shop she hasn’t wanted to leave immediately in case she gets spotted by someone she knows and is sooo embarrassed to be seen dead in somewhere so babyish . Maybe I’ll get something right one day, but I won’t hold my breath.’

‘Teenager?’ I ask.

‘Thirteen. What gave it away? The sulking, the insults, or the tantrums in a public place?’

‘I heard that!’ Ava calls from the other side of the shop.

I often worry about the lack of customers, but with these two in here, it’s probably a good thing there isn’t anyone else to get in the middle of the tension between them.

‘And you weren’t interested in hearing that . My apologies, again.’

He’s got the whole Prince Eric look going on – bright blue eyes and the darkest black hair, a straight nose with a wide tip, not unlike one of Flynn Rider’s wanted posters. He’s the kind of gorgeous that makes your mouth go dry, and makes you stand up straighter, self-consciously smooth your hair down, and suck your stomach in without even knowing why. He’s highly unlikely to be single, and even if he was, I have no intention of trying to seduce him. My last relationship ensured I’d never be tempted to try to seduce anyone ever again, or let myself be seduced, in the unlikely event of anyone trying.

Even so, I can’t help myself sneaking a quick peek at his ring finger. No wedding ring. Promising?

No, not promising. Mickey! What are you thinking? He’s obviously struggling with summer holiday parenting and schools only broke up on Friday. Men with issues are even more off-limits than men without issues, and all men are no-goes for me for the rest of forever.

I watch him as his eyes wander around the shop, his lips pressed into a thin line that’s becoming thinner with every object he takes in, like he’s trying to figure out what to criticise first. Eventually he goes back to the hanging birdcage that nearly took him out just now. ‘Why do you have a birdcage with no birds?’

‘It’s decorative. You can put candles in them. And a curiosity shop is hardly the place to keep birds in captivity, is it? They’re Victorian, from the times when families used to capture wild songbirds and keep them in the house to sing to them.’

‘Victorian birdcages would have been made of brass or wood. This is aluminium if I’m not mistaken. Cheap aluminium that will bend if you press it too hard.’ He reaches up and does exactly that. ‘Aluminium was discovered in 1825 and the difficulty in obtaining it made it rarer than gold in Victorian times. Believe me, they weren’t building birdcages out of it. They’re not Victorian, they’re cut-price tat, most probably made in China.’

‘They’re a throwback to Victorian décor. I didn’t mean they were actually Victorian. This is not an antiques shop. There’s a curious mix of everything in here.’

‘From the looks of it, there’s not a mix of everything, there’s simply every single thing that anyone’s ever thrown out.’ His hand shoots out and he rummages in a basket and pulls out a scrap of fabric and holds it up. ‘Why do you have a basket of fabric pieces?’

‘They’re old fabric pieces. Scraps of fabric can be important to crafters or vintage collectors or people who remember things like curtains or bedding from their childhood and want to reminisce.’ Even as I say it, I wonder why I’m defending myself. What I stock in my shop has nothing to do with this judgemental stranger and I don’t have to justify it to him or anyone else, despite how guilty I feel about the bloodied red mark blooming on his forehead.

He grunts and puts it down again. One hand is still dabbing at his forehead with the damp cloth, and he shoves the other one into a pocket of his smart trousers with a pin-sharp centre crease. Hopefully the spiky tone in my voice was enough to tip him off that his opinions are unwanted here.

A few minutes pass in awkward silence, interspersed only by gasps of joy and various iterations of ‘ohmigod, I love it’ and ‘coolest thing ever ’, and I keep expecting him to follow his daughter through and have a look around, but he seems glued to the spot right inside the entrance. ‘You can come in, you know. You don’t have to loiter in the doorway.’

‘I have a great fear of what else might fall on top of me. I’ve found a safe spot here, I’ll stick to it, thanks.’

‘You’re blocking the door for other customers.’

He glances at the door behind him with a look that suggests other customers are about as likely as seeing Bigfoot toddle up the road carrying a handbag and twirling an umbrella. ‘Well, if you’re suddenly overwhelmed with a rush, I’ll get out of the way. Or provide Search and Rescue support when they get lost inside, or first aid when something leaps forth and attacks them. You can barely move in here!’

‘That’s not true! You can move.’ You can’t move much , mind, but I’m not giving him the satisfaction of admitting that. All right, it’s a tad overcrowded, but it’s a charming hotch-potch of treasures. It’s not supposed to be organised with military precision. It’s intended to be a jumble where customers can unearth objects they’ll love and cherish for the rest of their lives, but his words make me squirm uncomfortably. I worry my shop has reached the stage where it’s too crowded, and hearing it said so blatantly does nothing but confirm my fears.

‘You can’t honestly believe all this has value. Given the quite odd disembodied half-mermaid statue outside, I thought it was going to be mermaid themed but there’s no theme at all. It’s like you opened the shop door and let every forgotten storage unit in Britain throw up in it.’

I want to laugh at his turn of phrase, but I stifle a snort behind my angry look. Who does he think he is? I want to tell him that this is a perfectly successful little business, full of treasures that I rescue from where they’re unwanted, and I keep them safe until a new owner can find them and give them love again, but given the lack of customers lately, ‘perfectly successful’ might be pushing it a bit. Besides, I don’t have to justify that to anyone, let alone some random man who thinks he knows best. ‘Does it ever cross your mind that not everybody wants your opinion? I’ve been running this business for the past couple of years, and for decades before that with my father. What gives you the right to come in here and be so judgemental and derogatory?’

He goes to answer but ends up mouthing at the air when no sound comes out. He blinks at me, open-mouthed for a minute, and then goes to push a hand through his hair and accidentally clonks the hanging birdcage again, sending a metal clang ringing through the shop, and shakes his head, and I get the impression that it’s more at himself than at me.

‘You’re right,’ he says quietly. ‘It’s been a rough day and I’m taking my frustration out on you and lashing out at your shop. I’m sorry.’

‘At least your daughter has better taste than you, and better manners when it comes to giving strangers their unfavourable opinions,’ I mutter, secretly quite glad to see the look of shame that accompanies his apology.

He’s an odd one. Opinionated but also, quite apologetic? That’s not the first time he’s said sorry in the past few minutes, and his face has reddened at being called out on his rudeness. He’s the kind of man I should dislike, but he’s also quick to apologise and there’s something about him, a sadness or tiredness that makes it seem like there’s no heat behind his words, plus it’s really hard to dislike someone who looks like the real-life version of my first ever childhood crush, Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid .

‘And it’s not a weird disembodied half-mermaid statue. It was a full mermaid once – my dad bought it for me when I was a little girl. It’s stood outside for decades, but it was looking a bit sorry for itself after years of wear and tear, so my dad cut it off at the waist, repainted it, and turned the tail upside down, so it looks like the mermaid is diving into the street.’ I struggle to keep the emotion out of my voice because it was one of the last things he did before he died. He wanted to give my beloved statue a new lease of life when he knew that he wouldn’t be around for much longer. ‘No one insults my mermaid’s tail.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t know it was so important.’

I’ve obviously failed at hiding the emotion it brings up, because he looks genuinely guilty, and I wish I hadn’t bothered trying to explain. Why does it matter to me if he likes my shop or not?