Chapter Five
Panting, Petra burst into the shop, closed the door, and then leaned on it, closing her eyes.
“Are you quite well?” came Flo’s voice, laced with concern.
Petra opened her eyes and stared at Flo, unseeing. “I. Have. Just. Met . . .”
“Who?” pressed Flo. “Your maker? The abominable snowman? The Loch Ness Monster?”
“Ha! Scottish, yes! But ‘Rossie’ not ‘Nessie,’” mumbled Petra, staring into space.
The voice—the Scottish accent—had been the same, she was able to appreciate that now.
The physical appearance? Unsettlingly different.
And, of course, she couldn’t possibly have met the “hot Ross” iteration before, but she still struggled to dismiss the déjà vu vibe—that version of his face with the moody lighting that she felt she was dredging up from her memory banks.
It made no sense, though. How would it be possible to meet someone that stunning and not have his image burned onto her eyeballs to the exclusion of everything else from that moment on?
It would have been the most memorable event of her life to date.
No, the unsettling familiarity must have simply been her brain telling her that—despite being almost beyond comprehension—this demigod and the costumed Captain Hook guy she had been so amused by were one and the same.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Flo persisted, her brows knitted, clearly desperate for some better-quality information
from Petra about why she was in such a state.
It was too ridiculous to admit to feelings she barely understood herself, thought Petra. And she hardly knew this woman, who
had probably now decided she was completely unstable.
“So,” Petra clasped her hands in a parody of enthusiasm, “I think I’ve sold a book,” she explained, trying to adopt a businesslike
tone. “That’s all. There’s a man coming in shortly. I just bumped into him. He was looking at a copy of Paradise Lost the other day, and he wants it. Ooh, do the secondhand books have prices on them, by the way?” she added.
“They should have,” said Flo, giving Petra a strange look but then visibly deciding to let it go. “But if there’s no sticker
on the book itself, all the secondhand books should be on the system, and the price will be there as well.”
“I’ll go and see,” said Petra, glad to have something to do. She scampered upstairs to find the book still lying on the table
where they had left it and—yes—as good as Flo’s word, there was a fresh price label on the back. Yikes. Fifty pounds, though . . .
The scruffy version of Ross didn’t look as if he would have been good for fifty pence, let alone fifty pounds. However, handsome
Ross looked as though fifty-pound books were very much part of his world.
“Does that sound about right?” she asked Flo, showing her the label.
“I wouldn’t have a clue,” Flo admitted, “but that’s Charlie’s writing, for sure. Charlie,” she explained, “was our antiquarian book expert. He worked here for a few months last year then he got snapped up by Sotheby’s, so he’s in London now. He knows his stuff.”
“Sure, sure,” said Petra, anxious for Flo not to think she was second-guessing former staff. What did she know about secondhand
books, after all?
“But it’s totally up to you,” Flo reassured her. “A sale’s a sale. If you want to offer a discount.”
Could she? Should she? Was it really her place to be giving away stock at rock-bottom prices? Surely there were so many other ways she would damage poor Jules and Roman’s business. Doubtless she would soon find out what they all were.
The shop doorbell clanged, and the doorway darkened. The silhouette was unmistakable, those broad shoulders and long legs . . .
If she hadn’t appreciated the sheer physical perfection of the man on first meeting him, it would have been that the enveloping
great coat had been relinquished in the spring sunshine for this khaki jacket. And it suited him. Very, very much.
Petra drew in a shuddering breath. “Fifty!” she blurted, holding the book out toward him. “But,” she added on reflection,
“to you—um—forty-nine pounds . . . and—er—ninety-nine pence,” she went on, lamely, losing her nerve.
Ross chuckled, taking it from her, their fingers touching briefly.
He seemed not to notice how Petra froze and then snatched back her hand as if it had been burned by the contact.
“A penny off?” he said, examining it critically.
“What a tempting offer. I’m going to have to grab it before you change your mind,” he said, grinning at her, apparently relaxed, although he broke their gaze after just a moment.
How could he behave so normally? she thought, resisting the temptation to place a steadying hand over her racing heart. But
then, this was her gazing at his beauty; he was hardly going to be having a similar reaction to the sight of her. She, with her London-in-winter pallor and
total absence of makeup. Today, having brought few clothes with her, she was in the saggy brown sweater she had been wearing
the morning of the unspeakable social media gaffe.
Ross’s newly revealed beauty almost made her want to raise her game.
But the raw material—pale skin, poker-straight black hair in a nondescript bob, and an okay figure, not best served by her
normal uniform of jeans and sweater—was never going to elevate her to his levels of personal attractiveness . . . She could
maybe iron a shirt or slap on some mascara occasionally, though.
She had her pride.
While Petra was taking the opportunity to examine Ross unobserved, he was engaged in further examining the book, turning it
this way and that. “Worth every penny of forty-nine pounds and ninety-nine pence,” he declared. “And I need to build up my
collection,” he added. “I’ve probably only got about four copies already. Not this edition though.”
“I’m like that with Jane Eyre,” Petra admitted, as he reached for his wallet, peeling off tens from what looked like a decent roll of cash.
“Please come again,” she said, as she handed him the penny change, grateful that there was no inadvertent touching this time.
In fact, he took it with comic precision between finger and thumb, squinted at it, as if to check that it wasn’t counterfeit, then dropped it into the charity collection pot on the counter.
“Maybe I will,” he said, waving his new book in salute as he left. “And by the way,” he added, over his shoulder. “That joke?
It was pretty funny.”
“Well!” declared Flo, after a pause. “He was handsome.”
“He was all right, I suppose,” said Petra, hearing all too clearly how unconvincing she sounded.
“We had better keep Diana away from him. She’d have him for breakfast,” Flo went on, examining Petra’s demeanor shrewdly and
looking as if she would like to say a lot more on the matter.
Thankfully for Petra, the two women were kept busy by a steady stream of customers after that, although Flo kindly stayed,
once the shop went quiet in the afternoon, to answer all the questions on Petra’s list. Even the silly ones.
The more Ross thought about his interactions with Petra that morning in comparison with the two prior meetings, the more depressed
he became.
And when he was depressed, he walked.
The rented cottage was damp and poky, for all its thick-walled, oak-beamed charm, but the aspect that had really attracted him to the little house was through the gate at the end of the garden.
The gate opened onto a narrow muddy path that led directly to the summit of the nearest hill.
It was steep and rocky, but this walk had become his escape.
His daily meditation. It was his opportunity to think and his opportunity to stop thinking.
On this particular afternoon, it also led to needle-sharp rain, low clouds, and finger-nipping cold.
But Ross didn’t mind. He barely noticed.
He strode quickly, splashing through the puddles, the fragile, striated ice layer shattering under his boots.
The icy water seeped inside, through the lace holes, but he welcomed the distraction of rapidly numbing feet.
His face quickly felt numb too, with no beard to lend its warmth; the newly exposed skin felt raw, and then it felt like nothing at all.
Ross welcomed numb. Numb was good. Eventually numb turned to pain.
But pain was good too. It was all a distraction from the complicated, swirling feelings that had started racing through his brain again, scattering his thoughts and settling, as always, into a thick, blanketing fug of self-loathing.
And shame.
His mates had laughed, of course. Back in the time when he actually had mates, this was. Before he had kept saying no to those nights out. Before they got tired of asking him and drifted away.
Before then, they had torn out the newspaper articles and brought them along to their pub meet-ups, those hateful, artsy,
black-and-white photos of him that the literature review picture desks loved to use. His friends would deface them with speccy
glasses, zits, and comical mustaches. “Not just a pretty face,” one article headlined. “Not even a pretty face,” they had bantered, joshing, punching him on the shoulder.
“Nice problem to have, buddy,” seemed to be the general consensus when he demurred at how the arts correspondents had gazed in wonder at his beauty and talent, gushing about his setting the scene for a new wave of talented young writers.
To a man and a woman, they were rapt, not only burdening him with the weight of his own work but also casually loading onto his shoulders the dreams and aspirations of the entire literary world.
He was, they informed him, the lodestone of an entire generation of young British writers.
So, no pressure.
And then, of course, there was the casual objectification: the deliberate placing of a heavily ringed hand on his knee by
the mascaraed, leopard-printed literary page editor who invited him to have dinner one day soon, fluttering her lashes suggestively.
Then, there was the esteemed arts critic of a national Sunday broadsheet who proposed Ross should come to his home because
he, Ross, and his husband would “get on well” together. As a threesome.
Some of these people had clearly not even read his book. And that hurt, because he had been proud of his debut: a slim, dense,
literary novel, crafted over the course of several years and a creative writing MA. The book had been endlessly described
as a bold, brave concept, “a story of our time, told with precocity and exquisitely poetic wisdom,” as one reviewer had put it. He had poured out his heart to the world. And it had listened. And then . . . when the clamor
and the flattery and the acclaim of his first novel had fallen silent?
Nothing.
He had—he discovered to his horror and bemusement—nothing further to say.
He had tried, of course. At first, flexing his writing muscles, allowing himself space and solitude, had been a relief after more human contact and fuss than had ever felt comfortable.
Patiently—at first—he had waited for fresh writing ideas to take root.
But they did not. And then being alone had gradually become painful, even more enervating than all those interminable discussion panels, readings, and interviews had been.
Once the darling of the literary world, he found the commentators and the influencers had quickly moved on.
Within its diurnal round, the publishing world had inevitably discovered newer award-winners, even younger geniuses, fresher and shinier ideas.
His agent had been supportive—he couldn’t fault her. His editor was less so. She, in the warm spotlight of success, quickly
moved publishers for an even more elevated job title, and had leveraged her connection with him to suggest his second novel
would come with her. But then their bond had soured in a blizzard of unprofessional bitterness and spiteful recriminations.
It had hardly even mattered in the end that he had been silly enough to mix business with pleasure. Because there had simply
been no second novel.
For a year, two years, three years, the “just checking in” phone calls and emails from his highly regarded agent had become
less and less frequent. The agent’s pep talks had morphed from euphoric anticipation to gentle enquiry, through bracing statements
of expectations and then—finally—to imploring. It was Ross who had ended it formally. What use was an author to a literary
agent when he was producing nothing they could sell? He wasn’t even producing something they could help to develop, to edit,
to brainstorm . . . There had been nothing. Well, not totally nothing, but nothing the agent could go out on submission with. At one point, Ross had tentatively shared a couple of half-formed
ideas with her, a panacea he had hoped would buy him some peace for a while. But—gently—the agent had declined to endorse
these fragments with any confidence. “Not high concept enough,” she said. “Too quiet,” “Too derivative,” “It’s a brutal market.”
And Ross had agreed with her, he reminded himself, running his frozen hands through his soaked hair, tipping his head back
to the lowering gray sky that nearly touched the summit of the little hill as he reached it, welcoming the needle-sharp rain
on his face. Now very decidedly into his mid-thirties, he was no longer even the young, fresh-faced emperor of the literary
world—he had nothing to say. Nada.
And what was the use of a washed-up writer to anyone?
Even if he did still have the looks.