Chapter 4
4
A room without books is like
a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
“ H ere,” Baylin said, handing Teddy a sticky note.
He read the name and number she’d written on it.
“What’s this?”
“A talented mechanic.”
His stomach soured.
“I don’t know,” he said, his words laden with apprehension.
“He’s a wizard with engines.”
Teddy hesitated, looking wearily at the slip of paper in his hand.
“I still don’t know,” he hedged. “Boxy isn’t any ol’ car.”
“Jax isn’t any ol’ mechanic,” she countered. “And you named your car?” The grimace on her face spoke volumes.
“Uh, yeah!” Didn’t everyone?
“Boxy? Is that a play on Foxy? Or Roxy?”
Teddy wanted to kiss that scrunched up snooty expression right off her beautiful face. Wait— Wipe that look away, not kiss. What was he thinking?
“Nooo,” Teddy replied, shaking off the strange and displaced urge. “She’s a?—”
“ She? ”
“Of course.”
“Wow,” she stated. Her eyes brightened, and Teddy would have sworn she fought back a giggle.
“Please, do continue with this riveting tale,” she said, bowing forward as if extending an invitation.
“ She, ” Teddy emphasized, “is a vintage racing car. In racing, when cars go back to their garage —their home, so to speak, for the event — they’re told to box . And, as a kid playing baseball, I always felt at home in the batter’s box. So, I named her Boxy.”
A speechless Baylin meant she was dumbfounded by his idiocy or impressed by his cleverness. Teddy feared knowing which one she felt at that moment.
“Well, call Jax. That’s his cell; he’ll answer, even on a Sunday night. Boxy will be safe in his hands. I promise,” she tacked on with a saucy head shake.
When Baylin left the kitchen, Teddy pulled out a chair and sat down to make the dreaded call.
Not thirty seconds later, she returned with a laptop computer.
She set it in front of him and pointed to the screen.
“These are your lodging options. Start calling them after you talk to Jax,” she ordered. Then she walked to the back door, slid on a highlighter orange beanie, and put on a heavy plaid flannel jacket.
“Where are you going?” he called just as she closed the door on her way out.
She ignored him.
Teddy was on the phone when she walked back through the kitchen thirty minutes later, replaced her winter gear, and disappeared down the hallway without a second glance in his direction.
A nother twenty-five minutes later, feeling much worse about his hotel options but much better about his car, Teddy slid his chair back under the table, switched off the kitchen lights, and wandered down the hall in search of Baylin.
Before he found her, Teddy discovered an old-fashioned parlor that encompassed the double-door entryway and stretched the width of the house, which he guessed was built in in the very early 1900s. His slight obsession with historical architecture and house design forced his feet into the room.
He envisioned the space as it likely had been a century before: an elegant center of the home, perfect for entertaining, with formal furniture, grand artwork and sculptures, patterned wallpaper, and tons of natural light streaming through the oversized picture windows. Teddy imagined men sitting in tall-backed chairs while smoking and discussing business…solving the problems of the world. He pictured women in full skirts and upswept hair, chatting about families in their community and actually solving the problems of their world. The room carried an air of timeless stability.
He brushed off the creative history he’d conjured and studied the room for real.
Over the years, updates had transformed the parlor into a less formal room, one spacious enough to serve multiple purposes. Half the space felt solid and masculine, stately but not stuffy. Ornate carvings decorated rich wooden end tables and matched a heavy coffee table. Upholstered wingback chairs, a leather sofa, and an antique upright piano added layers of colors and textures. The layout resembled a private library.
Indeed, it was a private library. Floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves dominated the entire side wall on that end of the room. Handsome, four-sided bookcases dotted the open space. Books, artwork, knick-knacks, and portraits in all ages and fashions of frames filled every shelf to the gills.
Outside of school and city libraries, Teddy had never seen such a wonderful collection of books. Some spines appeared older than dirt, but much richer with metallic lettering and embossed designs on the weathered leather covers. Others looked to be straight out of the late 1900s with glossy dust jackets printed in bold, vivid colors to show off bubbly, artistic fonts and dramatic scenes hinting at the stories tucked inside.
One large section of shelving contained a collection of books in individual cardboard slipcases. Their pristine condition belied their obvious age. Teddy picked up an edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of his all-time favorites, and eased the book from its case. With gentle caution, he opened the cover, but just a little so as not to pull on the spine. Inside lay a brochure, a single page folded in half to create four pages of detailed information. He read the contents cover to cover, learning about the typesetting and illustrator and binding used for that edition.
Teddy replaced the Mark Twain novel to explore Candide by Voltaire. The same type of brochure, with the title Sandglass under the words The Heritage Club, rested inside the cover again. He found one in every book he glanced in. He admired a beautiful copy of Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland. A lovely bouquet, stamped in white foil, filled the cornflower blue cover, equally simple and elegant. Then Teddy stumbled upon an exquisite copy of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. A rope pattern framed the letters CD, all of which were embossed with deep red ink that matched the slipcase. A shiny gold foil circle displayed the title on the binding. Hands down, it was the most fabulous book Teddy had ever seen.
He held a strong affinity for Dickens; he related to Dickensian characters deep in his soul.
Without conscious thought, Teddy settled into an overstuffed reading chair positioned close to the bookshelves. He pulled the chain on a floor lamp over his left shoulder. As though he’d received a delicate treasure, Teddy studied the title page, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club . A wonderful drawing with the caption, Mr. Snodgrass The Poet, faced the title page. The vivid colors brought the character, in all his conflicted romantic melancholy, to life. The man’s personality oozed from the artwork.
Teddy turned the page to find the copyright information: a first edition printed in 1938, by The Heritage Press, Inc., illustrated by Gordon Ross. Magnificent .
With the greatest of care, Teddy laid open the Sandglass — Number XII: 26 — and began reading about the birth of Samuel Pickwick. Fascinating .
“They won’t break,” Baylin announced from the doorframe, where she leaned against one shoulder, indicating she’d been there a minute.
Busted.
“They might,” Teddy argued. “They’re extraordinary.”
“That they are,” she agreed. She agreed …with something Teddy said. Miracles never cease .
“And my family has a fantastic collection of them,” Baylin explained.
“How many are there?”
“A man named George Macy published them as a monthly book club from 1935 to 1982, with a few bonus releases from time to time; they only ran about fifteen thousand copies per printing, just enough for their subscribers. So, roughly fifty years…that’s about six hundred titles…times fifteen thousand copies?—”
“Nine million books,” Teddy finished for her. “In the publishing world, that’s not many.”
“Unless you’re an author trying to sell them, in which case nine million books is a decent number,” Baylin contested.
“ Touché, ” he allowed, enjoying their back-and-forth banter. She wanted to stay aloof, to shut him out. But, she wasn’t fooling Teddy. She liked him, at least a little.
“Why do you smile so much? Or grin? Or just…be happy?”
“Would you prefer I be grumpy and cross?”
“Maybe,” she said, crossing to the bookcase to pick up two Heritage Press Club books, both matching with emerald green binding and canary yellow slipcases. Teddy couldn’t read the gold foil imprinted titles from across the room.
Baylin perched on a second reading chair close to where Teddy sat, handing the top book to him before sliding the book in her lap from its case.
“ Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, Number 1,” he read aloud.
“Hmm,” she hummed. “These are my favorite in the collection.” Teddy followed her lead as he’d done in the garden, opening the volume and flipping until he came to an elaborate double-page illustration, a sketched and colored scene straight from the height of antebellum finery. He glanced to see Baylin’s illustration depicted a post-battle scene of the Civil War. Where the artwork in his volume promised youth and hope and possibility, the artwork in her volume portrayed bleakness, pain, and death.
Teddy watched Baylin run her fingers over the pages. Then she exhaled, as though shaking off sadness. She closed the book and went to replace it. Teddy did the same. He stopped to stand just behind her shoulder, reaching over and around to return his volume.
Was it rude to invade her space? Nah, he just wanted to see how she’d respond.
Too bad that yet again, he didn’t know if her reaction was a positive or a negative, if the way she stood her ground meant she didn’t feel the air sizzling between them, or if she felt it but had the strength to hide it.
If so, she was stronger than Teddy.
His fingers itched to touch her hair, to move it aside and trace her jawline. Oh, to place his lips on the soft skin at the curve of her neck.
Man, had Cupid’s arrow hit its mark, right dead center in the middle of Teddy’s chest.
Reining in his wayward thoughts and even more outrageous desires for a woman he’d known less than twelve hours, one who didn’t seem to feel the same… yet, Teddy stepped past Baylin to return the Dickens book to its empty slot on the shelf. He might’ve let his body brush hers as he went by. Just a hint of touch.
He wasn’t a saint, after all.