Four Brothers and a Bride novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Quiet One

Rosalind tells Whit she's Mrs. Wyatt Chisholm, and Fenn returns her grandmother's book with news that someone erased the roof camera from the hour she married.

I made my two o'clock shift at the bookstore with ten minutes to spare and the signet ring still on my thumb.

The owner was asleep in the armchair by the poetry shelf, the way she was most afternoons.

I put the kettle on in the back and started shelving the boxes from an estate sale, because my hands needed something to do.

Paperback mysteries. A water-stained atlas. Somebody's whole life in cardboard.

The bell over the door rang at 2:30.

Whit came in.

He'd changed into his weekend clothes, a quarter-zip and loafers with no socks, and he didn't look at a single book.

"We need to talk," he said.

"We did. Friday. You did most of it."

"Don't be cute."

He came around the end of the counter, into the narrow aisle where I was standing.

"My fiancee hasn't stopped asking about you since this morning."

"She seemed nice."

"She asked me if you were stalking me."

"I'm shelving Agatha Christie, Whit."

He leaned in and dropped his voice to the one he used when I'd embarrassed him at his work dinners.

"I don't know who you slept with up there to get past security. But that is my career. That floor is my future."

"If you pull something like this again, I'll tell everyone you're unstable."

He'd said it before.

Not in those words, but in a hundred smaller ones.

You're being dramatic. You're tired. You're not thinking clearly, Roz.

I put the last Christie on the shelf and turned to face him.

"I didn't sleep with anybody," I said. "I married Wyatt Chisholm."

He stared at me.

Then he laughed, a real one this time, loud enough that the owner stirred in her chair.

"Wyatt Chisholm doesn't know your name."

"He knows it pretty well. He signed it next to his."

"Oh my God." He shook his head, almost fond. "This is sad. This is actually sad."

"You know he's my boss's boss, right? You know I've been in a room with him?"

"Then you'll recognize him Saturday."

That stopped the laugh.

"I'll be at your party," I said. "On his arm."

Something moved behind his eyes, a quick calculation.

"If you show up at my engagement party," he said, "I'll have you thrown out."

"By the same security guys who should have thrown you out this morning."

He walked out without buying anything, which was the only thing he'd ever had in common with the owner's cat.

I stood in the aisle and shook for a full minute.

Then the bell rang again.

The man in the doorway was tall and black-haired and gray-eyed.

He wore wire glasses and the soft blue sweater from the boardroom.

He had a book under his arm.

Red cloth, a coffee ring on the back board.

My grandmother's Rebecca.

I'd left it in the hotel's little library lounge on Friday night.

"You forgot this," Fenn said.

He held it out across the counter.

I opened the front cover, and her name was there in her careful pencil.

I had to put it down for a second.

"Thank you," I said.

"It's a 1938 first," he said. "You told me. You told me she read it to you in the bathtub when you had chicken pox."

"That's an extremely embarrassing thing to have told a stranger."

"You told me a lot of things." He pushed his glasses up. "I wasn't a stranger by eleven-thirty."

"You were a stranger with three spares."

His mouth twitched.

It was the same mouth as the other three, and it did something none of theirs had done all morning.

"I had eleven to midnight," he said. "Just so you know which part was mine."

"The books."

"The books."

He looked around the shop, at the leaning stacks, the cracked front window, the cat asleep in the travel section.

"This is a good store."

"I'm supposed to buy half of it."

"Supposed to?"

"My ex has the money. He just walked out."

Fenn turned and looked through the window, at the back of a quarter-zip disappearing down Sixth Street.

"Whit Stokes," he said.

"You know him?"

"He's our marketing director." He said it mildly, the way you'd mention a pothole.

"He did a presentation for us in June. Cian was Wyatt that day."

"Cian said he'd never met a man who said 'synergy' with his whole chest."

I laughed before I could stop it.

Fenn looked pleased with himself, and then embarrassed to be pleased.

"Did you marry me?" I asked.

The pleased look went away.

"No," he said. "I lost you at midnight. That was Bram's hour."

"And after Bram?"

"That's what I came to tell you."

He put both hands flat on the counter, careful.

"Bram pulled the roof camera footage this morning, after you left."

"And?"

"Somebody erased it." He met my eyes. "From ten past one until two."

"Bram's the only one of us with the code, and he swears to God it wasn't him."

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