Page 20 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“What’s wrong?” he shouted, his lips all but brushing her ear.
Snapping out of her near swoon, for a nanosecond Jules debated telling him to naff off, but she couldn’t let her friend down just to score a dubious point against her enemy. “It’s Freya,” she yelled.
Roman understood instantly. He pointed to the ladies’ loo with eyebrows raised, and she nodded. The next second, he was in there, scattering discombobulated women like squawking chickens—a fox in a henhouse. Jules followed right behind. For a long moment, he looked down at Freya, slumped against the wall and still sleeping peacefully. Then he crouched and gathered her up, lifting her in his arms with apparent ease. Next thing Jules knew, she was following him up the stairs and out into the street, as he cradled Freya, her head snuggled comfortably against his shoulder.
Left to trot fussily behind him, with Freya’s bag and coat over her arm, Jules felt like a spare part as he strode—seemingly barely noticing the weight of Freya’s body—through the darkened streets.
There was a sharp wind assailing them from the sea, and Jules shivered, longing for sleep. She was thankful Freya and Finn’s flat above the deli was just yards from Capelthorne’s and her own bed.
Roman didn’t say a word as they walked and just stood aside when they reached the door to the deli, so she could reach aroundand ring the bell for the flat, which she did, being ultra-careful not to brush against him. His face was neutral and closed, all his former amused charm dispersed, although his expression softened a little when he looked down at Freya, still sleeping peacefully in his arms.
“Sorry, mate,” he said as Finn, in boxers and nothing else, opened the door.
The man is built like a Roman god,thought Jules, staggered at the perfection of Finn’s abs. Then she found herself wondering what sort of state Roman’s abs were in. Pretty decent, if the exterior was anything to go by.
Roman, in contrast, was not struggling to stay on task. “She’s chucked it all up, so you don’t need to worry,” he told Finn, “but she’s going to feel terrible in the morning, and serves her right.”
The two men tenderly managed the transfer from Roman’s arms to Finn’s, and then, duty discharged, Roman turned to Jules, looking stern and bored.
“I assumeyoucan get yourself home without my help?” he said, looking over to the door of Capelthorne’s.
Jules was stung by his patronizing manner.
“You are correct,” she said stiffly, overwhelmingly tempted to add,I bid you good night, sir, and perhaps even snap a salute and/or a heel click, but—let’s face it—hehadgot her out of a difficult situation, so she settled for saying, “Thank you for helping with Freya. I should have been watching her more closely.”
“You should have,” he agreed. “Anyhow, I did it for Finn.”
Of course he did.
“I enjoyed our drink,” he ventured.
“I didn’t,” she snapped, turning and walking away.
Chapter 9
“Say what you like about those Montbeaus,” Flo said the following morning, when Jules recounted the tale, “that Roman did the decent thing, at least.”
There was no way Jules was going to worry Flo by reporting back on Roman’s devastating revelations about his intentions toward Capelthorne’s, so she just grunted, sipping her coffee, relieved that her headache had released her from its grip. Normally her migraines dragged on for days. Today, she determined, she would put the final details to her marketing plans for the next few months, including a summer of celebrations to mark Capelthorne’s one hundred years in business. Itmightalso be their last year of trading, but Jules was going to do everything she could to make sure it was memorable. For Flo’s sake. And maybe, a little bit, to prove a point against Roman, she admitted to herself, remembering what her aunt had said about revenge.
Charlie was waiting patiently outside when Jules went to unlock the door. Today, his trousers and rainbow braces had been replaced with a capacious pair of dark green dungarees, a cozy yellow sweatshirt in deference to the crisply cool spring morning, and a clumpy pair of Doc Martens with stripy yellow-and-black laces.
“Jules!” Charlie declared in greeting, waving his arms extravagantly, as if acknowledging her from a vast distance, even though there was barely six feet between them.
Flo’s face lit up. “The entertainment’s arrived,” she observed dryly from her perch at the till. “Jules, darling, you had better put the kettle on.”
Arming Charlie with a strong mug of tea—oat milk, two sugars—Jules settled him upstairs among the old books, envying his environment and his task for the day. The plan was that Charlie would start to catalog the books in an Excel spreadsheet, evaluating each in turn and collating a list to upload to BookFinder.com with minimum bids in place to make sure nothing potentially valuable slipped through their fingers. Charlie, it was agreed, was essentially doing himself out of a job, by steadily clearing the whole floor to leave space for Jules’s expansion plans.
Jules loved that Capelthorne’s had something Portneath Books didn’t. She had Charlie, plus who knows what treasures lurked on those dusty shelves?
Roman was troubled. His brow furrowed with more than physical pain as he ran, driving himself, pounding through his normal early-morning route, up the hill from the chapel where he lived, onto the ridge where he stopped, wiping sweat from his brow. From there, he could admire Middlemass village, nestled in the valley with the silver ribbon of the river running through it. The river was narrow here—not much more than a stream—as it ran past the little shops and then on to the village pond by the green. It started to froth and surge just beyond the green, running fast and deep under the humpbacked stone bridge as it flowed through the village, before widening and slowing on its way to the sea at Portneath.
This was his home.
Much of the farmland he was running through was Montbeau land, owned by the family for hundreds of years. They didn’t farm directly anymore. All the land was rented out for others to work, but the influence and control of this single family—his family—was absolute. And that mattered, didn’t it? Maintaining that power had always been important, or at least it was to his father. Wasn’t that why he had had it drummed into him from an early age? Somehow, after more than ten years away in the wider world, at college, then work, the eternal “truths” of home felt, well, maybe just a bit more nebulous.
That said, it was what he had returned home to achieve. And whatever Roman set out to do, he generally achieved it.
As he set off running again, his breath clouded in the air as he crunched across the frosted grass on the verge, breathing in time with the relentless pounding of his feet. There was one thought that preoccupied him: he was regretting his conversation with Jules, admitting he was going out of his way to shut Capelthorne’s down. What had possessed him? Was he confessing? Warning? Taunting? He wasn’t sure what he had been doing, but it had meant giving away the advantage of surprise—and, from a business perspective, it had been an idiotic thing to do. It was not like him, not to keep his counsel, but he had been filled with a desire to keep her talking at any cost, to keep her looking at him with those huge, strange green eyes that were so quick to fill with tears and quick to flash with anger—hatred, even...
