“It’s nothing, Patch. Must be that weather Victoria was predicting.”
As she murmured the words, the foreman, the one particularly guilty of ogling the younger Crowhart, slipped on the suddenly rain-slick cobblestones and tumbled backward into a vat of mixed cement. Thunder sounded again. Rhiannon didn’t even flinch or turn his way. The cat hissed. Patches whined pathetically from her perch, gazing at the beast hurrying after its mistress into the building next door.
How did Victoria put it? “Safer” away? As rain fell in sheets over the now deserted Market Square and the construction workers scrambled to get out of the downpour, Pru touched her sternum. For some reason the skin there felt tender. Bruised.
Then she rolled her eyes at her foolishness. As she chastised herself for imagining things like being speared by the sheer force of a gaze that didn’t even see her, the one thing Pru couldn’t shake was the scent of petrichor. In the quiet of the bookstore, with all the windows closed, it surrounded her as if she were standing in the middle of the deluge.
3
RHIANNON, NOSY NEIGHBORS & BELONGING (OR LACK THEREOF)
THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER RETURNS!
We’ve last seen Rhiannon Crowhart twenty years ago, departing the Nest and Dragons, promising never to come back.
With construction in full swing at the Old Atelier, the town awaits with bated breath the fate of its most coveted property that has been languishing for decades and wonders about the reason behind the return of the banished Crowhart.
—Crow’s Caw
Rhiannon Crowhart did not rollher eyes at the screaming headline and ink wasted on lines of innuendo in the yellowish publication, but she wanted to. Still, she knew bait when it walked in and introduced itself. She had never been banished, unless one counted one’s own conscience, and nobody needed to know that. Certainly not her next-door neighbor.
Rhiannon made a point of never making lists, especially for things that were beneath her notice. She decidedly didn’t makelists of observations about people she did not care to observe in the first place. And the young, willowy creature stealing gazes at her from her small bookstore was not someone Rhiannon bothered with as a rule.
Still, if she were to concoct such a list, it would be very short.
Number 1. The shopkeeper had prying eyes and, by the look of it, straw-like silky hair that kept escaping the messy bun the woman tried to fix every so often.
Number 2. The shopkeeper was nosy.
Rhiannon caught her watching all the comings and goings approximately ten days after she moved in. She’d have certainly noticed sooner, but then again, Rhiannon Crowhart was the one being noticed, not the other way around. As a former auctioneer with over a decade of experience running one of the biggest auction houses—some might even say one of the best out there—Rhiannon knew that oftentimes she was the one observed, catalogued, and admired. The pièce de résistance. The crown jewel and the most desired object in every collection on display. As such, it was none of her business who looked at her. She shined, so being stared at was par for the course.
Those curious eyes had probably watched her from the very first day, if for nothing else than the fact that she was Rhiannon Crowhart of the island Crowharts, returned to her ancestral nest. Pun intended. And here, in this accursed place, attention came with the last name.
Number 3. The shopkeeper’s prying eyes were of a remarkable gray. They sat on a pretty face, touched by a guileless sort of naiveté Rhiannon would normally cringe at, due to how utterly defenseless it seemed.
If Rhiannon was perfectly honest with herself, and she tended to not be quite so often—life was hard as it was, there was no need for more sharp edges—she would confess to seeing those remarkable gray eyes in her dreams, night after night,since stepping foot in the town’s limits. The dreams always faded and left her with more questions, a sense of fear and claustrophobia that she had never known herself to be afflicted with, and yet she remembered calling out, reaching for the woman who looked at her as if she had come to save her…
Rhiannon blinked and then simply closed her eyes. No, just dreams, just this godforsaken place, this island, this town, this damned house.
She needed to keep moving, doing, building, fixing. These were the only things that kept her sanity. As for the neighbor? Rhiannon’s list of observations about her ended. Pretty eyes or not, this wasn’t someone Rhiannon sought out. She preferred her women older, experienced?—
Rhiannon took a deep breath and forced herself to abandon that train of thought. There were no women. Once upon a time she might’ve had a preference, but for the past two decades there had only been one. Rhiannon had nobody to blame but herself.
Another deep breath and she put the fresh-faced ingénue out of her mind, crumpling the newspaper and three-pointing it into the trash can. Then she looked down at her manicure and saw that the petty gesture smudged her just applied coat of burgundy nail polish. Dammit. Fighting back in this town always cost her.
She thought how she really should’ve learned her lesson by now. Don’t react. Go through the motions. Let time pass. After all, in her predicament, the only way out was through.
A year. Twelve months. Margaux’s last act of revenge, even from the grave, was her will and testament. Nothing lets a surviving spouse know about the depth of their wife’s hatred of them as the sheer pettiness included in the remains of the crumbling estate. All the little hurtful stipulations, all the slaps at her, all the words the lawyer had to read in front of a crowd—because of course Margaux had to have a crowd at the reading of her will—nothing had bothered Rhiannon. Nothing had touchedher. Until the last set of provisions. The business they had started together, the one Rhiannon managed by herself most of their twenty-year marriage, the one that became successful due to her guile, acumen, and her restorer’s talent—that business would be forever tied in legal quagmires unless Rhiannon returned to Dragons and Crow’s Nest and took possession of the Old Atelier for one year.
She lowered her face to the windowpane, the cool glass soothing heated skin, allaying her anger. It was a useless emotion anyway, even if Rhiannon allowed herself to indulge in it. Her lawyers fought for months, and it had still come to this. Rhiannon Crowhart was back on Dragons, back in Crow’s Nest, and back in the Atelier that, despite all the hours of renovations, paint, cement, and construction glue, still smelled the same. Twenty years and she could still smell Margaux in these walls. All the noise of the renovation site and she could still hear old man Jerome’s cough as he leaned over the magnifying glass inspecting some stitch in the leather binding.
So, nothing changed on Dragons. Except twenty years ago the bookstore next door had a different owner, one who didn’t have eyes as pretty. The widow Fowler. Well, she had been quite feeble back then, the judgmental old biddy. Rhiannon felt the judgment on her own skin every day, even before the whole Margaux affair blew up in her face. The Crowhart and Fowler feud or some such ancient nonsense that nobody remembered but the old crone. And the bookstore itself did not look as inviting.
It didn’t matter, though. Rhiannon had to endure exactly twelve months in this godforsaken place, and so she would. Otherwise, not only would her auction house be in trouble, but the Old Atelier itself would revert to the state. And one thing the Caw was right about—the damn heap of brick and oak was valuable. It was also storied, a fact Rhiannon preferred not tothink about. She tried to tell herself that not all sins were hers to wash.
The Atelier had been storied and extremely valuable even back when Rhiannon was silently pining after the sad and lonely woman of the house. Its position opposite the town hall on the main square of Crow’s Nest afforded it amazing views and strategic placement. It had been worth a fortune twenty years ago. It had quadrupled or quintupled in price since the eighteen-year-old Rhiannon crossed its threshold the very first time.
Still, it hadn’t been the money that forced her hand making her shutter her business and sell the house in Malibu. It wasn’t the prospect of finally owning the most famous building in Crow’s Nest.
