Page 27 of Playing for Keeps

The woman from the bookstore.

God, she was real.

For weeks, I had been replaying that afternoon, wondering if I’d made too much of it. Wondering if maybe I’d built her up into something she wasn’t. But no. Reality wasn’t just matching memory, it was knocking it sideways.

She was breathtaking.

She had her hair up, with a few curls left loose around her face. It was that effortless kind of pretty you can’t fake. The dress was a dark green that hugged her in all the right places and the fabric shimmered a little every time she moved her shoulders. She looked like she belonged here, like she could have come from one of those glossy magazines I had made fun of before.

And she was laughing.

That laugh – warm, alive, easy.

I kept walking but I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

And then she looked at me, her eyes widening in surprise, before she gave me the most beautiful smile.

A lightning bolt. That’s what it felt like. Straight through me.

Grace looked up, practically glowing. “Emma, this is Max, my brother.”

She blushed, just a little, but enough to notice. “Hello, Max,” she said, her voice smooth, familiar and so damn welcome.

“Hi, Emma,” I answered.

For a second, we just looked at each other, and I swear I forgot that Grace was right there, that there were dozens of other conversations going on around us. It felt like being in the bookstore again, with the same jolt of awareness, the same pull.

Grace cleared her throat, which brought me back into the room. “So,” she said cheerfully, “Emma was just telling me she’s here in Toronto working on her next book.”

Emma smiled, tucking a loose curl behind her ear. “That’s the idea, at least. I can’t say I’ve got very far yet. Too busy settling in, teaching, trying to absorb the city.”

“Absorb the city,” I repeated, amused. “Is that the official term?”

She laughed, looking at me. “Something like that.”

God, that laugh. It hit me right in the chest.

“Speaking of books,” Emma said, turning a little toward me, “how did your niece like hers?”

I blinked for a second, caught off guard and then I remembered. Of course. Lucy.

I grinned. “She loved it. Read it cover to cover in just two days. Then she started again from the beginning. Carried it around the house like a security blanket.”

“I’m glad. Ten is a good age to fall in love with books.”

“She’s already there. Half the time I go over to Grace’s, Lucy’s lying on the couch with a book and a finger up like I should be quiet. Last week she told me I was ruining the atmosphere. Ten years old!”

Emma chuckled. “A serious reader, then. You’ll have to be careful, she’ll grow up correcting your grammar.”

“She already does,” I admitted. “She told me last week that ‘me and Lucas’ is wrong and that it should be ‘Lucas and I.’ Again, she’s only ten!”

“Sounds like she’ll be running her own seminar in a few years.”

“Probably,” I said, grinning. And then I caught Grace watching us, her eyes narrowing, a spark of something in her face.

Grace had heard me talk about Emma before of course. More than once, she had teased me about the “mystery bookstore girl”. And now that she saw how Emma and I talked to each other, she put two and two together.

Her smile turned sly. “Emma was just telling me she wants to write about something truly Canadian in her next book. And I was just about to suggest…” She paused on purpose, drawing it out.