Authentically izzy, p.20
Authentically, Izzy, page 20
He’d spent so many years hoping, without much real belief, that someone as book-obsessed and at times awkward might actually exist, and after two rather hurtful relationships—where both ladies turned out to be false—and a trip around the world, he’d finally found her.
And he was certainly hanging on for the happily ever after.
The spacious entrance to the library boasted walls decorated on either side with beach-related kid art. Ah, Brodie recalled Izzy telling him the theme for the next two weeks was ocean creatures. Beyond the entrance, the room opened to reveal neat rows of books, plenty of natural light streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows, and all framing a large desk centered directly in front of him, where a rather unwelcoming woman of middle-age stood. A few other people stood nearby, but Brodie kept his focus on the librarian and donned a friendly smile.
She did not reciprocate. His pace slowed. Was this Izzy’s aunt? Hadn’t Izzy mentioned something about Josephine’s influence on her aunt’s opinion and how the woman hated the idea of some man from another country sweeping in and stealing Izzy away forever?
“Good morning.” She didn’t so much as flinch, but stared at him with such intensity he wondered if she read his thoughts. “I’m Brodie Sutherland. I think perhaps Izzy—”
“I know who you are.” Her frown deepened as she examined him with narrowing eyes, but gave no further exposition.
“Ah, well, I was hoping to join Izzy’s story time this morning.” He checked his watch, just to give his eyes something to focus on besides her face. “Ten o’clock, isn’t it?”
The older woman did not immediately answer, but her careful perusal started at the top of Brodie’s head and traveled down to the notebook in his hands and back. If possible, the creases in her brow deepened into shadowy caverns enough to steal his Blighty Mastiff moniker without contest.
A young woman cleared her throat nearby, obviously waiting for the librarian to finish helping her.
“Wait here and I’ll show you the way.” Her gaze moved to a man Brodie hadn’t noticed, who was standing to his left. In complete contrast to the scowl she’d offered Brodie, she bathed the stranger with a dazzling smile. “You too, honey.”
The older woman disappeared down the library aisle and left Brodie standing in the residual silence with the stranger. He was a swarthy-looking fellow, dark hair waved back away from his face, and Brodie had caught a quick glance of uncommonly blue eyes, eyes now used to burn a stare into Brodie’s profile.
A swell of undetermined uneasiness rivered up through his stomach as the silence continued, so Brodie finally turned.
The man’s smile flashed wide. “You here for Izzy too?”
Brodie followed the man’s gaze down to the notebook he held and back, an uncomfortable foreboding tightening every muscle in his body. Too? “Yes.”
The man nodded and sent a grin to a young woman walking by before turning his attention back to Brodie. “Do you know how long her little story thing is supposed to last?” He glanced down at his phone, then looked toward the window as if gauging the accuracy of the time on his phone. “I thought I’d wait around to get a chance to see her, but it all depends on how long she’s going to be with those kids.”
Perhaps Brodie wasn’t being charitable to this man, with his swath of black hair and two-inch height advantage. True, the very idea that he wanted to see Izzy pinched a frown into place on Brodie’s face. But . . . wouldn't he expect people to come to the library to ask Izzy questions? He couldn't expect all of her visitors to be freckle-faced children.
“I believe story time is an hour.”
The man’s head came up from his phone, his gaze taking Brodie in as if for the first time. “You’re not a local.”
Clearly. “No, I’m visiting Izzy from abroad.”
One of his brows tipped up. “Abroad?”
The question didn’t need a response really, so Brodie merely nodded, the discomfort in his chest tightening with each passing second. Who was this chap?
“Well, Izzy’s one of a kind, that’s for sure. She just gets people. Understands characters and books.” He leaned back against the counter and lowered his voice in a conspiratorial tone. “And she’s great with romance too.”
Brodie was incapable of responding, which didn’t seem to impact the man at all.
“She’s completely changed my life. Her creativity and ability to get to the heart of the problem? To read deeper?” His bright-blue eyes flashed to Brodie’s face. “And her passion.”
“Passion?” The word croaked from Brodie’s throat.
“Of course, passion. Wow! She just keeps it bottled up until the right time and then . . .” He shook his head, his dastardly grin growing. “I’m just saying that, if you’re going to make an impression on Izzy, you’ll need to be an avid reader.” The man continued, his chin taking on an arrogant tilt with a smile that seemed much too large for his face. He even seemed to lord his extra inches over Brodie, bending a little at the waist to accommodate the quiet a library required. “For example”—the man waved toward the books on the counter in front of him—“I’ve read at least five of these right here in front of me. Popular-fiction titles. These three in particular are very popular. You’ll probably want to read them.” He pointed to three covers with various aspects of Rome highlighted on the front. “Just a little advice.” He took up the books he referenced and created a little stack in front of him on the counter like a little trophy.
An avid reader? Brodie surveyed the paltry stack of books the man referenced. Surely this stranger didn’t dare lecture him on reading? Brodie’s gaze fell to the piles of books on a cart nearby, taking inventory of the array of paperbacks and hardcovers, his attention pulled to a set of familiar loves. Without hesitation and a growing smile, he snagged the massive volume of Dickens’s Bleak House, then a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which just so happened to have the largest page count of the series, and he topped his little book stack off with Melville’s Moby Dick, leaving Brodie’s book tower two inches taller—and much more prestigious-looking—than his competitor’s. “I happen to be an extremely avid reader.”
The man’s eyes widened, and with only a hint of hesitation he stepped around the edge of the closest bookshelf and reemerged with four more books in hand. Without breaking eye contact, he added them to his growing tower, a look of unadulterated arrogance on his face.
Brodie almost chuckled. The loon had no idea with whom he was dealing. Casting a glance up at the category signs above the shelves, Brodie dashed off to the Classics section and returned with Don Quixote, War and Peace—both around a thousand pages—The Hunchback of Notre Dame at nearly two thousand, and grabbed The Lord of the Rings trilogy on his way back to the desk, carefully adding his finds to his growing set, which dwarfed the stranger’s miniature list of modern paperbacks.
“You have not read all of those.” The man’s eyes narrowed into blue slits.
“I can give you a summary of each and every one if you want, and I keep a reading log.” Brodie reached for his satchel at his hip. “With dates and—”
Without another hesitation, the man disappeared down the aisle again, this time returning with at least ten new books to add to his somewhat lopsided tower.
It was ridiculous. Brodie knew it. Most likely the stranger did too. And if Brodie had kept his good sense, he’d have stopped right there. But some primal urge spurred him back toward another bookshelf with the unstoppable quench for literary domination. In twenty seconds or less he returned with three undeniable winners: Middlemarch, The Count of Monte Cristo, and . . . the Bible, but he’d have won with just two of the three. The latter he brought along as a shameless boast.
Just as he was about to place the three-inch holy book on the tip-top of his book pile, the older librarian rounded the corner and came to a full stop. Her eyes bulged rather unbecomingly and then her entire expression firmed into a line of fury so fierce, Brodie lost every bit of his focus. His hand shook. From his periphery a movement of blue drew his attention and Isabelle emerged from a nearby doorway wearing a hat that looked like the massive head of a shark, her lovely bottom lip dropping.
And as the old adage proved, that was the final straw. The quivering book bumped Alexandre Dumas and in a slow, horrific motion, Brodie’s tower of literary classics plunged toward the stranger’s wobbly contemporaries, and both bastions plummeted to the floor in a massive crash.
Brodie’s breath halted into the deafening silence that followed the catastrophe and then a quiet whimper rang out from the direction of the doorway. Pale faced and beautiful in her old-fashioned, belted dress, Isabelle rushed forward, followed by a collection of about fifteen children, all wearing some strange form of hat or other as if they were little Disney dwarves following their beloved princess.
At first he almost grinned as she hurried directly toward him like some melodramatic movie ending. “Oh, oh, are you all right?” He opened his mouth to respond, but just as she reached him, she dropped to the floor and swept her arms around the nearest book. “The bindings! The covers!” Her voice raised in pitch as she lifted the hardbound editions of The Lord of the Rings to her chest, her shark-hat bobbing as if to attack. “My precious.”
“I really couldn’t do much about it, Izzy, truly.” The stranger waved toward Brodie, who’d dropped to his knees among the hatted children to collect the sprawling books. “He kept egging me on.”
Isabelle’s dark gaze came to Brodie’s, a look of horror creasing her brow. “What were you doing?”
Brodie shot the stranger a glare and then placed his books on the counter, carefully taking a few the children offered. “Behaving as an imbecile.” He retrieved a few more of the books, his face growing warmer as the implication of the last five minutes bled clear in his mind. Isabelle clearly had some romantic attachment with this stranger. After all that had happened between them over the past week, had he really been so blind or naive to think he had truly won her heart?
“I found one too, Miss Izzy,” came a child’s voice.
“Me too.”
“I told you that you shouldn't have brought this foreigner here, Izzy.” The librarian’s harsh whisper carried enough volume to make her point quite clear. “Not when you already have a perfect catch.” The woman’s face wrinkled into smiles as she looked over at the stranger.
“Aunt Louisa, that really isn’t—”
“You’ve always been my favorite librarian, Mrs. Edgewood,” came the stranger’s warm response. “The best I’ve ever met, actually. A perfect match, if you know what I mean.”
“Miss Izzy, here’s another one,” a child interrupted.
But Brodie had already heard and seen enough. He needed air, distance. In usual style he’d jumped into a situation with full heart and found his expectations and reality stood chasms apart. He took the distraction as an opportunity to slide from the crowd and escape out of the library. His chest burned but he increased his pace down the walkway. Why had he opened up so much, so quickly? Had Anders been right? What an utter idiot he’d been!
Brodie knew it was possible she’d take a while to warm up to the idea of being with him, but . . . well . . . His feet faltered and he squeezed his stinging eyes closed. No wonder he’d taken so long to risk his heart again, but this time . . . he’d begun to truly believe in all the magic.
Not again.
* * *
Izzy had taken the hardback The Lord of the Rings into her arms and swept up the Illustrated King James Bible before standing from her place on the floor among the literary disaster.
“He wouldn’t stop challenging me on the books I’ve read.” Eli shrugged a shoulder and finally lowered himself to pick up one of the books from the floor. Ebony’s Fire, if Izzy guessed by the color scheme. One of his own. She replayed his explanation in her mind.
“Why would Brodie challenge you about books?”
“Because Eli made it clear that he was interested in you, is what I caught from the conversation.” Aunt Louisa raised a brow and sniffed the air, as if she cared very little for the whole thing. “Not that I could hear everything through the bookshelves, but I’d say Eli was making great strides in showing his reading abilities over that foreigner.”
Another look at the books now stacked neatly back on the counter gave a clear distinction about who chose which books. Three books Eli had chosen were the ones he’d authored. Cheater.
And then there were the classics and beloved ones. All hardbound. All Brodie.
“Your interest in me?” She studied Eli, shaking her head. “We’re not dating.”
“I didn’t say we were dating, though I have high hopes of winning you back.” He shrugged a shoulder.
“Winning me back?” She shook her head, her voice rising well above story-time volume. “Eli, you never really had me. I was your editor. We were working on friendship, not romance. Is that what you said to him?”
“Whoa!” He raised his palms in defense. “I only talked about your passion for books and how great you are with romance.”
“How great I am with . . .” Her mind clicked through the conversation.
She spun around to look for Brodie, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Air left her lungs in a burst, as she replayed the previous conversation and her subsequent reaction. Brodie!
Without another word she rushed to the door and out onto the sidewalk. Both directions gave no clue of his whereabouts, until she caught sight of him crossing onto Main Street, his stride long and fast.
She planted her foot to run, but as she tried to raise it, her foot caught. She looked down and lost her balance. The heel of her shoe wedged into the sidewalk crack. With a twist of her body and a hand to her skirt to keep it from flaring high enough to scar young children for years to come, something cracked and she hit the grass to the left of the sidewalk.
With a moan, she pushed up from the ground to find her heel broken from her shoe and a nice little slash down her right leg, as well as a throb in her ankle. Not exactly the classy, rom-com chase she’d been concocting as she shoved open the library doors in search of Brodie, but it seemed fairly appropriate for her real life. She gathered what was left of her shoe and her pride, and hobbled off on a painful run down the street.
What did he think? That she hadn’t cared about him as much as the books? Her stomach tensed. Or that she was dating Eli while also stringing Brodie along?
Dear Lord, help me. My life has become a Bridget Jones rerun.
She increased her pace.
“Brodie!”
Her voice barely made a dent in the space between them, but she tried again. He didn’t so much as turn around, but a few curious onlookers stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. She smiled but knew her behavior only confirmed the thoughts half the town had about her already . . . book spouting, exuberant storytelling, odd hats, and all.
She ran harder. He’d just crossed the street near the bank.
“Brodie,” she called again, and this time his feet faltered. “Brodie, please.”
At this, he stopped completely and made a slow turn in her direction. His expression slowed Izzy’s approach and almost brought her to tears. Gone was his welcome smile and the ready glint in his eyes. The tender expression she’d grown to expect when he looked at her. Instead, a wariness pulled his lips into a frown and dulled his gaze. Oh, what had she done!
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she rasped out as she attempted to catch her breath.
His attention dropped to her uneven steps and he rushed forward. “What happened to you? Are you all right?”
The tears won, then. Blurring his face from her view. “I . . . I fell trying to catch you.” She waved toward her foot. “Broke my heel . . . I’m not sure what else.” She reached for his arms, holding him in place. “There’s nothing between Eli and me. Nothing.”
He shrugged off her hold and stepped back, remaining quiet.
“You have to believe me. We barely even dated at all. And I ended everything once I realized how much . . . how much it meant for me to meet you.” Oh, none of this was coming out the right way. “I was his rebound girl, I think. He’d convinced himself he cared about me more than I ever cared about him.”
“I know the feeling.”
The low response stole Izzy’s breath and she whimpered, catching his arm as he turned to resume his walk. “No, Brodie, please. Eli may think he wants to be with me, but I’ve made it clear we are only friends. That’s it!”
“Then what is this Eli said about knowing how much you love romance and are creative with him and—”
“I’m his editor.”
“What?”
“In fact, the only reason I think Eli ever started dating me in the first place was because he knew I’d help him with his books. The veritable story of my dating life! Pretend romance for services rendered.” She drew in another breath, trying to ease the thrumming of her pulse in her ears. “He never really cared romantically about me and I never cared about him anywhere close to the way I—” Her breath caught.
He raised his brow as if challenging her to finish, but the words wouldn't come. What if she spoke them to him? What if she gave her heart and then . . . then everything fell apart? Dating was one thing, but expressing her heart? Being brave behind a screen and face-to-face weren’t the same.
“What do you want, Isabelle?”
It was such a simple sentence offered from his soft, smooth, baritone voice, and the answer emerged so quickly in her mind, it shocked her. You. Could it really be that simple?
“What do you want?” Perfect, Izzy. Very brave of you! She inwardly groaned.
He studied her for a long moment, as if garnering his own courage or reading her mind. Maybe. In that case she wouldn’t have to voice her thoughts after all.
