Free The Shop of Shades and Secrets (Modern Gothic Romance 1) by Colleen Gleason

not,” he sighed, “just water.”
     
    Iva patted his hand with her own wrinkled, blue-veined one, and smiled. Then she turned to Gideon. “I hope we didn’t interrupt any plans you might have for the evening.” She followed him into the kitchen, and Gideon Senior tramped along behind, mumbling about being unable to have fun anymore.
     
    Gideon pushed away the tinge of irritation and busied himself by turning on a teakettle filled with water. His step-grandmother’s comment was simply a more tactful way of trying to find out the same thing her husband demanded to know. “No, no plans this evening.” He set a small basket of tea bags on the grey granite counter in front of Iva.
     
    His grandfather hmphed and would have begun the usual diatribe—at least, the one that had become a familiar litany in the six months since Iva had come into their lives—had she not intervened. “Well, that’s good, because we’d hoped you’d join us for dinner so we could tell you all about our honeymoon.”
     
    Relieved to be off the hook, and somewhat surprised at how pleased he felt at having something worthwhile to do, Gideon accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. “Do you have any pictures yet?”
     
    “Pictures? Ha! How about three of those—what are those little things called?—three of them of video? Your grandmother spent every waking moment with the recorder dangling from her hand.”
     
    “They’re called memory sticks. And, Hollis, you know that’s an exaggeration,” Iva responded mildly, looking up from the basket where she’d been flipping through the different teas.
     
    “I said every waking moment—” Gideon Senior began, with an unmistakably meaningful wink.
     
    “I only filled up one memory stick, although it was eight giga-whatevers. And besides,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “the last thing your grandson wants to see is you in a Speedo.” Without turning a hair, she chose a bag of peppermint tea and handed it to Gideon, who had to choke back a snort of laughter at the revelation that his fairly physically-fit grandfather not only owned—but wore—a Speedo. At least if he happened to see a picture, Gideon wouldn’t want to poke his own eyes out.
     
    Gideon Senior may have flushed a bit, but his grandson wouldn’t have testified to it had he been pressed. It may just have been the natural ruddiness that his face took on when he blustered about. “Anyway, m’boy, why is it that you don’t have plans on a Saturday night? Whatever happened with that woman—er—what was her name? You brought her to our wedding. She was a fine-looking woman—and seemed smart, sharp, sophisticated.”
     
    “Leslie, dear. Her name was Leslie.” Iva flashed a quick glance at Gideon as if to show her sympathy for him, but he wasn’t fooled. He had figured out their good-cop, bad-cop routine months earlier.
     
    With a sigh, he capitulated. “Leslie van Dorn, Grandfather. And nothing has happened to her—I just don’t have plans to see her tonight.” It had been several weeks, in fact, since he and Leslie had had occasion to get together.
     
    “Well why not?” Gideon Senior demanded as his grandson turned to retrieve the steaming kettle. “If you don’t spend any time courting her, how do you expect to find the opportunity to propose?”
     
    Gideon burned himself on the teakettle and yanked his hand away from its hot metal spout. Swallowing a curse, he replied calmly, “I don’t intend to propose to her, Grandfather, and you know it.”
     
    Indeed, despite the fact that she was exactly the kind of woman he would someday wed—if he did at all—marrying Leslie van Dorn, President and CEO of Interworks, Inc., was the last thing he could see himself doing. “Grandfather, Leslie and I have the stereotypical perfect arrangement. We both choose to concentrate on our careers, and, since we’re so busy all the time, we just help each other out when we need an escort for some