Free Leather Bound by Shanna Germain Page A

head in, holding up the drink I’d brought her. As always, she was impeccable, right down to her swingy skirt and her purple toenails peeking out of a pair of black sandals. It was way too damn cold for that. I was in a long wraparound dress, striped tights, and black boots and I was still freezing.
    She looked me over. ‘No sex this morning, I see.’
    ‘No sex,’ I said. ‘Thanks for finishing up yesterday. How did it go?’
    ‘Steady.’ She draped herself in the theatre chair with a tired ‘oof’. ‘I’m glad we’re almost at the weekend.’
    We close Leather Bound on Mondays and Tuesdays, which gives us a sort of weekend without killing our business too much. Our only other option was to hire employees, which got all kinds of crazy and expensive. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m slightly anal and slightly OCD and I’m not about to turn the store over to a bunch of people I don’t know.
    ‘Yah, weekend,’ I agreed, although I didn’t feel that way. Mondays and Tuesdays were the days Kyle and I usually spent together. He kicked off at the tat shop early on Monday and took Tuesday as one of his days off. It was something I usually looked forward to, but now it made my chest feel tight. I realised I hadn’t even listened to his messages as I’d promised myself I would, much less called him. I was beginning to feel like a horrible, horrible person.
    ‘Did you talk to Kyle?’ Lily asked. ‘About the whole marriage thing?’
    As if there was something else I needed to talk to him about. Sometimes I hated her knowing me quite so well.
    Clearly she saw the answer in my face because she quickly said, ‘Never mind. I’ll go flip the sign.’
    I heard her turn the sign – it was wooden and it clunked against the glass storefront every time you moved it – and then I heard her talking to someone. Her voice carried back, but not her words. Probably a customer, from her tone. That made two early-morning walk-ins back-to-back. What an odd week it was turning out to be.
    I pressed Clementine’s lid shut on my myriad disappointing searches, forcing myself to let go of my desire to spend time researching a man I knew nothing about and didn’t need to know anything about. He probably wasn’t the man I’d seen at L&L. He was just some guy – some very sexy guy, granted – who was either looking for a little thrill to fill his boring days or was two eggs short of a sanity dozen. Either way, it was a hassle I didn’t need.
    It would have been easier to convince myself that was true if I wasn’t thinking about him constantly. The sexy mystery of him was clearly doing bad things to my brain.
    Well, I’d turned down the job, and we were rid of him. I was going to excise him from my brain once and for all.
    A second later, Lily rushed into the office, carrying a piece of paper, her blue eyes wide.
    ‘Janine,’ she said. ‘They want to kick us out!’
    * * *
    ‘Rewind,’ I said. Lily sometimes got overly excited about things and jumbled her words. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was hoping this was one of those occasions.
    ‘They want to kick us out,’ she said, a hundred times more slowly. It didn’t help. Her words still didn’t mean anything to my brain and I tried to place them in some sort of context.
    ‘Some guy just delivered a letter from the landlord.’ She shoved it into my hand, and before I could read it she said, ‘They’re saying they’re going to double our rent.’
    I looked at the letter she’d handed me, but I couldn’t read it. The letters were fuzzy, as if typed with a really old typewriter. Then I realised it wasn’t the letters; it was because my hands were shaking so much it blurred the type. I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. Read it for real this time.
    Lily wasn’t kidding; they wanted to double our rent. We could cover it, maybe. Just maybe. If we were willing to go mac and cheese and live in cardboard boxes – or the