The Stranger: The Heroes of Heyday (Harlequin Superromance No. 1266) Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I need to show that fool Verna Myers something.”
    Mallory smiled at her favorite customer, glad to have something fun to take her mind off the annoyances of the day. And any meeting of Aurora’s book club, Bookish Old Broads Incorporated, or Bobbies, as they called themselves, was bound to be fun.
    The group met here every Thursday at six, for cookies and coffee and spirited debate. Last Thursday, Verna Myers, who worshipped at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary feet, had been so enraged when Aurora criticized Tender is the Night that she had stood up, sputtering indignantly, and yanked the feather right out of Aurora’s hat.
    A hush had fallen over the entire bookstore. No one, but no one, touched Aurora’s feathers. Wally said later that he’d been expecting a catfight. But Aurora was a lady. Instead of scratching Verna’s eyes out, she had merely taken her copy of Tender is the Night, torn out a page from the middle, and used it to wipe the cookie crumbs from her mouth.
    Frankly, Mallory had been surprised to see Verna show up again this week. But Verna probably enjoyed the rows as much as Aurora did. And, since the wealthy old ladies always paid for anything they ruined, it was lucrative for Mallory, so everybody came out a winner.
    â€œ Gatsby? I’ll go look,” Mallory said obediently. No one who knew Aurora really minded her bossy tone. Underneath the haughty Queen Victoria exterior beat one of the kindest hearts in Heyday.
    But wouldn’t you know it? She was completely out of Gatsby. The high-school seniors were writing research papers on Fitzgerald this year, and they’d all come rushing in at the last minute and picked her shelves clean.
    She had her own copy upstairs. Rather than disappoint Aurora, Mallory decided to go get it.
    â€œWally, will you watch the register for a minute?”
    Wally, who was shelving CDs, his favorite task, frowned. He was an artist—a budding film director, at least in his own mind—and he thought handling money was crass. But he was deeply in hock to the photography store down the street, so he didn’t dareannoy the one employer in town who would put up with his attitudes, not to mention his multicolored hair.
    â€œSure,” he mumbled, and began to shuffle in her direction.
    Mallory’s shop was actually two storefronts combined into one large bookstore on the bottom. On the upper floor, though, the building was divided into two snug but charming apartments with porches overlooking the tree-lined, curving Hippodrome Circle. Mallory lived in one. The other had been empty ever since Christmas, when her neighbor, a local chef, had taken a job at a fancy restaurant in Richmond. She still missed the great aromas that had always seeped from his apartment to hers.
    Both apartments were accessed by the same outside staircase, so Mallory exited the bookstore, drank in a little of the sparkling Virginia spring air, and then climbed up to see if she could hunt down Gatsby in the jungle of books in her living room.
    She kept admirable order downstairs—customers had to be able to find books before they could buy them. But up here, where she stored everything that wouldn’t fit in the shop, as well as her own ever-growing collection of books, the situation was a mess.
    Gatsby…Gatsby… When had she last read Gatsby? Probably around the holidays…which meant it would be beneath the “summer reading list” books that had just been delivered, but not so far down as the “back to school” books from last fall.
    It took forever, so she wasn’t surprised when sheheard footsteps on the outside staircase. Wally, undoubtedly panicked by being stranded with the Bobbies, must have left the register untended—the ultimate no-no—and come up here to drag her back downstairs.
    She grabbed Gatsby, knocking over three Pilchers and a du Maurier in the process, and hurried to the door. “Darn it,