What the rain left behind

Chapter three

EVERY BOOK SHE RECOMMENDS

By Friday evening, the rain had finally stopped.

The streets of the east side were still wet and shining, and the air smelled clean, like a page that had just been turned. Maya Bennett stood at the front window of Willow & Page Books, rearranging a display of spring poetry that nobody had asked for, when she felt it.

It was a small thing—a change in the room, like a pressure in the air before a storm.

The brass bell above the door rang.

She did not need to turn around. Somehow, she already knew.

"Good evening, Miss Bennett."

Maya set down the book in her hand, took one slow breath, and faced him.

Lucian Vale stood just inside the doorway, in a navy suit this time, with no tie and the top button of his shirt undone. It made him look less like a man who owned a skyscraper and more like someone who had rushed out of a meeting. His dark hair was a little untidy, as if he had run his hand through it more than once. His gray eyes were exactly as she remembered them: calm, steady, and impossible to read.

Behind him, through the window, there was no long black car. Only the empty curb.

"Mr. Vale," Maya said, and was annoyed to hear her voice come out so carefully. "You're back."

"I am."

"Is it the suit? Because I'm sorry again, and I did mean to ask if you wanted me to cover the cleaning, but I don't think a bookstore salary stretches that far..."

"I threw the suit away."

Maya blinked. "You did not."

"I did not," Lucian admitted. The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly. "It is hanging in my closet. I do not know why."

For a moment, she could not tell if he was joking. Then she realized that he was, in his own stiff, careful way, and a small, startled laugh escaped before she could stop it.

He looked at her as if he had just heard something very rare.

"I am not here about the suit," he said.

"Then why are you here?"

It was a fair question, and she watched him struggle with it. This was a man who negotiated million-dollar deals before breakfast, and he stood in the middle of a tiny bookstore as though he had forgotten every word he knew.

"I would like to buy a book," he said finally.

"A book."

"Yes."

"Okay." Maya folded her arms. "What kind of book?"

"I do not know."

"You do not know."

"I have not read one," said Lucian Vale, with great dignity, "in nine years."

Maya stared at him. Then she looked at the back of the shop, where Tessa had gone suddenly, suspiciously silent. A pair of eyes appeared over the top of the cookery shelf, wide as saucers, and vanished again.

"Nine years," Maya repeated slowly.

"I read a great many documents. Contracts, reports, proposals. But not a book. Not for pleasure." He paused. "I thought perhaps I should begin again. And I thought you might know where to start."

There was something in the way he said it, quiet and almost shy beneath the polished voice, that made Maya's guard slip a little.

"Okay," she said. "Let's find you something."

---

She led him down the narrow aisles, and he followed a step behind, his hands clasped behind his back like a visitor in a museum.

"What do you like?" she asked. "Mysteries? History? Adventure?"

"I do not know what I like."

"Well, what did you read when you were young?"

He was silent for so long that she glanced back at him. He was looking at a shelf of old, faded children's books, and his expression had gone strangely distant.

"My grandmother did not approve of stories," he said at last. "She said they were a waste of time for someone who would one day run a company."

"That's awful."

"It was efficient." But the word came out hollow.

Maya felt something tug in her chest. She reached up to a high shelf and pulled down a worn blue paperback with a cracked spine.

"Start with this one," she said. "It's about a man who thinks he has everything figured out, and then a very small thing changes his whole life. It's funny, and sad, and I've read it six times."

He took it from her carefully, holding it like something that might break. He turned it over and read the back.

"Six times?"

"It's the kind of book you want to live in for a while."

Lucian looked up at her. "Then I will take it."

"You haven't even read the first page."

"You recommended it," he said simply. "That is sufficient."

Her cheeks warmed. She turned quickly to the next shelf. "Okay, well, you'll need more than one. If you only read one book, you'll never know what you like. Here." She pulled down a mystery with a silver cover. "This one has a detective who is terrible at his job and brilliant at everything else. And this one is poetry, short poems, nothing scary. And this is a history of the sea, which sounds boring but really isn't. And this one..."

She kept going. She could not seem to stop. Each time she handed him a book, he took it without a word, balancing it on top of the last, until he was holding a tower of paperbacks up to his chin.

"Maya," Tessa hissed from somewhere behind the shelves. "Maya, he is going to drop them."

"I will not drop them," Lucian said calmly, without turning around.

There was a muffled squeak, and then silence.

Maya pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. "Sorry. My sister has no manners."

"I like her."

"You haven't met her."

"I have met her ears," said Lucian gravely. "They are very observant."

This time, Maya really did laugh, a bright, unguarded sound that filled the little shop. And Lucian Vale stood there with twelve books in his arms and watched her, and for a moment, he looked like a man who had been walking in the dark for years and had just seen a light.

---

At the counter, Maya rang up the books one by one.

"That will be one hundred and sixty-two dollars," she said, scanning the last one.

"Is that all?"

"It's a lot for books."

"Miss Bennett," said Lucian, handing over his card, "I have spent more on a single lunch."

"That's not something you say to a person who works at a bookstore."

"Forgive me." He did not look sorry at all. He looked as if he were trying not to smile. "May I ask you something?"

She handed back his card and began wrapping the books in brown paper. "You can ask."

"Why did you tell me I was rude?"

Maya's hands paused. She looked up. "Because you were."

"Everyone else was afraid to say so."

"Was that why you came back?" she asked, before she could stop herself. "Because I said it?"

He took a moment before he answered, and when he did, his voice was lower and quieter.

"I came back," said Lucian, "because it was the first honest thing anyone had said to me in a very long time."

The shop went still. Somewhere behind the shelves, Tessa had stopped breathing.

Maya looked down at the parcel in her hands. She tied the string slowly, so that he would not see how her fingers trembled, and slid it across the counter.

"Then I'm glad I said it," she said softly.

He took the books. For a moment, neither of them let go of the parcel, and their fingers rested very close together on the brown paper.

"I would like to tell you how the first one ends," Lucian said. "When I finish it."

"You want to come back?"

"If you will allow it."

Maya swallowed. Every sensible part of her was telling her to be careful. He was a billionaire. She was a girl who saved coins for a shop she might never own. They lived in two different worlds, and she knew very well how stories like this usually ended.

But he was looking at her with such quiet, hopeful honesty that she heard herself say, "The shop is open Thursday to Sunday."

"I know," said Lucian. "I wrote it down."

She laughed again, helplessly. "Of course you did."

He smiled then, a real one, unguarded and a little crooked, and it changed his entire face. It made him look younger, and warmer, and so unexpectedly human that Maya's heart gave a small, treacherous leap.

"Good night, Miss Bennett," he said.

"Good night, Mr. Vale."

"Lucian," he said. "Please."

"Lucian," she said, and the name felt strange and soft in her mouth.

He nodded once, tucked the books under his arm, and walked out into the clean, glittering night. The bell rang behind him.

Maya stood very still at the counter, her hand pressed against her chest.

"Maya Bennett," said Tessa, emerging at last from behind the cookery shelf with her eyes shining. "You have a problem."

"I do not."

"He bought twelve books."

"He needs them."

"He said *please*."

"Tessa."

"He smiled at you!"

"Tessa, please go home."

But Tessa was already laughing, and Maya, despite every sensible warning in her mind, was smiling too. Outside, the last of the rain dripped quietly from the awnings, and somewhere down the street, a man with a stack of paperbacks walked home alone, feeling lighter than he had in years.