Read Online Keepsake by Antoinette Stockenberg - Free Book Online

flush out whoever had the most to lose from seeing him return to Keepsake. Over the years, and especially during the last few weeks, he had thought about Olivia, naturally, but mostly it had been in terms of nostalgia: she'd been part and parcel of his youthful drive to excel.
    But last night? Last night he'd been much more focused on her laugh and her eyes and her ... well, not her IQ, in any case. And today as he ditched his rental in the town parking lot behind the bank, he didn't care if her last name was Bennett or Sinkelheinkenschtein. He simply wanted to be with her again.
    He had it all worked out. They would have lunch at Entre Nous, an intimate bistro that had caught Quinn's eye. It was the kind of place you took a woman like Olivia Bennett. They'd linger over a bottle of wine, laugh about the spelling bees, and with any luck he'd line up another date—this time at night, by God.
    Whistling a soft tune, he made his way down wet sidewalks and slushy streets until he found her shop. The brick building once had been a single-truck fire station, so it had a funky kind of charm. With its slate roof pitching steeply toward the street and its big front window divided by dozens of small square panes, it looked like something out of a children's fairy tale. Quinn was especially glad to see that they'd kept the original door, carved with the initials K.F.D. in elegant Victorian script.
    He pulled open the heavy green door, jangling some bells above it, and stamped his hiking shoes on a mat inside the threshold. There were a couple of customers in the shop, and a fresh young thing cutting material from a bolt of cloth, but ... no Olivia. It rocked Quinn, the wave of disappointment he felt. Then he spotted her hurrying down a narrow open staircase that ran alongside one wall. She grinned and waved, and like a deep-keeled sailboat that's taken a knockdown, Quinn felt himself righting again. The whole thing couldn't have lasted more than five seconds. He found the intensity of it pretty damn scary.
    In the bright sun that poured into Miracourt, Olivia looked night-and-day different than she had in the candlelight of a drawing room—not as overtly seductive, and yet no less appealing. Chalk it up to the fuzzy sweater and flowing skirt she wore, but somehow she seemed more... straight up-and-down. More normal, more wholesome, more approachable. Or maybe it was her eyes or the way she smiled. Whatever it was, she looked glad and it made him feel good.
    "What do you think?" she asked, turning half way round.
    "Very nice indeed," he answered under his breath, and then he realized she meant the shop.
    The shop was nice, too. He didn't know much about fabric—zip, to be precise—but he knew enough about rich people's taste to know that the stuff around them appealed to it.
    "What does the name mean?" he asked, just to have something to say.
    "Miracourt? It's an old-style French bobbin lace—similar to lille lace." She batted her eyes and added, "I'm sure that makes it all much clearer to you."
    He cocked his head and gave her a penetrating look. "Ohhh, yeah."
    One thing Quinn did remember about her: She never lost her cool. And yet here she was, for the second time in twenty-four hours, with heightened color in those nicely shaped cheekbones of hers. Feeling suddenly confident about the prospects for that nighttime date, he murmured, "So—are we all set?"
    "Let me get my coa t," she said, and off they went.
    T o the drip-drip-drip of melting snow, they strolled past storefronts decked out for the season, with Olivia grading every windo w display they stopped to view.
    "Not enough vertical."
    "Needs a backdrop."
    " Great use of color."
    Window shopping, that's what they were doing. Quinn was utterly charmed by the concept; he'd never done it before. He threw a five-dollar bill into a Salvation Army bucket and thought to himself, I could get used to this. He was especially pleased that Olivia was inclined to saunter. That wasn't the