Leather Bound. Shanna Germain

I saw Stefan in the corner, but he was captured by an overly enthusiastic customer, so I left him to his fate and headed to Leather Bound, armed with a caramel mocha for me and a cinnamon latte for Lily. I smelled like Christmas, all wrapped up with a coffee bow.

      I’d slept fine, but I’d dreamed of sex all night long. Some of it was sex with Kyle and Davian, sometimes both of them at once. Sometimes the woman in the shirtdress was there, and sometimes Lily and sometimes even one or two of my exes. But mostly it seemed I’d dreamed of having sex with a faceless stranger, who then kept turning into Davian or a Davian lookalike. I was never sure.

      Lily hadn’t arrived at Leather Bound by the time I got there, so I set her coffee on the counter, hoping it wouldn’t get too cold, and spent some time giving Webster chin scratches and breakfast before I headed back to my office.

      I needed to tackle two things this morning.

      One, call Kyle.

      OK, wait, three things.

      One, figure out what I was going to say to Kyle.

      Two, call Kyle.

      Three, research Mister Cavanaugh and find out as much as I could about the mysterious man and his equally mysterious book. Yes, I’d turned him down, but I supposed I was like Lily in that way: once something caught my interest, especially something as shiny and intriguing as this, I didn’t let it go easily. Not to mention that I thought I saw him cutting the buttons off a hot girl at the sex store. Yesterday he’d responded to Lily’s comment about L&L with a knowing smirk. ‘I know the place,’ he’d said. If it really was him I’d seen, then he certainly did.

      But first, I should decide what to do about Kyle. Second, I should call him.

      So I sat down at my beloved desk and got ready to do a little research. Because clearly the best way to do the thing you don’t want to do is to tackle something else instead.

      I popped open my laptop and give a couple of light strokes over her keyboard for good luck. Lily says she’s ancient and just needs to be put down, but she’s seen me through a lot of thick and thin, and I get her upgraded every couple of years. She might not even have any original parts by now, but she works like a charm. Mostly.

      ‘Come on, Clementine,’ I whispered. ‘Gimme something good.’

      The internet is everyone’s friend when it comes to finding information, whether you’re trying to find rare books or stalk strangers. But the truth is that most people don’t know how to use it properly, or they find a bit of surface information and figure that’s good enough. My skill is digging deeper, poking into all the little corners of the web to find the hidden books and the dirt that most people don’t even notice.

      I figured it would take me five minutes, maybe ten, to find out everything the world knew about Davian Cavanaugh and his non-existent book.

      Turns out I was wrong.

      I was still digging when Lily showed up twenty minutes later, just in time to open Leather Bound, and I hadn’t found a thing. Not a single mention. These days almost everyone on the internet leaves a trail of some sort, even if it’s accidental. In fact, it’s near impossible to not have at least something about you. Especially with a name like Davian Cavanaugh. If you’re alive in the world with a name that unusual, then the internet knows about it.

      Except that it didn’t seem to.

      Which meant that he’d either given me a fake name, which was seeming more and more like a possibility, or was a super secret spy. If he was a super secret spy, I was definitely changing my mind and taking him as a client. And I was definitely fucking him.

      But I was betting more on the former.

      Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.

      ‘Hey, thanks for the coffee.’ Lily poked her 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.