Getting It Right (The Atticus Chronicles) Read online

  Getting It Right

  Book 1 of the Atticus Chronicles

  Jane Kent

  Copyright

  Getting It Right

  July 2013 (Originally published February 24, 2009 by Whispers Publishing)

  Copyright © 2013 Elizabeth Copeman

  Cover illustration copyright © 2009 Rene Walden/BG Designs

  ISBN 978-0-9920024-0-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system-except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or on the Web-without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  Published by: Elizabeth Copeman/Jane Kent [email protected]

  Dedication

  To my family and friends who believed I could long before I did.

  Love you.

  And to Suz and Laurie who taught me everything I know about creating believable characters. If the lessons didn’t take, the fault is in the student, not the teachers.

  Content

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Other Books by Jane Kent

  Chapter One

  “I’m staging a revolution.”

  PJ James paused in her unpacking of a box of Christmas decorations and stared, eyebrows raised, at her best friend over the top of her glasses, which, as usual, had slipped down her nose.

  “That’s going to be your New Year’s Resolution? To stage a revolution?” She held up a garland-decorated hand in a dramatic stop-the-presses gesture. “Ohhh, wait, wait! Yes, I can see your business cards now. Blood red with black lettering, naturally. Skye Hagens, Dictator. Which government of which country are you planning to overthrow, by the way?”

  Rubbing her achy right leg, PJ glanced out the frosty mullioned windows at the front of Words to Live By, her bookstore-cum-tearoom. She wrinkled her nose at the softly falling snow. “Someplace tropical, I hope?”

  “Not that kind of revolution, smartass.” Skye popped the last bite of her chocolate shortbread cookie into her mouth, then dabbed crumbs off her perfectly manicured fingers before tossing her wadded up napkin at PJ in mock pique.

  “Mmmmm,” she moaned after swallowing the mouthful of cookie, distracted from her proposed revolution. “Oh, my God, PJ, these cookies are to die for. Awesomely orgasmic. You’ll sell out every day from now until Christmas. Any other new tearoom recipes you want me to try out?”

  “Not until next week and those will be…” PJ let a dramatic pause hang in the air. “Ginger cookies made with freshly grated ginger instead of powdered.” She started unraveling the evergreen garland she’d pulled out of the box and brought Skye back to their original conversation by asking, “So, about this revolution of yours?”

  “You asked me if I was making a New Year’s Resolution this year and that’s my answer. I’m revolting. No resolutions for me. I suck at them. Too much pressure. They never work out and I end up feeling miserable and guilty. Nope, no more resolutions for this girl.”

  PJ snorted. “Well, maybe if you resolved to do something practical and attainable for a change, you might be able to live up to your own expectations without undue pressure. A resolution to win a million dollars in the lottery is just setting yourself up for failure. And a June wedding when you’re not even dating anyone at New Year’s is a recipe for disaster. Talk about pressure! That was expecting some pretty fast work, even for you.”

  “Even for me? Thanks a lot, James. You make me sound like some kind of slutty man-eater. And I could have gotten married last June.”

  “Yeah, if you hadn’t come to your senses and realized you were condemning yourself to life with Brad the Bozo just for the sake of meeting your turning thirty deadline and your stupid New Year’s Resolution. And don’t give me that whipped puppy look.”

  She eyed Skye’s stunning face, long naturally blonde hair and svelte-but-with-curves-in-all-the-right-places body with envy. No matter how many new recipes she tried out on Skye, the woman never gained weight. It was unnatural. “You know what I meant. It’s not you. It’s them. Men. Thinking with their collective small brains. You’re a guy magnet. You walk into a room and every guy in the place makes a beeline straight for you, drool hanging from their lips, panting to be your sex slave for life. Or wanting you to be theirs.”

  PJ waited a beat, then grinned and added, “That’s why I hang out with you. All those rejects to choose from.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Yeah, but you love me anyway.”

  “Yeah, I do.” Skye plucked the last shortbread cookie, her sixth of the night, from the plate and gave PJ an evil, this-is-payback grin before biting into the cookie.

  PJ sighed as she watched Skye munch. Life was so unfair. PJ might as well just smear a pound of butter on her hips to be absorbed through osmosis because that’s where the two measly cookies she’d eaten were going to go anyway.

  “So,” Skye asked between bites and groans of bliss, “what about you? Any resolutions yet?”

  “Well, I’m having that laser eye surgery in the New Year which, by the way, is why I’m wearing my glasses. I can’t wear my contacts for six weeks beforehand.” She shrugged. “So I guess my resolution is to do something for myself.”

  “Nuh-uh. Doesn’t count. You just happen to be having the surgery in the New Year because that was the first appointment open. And don’t think I’ve forgotten your resolution last year. You flopped as badly as I did, though I will concede that bad luck had a hand in it. We should make a pact. No resolutions for either of us.”

  PJ looked at her thoughtfully. Maybe Skye was on to something.

  Last year, PJ had resolved to lose weight and get healthy so she’d joined a health club. And, sad to say, she’d been motivated enough to cross the threshold all of twice during the month of January and both those instances had been during the first week.

  In February, she’d slipped on an icy manhole cover and broken her right leg in three places, effectively ending any exercise outside of physical therapy for several months. By then, she’d lost the minimal enthusiasm she’d had to go to the health club in the first place.

  She also had a slight limp now and could no longer wear any of the forty-five pairs of “do me” shoes she owned, all with heels higher than two inches. And she was five pounds heavier than she’d been last Christmas and five hundred dollars poorer thanks to the health club membership she rarely used!

  The year before last, PJ had vowed to spend more quality time with her parents and brother and then she’d gotten the job opportunity of her dreams, the one she’d resolved to land three years ago; Words to Live By had fallen into her lap and she’d moved from British Columbia to Ontario, three thousand miles away from her family.

  And not only had she not gotten a job using at least one of her dual degrees in English Literature and Business Management the year she’d resolved to get it, she’d been fired from her definitely-not-a-dream-job at a bookstore chain when they’d cut costs by downsizing and she’d been the last person hired and, therefore, the first person fired. Okay, fine, they’d calle
d it a lay off but the result had been the same, no job.

  She’d worked in a franchised coffee shop for the next ten months to make ends meet. Both jobs had been great experience for running her own bookstore-plus-tearoom but neither had done much for her savings account.

  And four years ago she’d been head over heels in love and her New Year’s Resolution had been to get married and start her own family. That was all well and good until her cheating, waste-of-space jerk of a boyfriend of five freaking years had dumped her on Valentine’s Day. The loser had married to her now ex-best friend by Labor Day that same year and been anticipating fatherhood by Thanksgiving.

  Good thing she’d never smoked. God only knows what would have happened to a resolution to quit. She’d probably be up to three packs a day by now and dragging an oxygen tank around as an accessory.

  “You’re on,” she said to Skye. “No resolutions this year.”

  “I’m going to have a No Resolutions New Year’s Eve par…” Skye stopped abruptly, then bounced up out of the big comfy chair in the homey seating arrangement she’d been sharing with PJ and pranced over to the Christmas book display.

  She plucked a book entitled Auld Lang Syne and Other New Year’s Customs, a book she just happened to have done some of the research for, off a pile and whirled to face PJ. “No, better yet, I’m going to have a combination No-Resolutions-Good-Luck New Year’s Eve party. All the New Year’s good luck traditions and superstitions from cultures around the world. You know, Hogmanay, first footing, dropping molten lead in cold water, eating ring-shaped foods?” She waggled her eyebrows at PJ. “Wearing red underwear.”

  “You’re nuts, you know that? And you’re waving a red flag in the face of fate. If you think resolutions are doomed for disaster, what do you think mocking the traditions of the entire world is going to do?”

  “Spoilsport. Ah, come on, Peej,” she wheedled, giving PJ her patented Puss ‘n Boots pleading big-eyed look. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Hmmm.” PJ pretended to think about it. “Well, I don’t have any other plans for New Year’s and I really want to see how you pull off the molten lead thing. What do you need me to do to help?”

  “Bake round food,” Skye answered promptly. “Martha Stewart, I am not.”

  PJ laughed. “Okay. Now, are you going to help with these decorations?” She cocked a teasing eyebrow at Skye. “Or did you just come here to eat?”

  Skye narrowed her eyes at PJ. “Your cooking is the only reason I let you hang around with me, you know.” She pulled a matching garland to PJ’s out of the box and started untangling it. “Why did you have to wait until two weeks before Christmas to do this anyway? Everybody else had their decorations up over a month ago.”

  “Well, considering the theme of your planned party, you should appreciate my reason; it’s tradition in my family. We like to leave them up until Twelfth Night, which means until the evening of January fifth, for luck. If I’d put them up earlier, I’d be sick of them by then. Besides, I’ve had the outside of the store and the windows decorated for a month.”

  “Humph” was Skye’s only answer, and then a triumphant “ta-da” as her garland unwound to its full nine feet while PJ’s was still a twisted lump of green boughs.

  “Where do you want this?”

  “Start at the windows and swag it along the top of that wall of bookshelves, I think.”

  “Okay.” Skye poked through the box of decorations and pulled out a smaller see-through box. “These burgundy and gold bows will look gorgeous at the top of each swag.”

  PJ watched as Skye crossed the polished wooden floor of the shop, the garland trailing behind her, before letting her gaze sweep over the rest of the beautifully renovated old-fashioned looking shop with appreciation and a little disbelief.

  Even after a year and a half, she still wanted to pinch herself to make sure it was all real. And all hers. The charming Victorian building with its main floor shop and two apartments above, in a lakeside tourist town an hour and a half north of Toronto, had been an unexpected windfall, the legacy of a great-aunt.

  In Great-aunt Phelia’s heyday, it had been a prosperous tearoom and not-so-prosperous curiosity shop called Montague’s Emporium, known simply as “the Emporium” to the locals, who still called it that, despite PJ’s ownership and name change.

  PJ had expanded the successful tearoom to include the rose covered veranda out front in the summer, and gradually turned the curiosity shop into a used bookstore that also carried the top current releases and a few specialty books. But the majority of her book business was done over the internet, fulfilling orders for used romance novels and specializing in tracking down hard to find books for her customers, and she was becoming quite well known.

  The business was keeping her increasingly busy. She had one full-time employee in the bookstore and two in the tearoom, plus some part-timers in the summer. And she had Skye as a sometimes employee. Well, no, employee wasn’t the right word, since Skye wouldn’t take any money, insisting she was helping as a friend, usually giving up one evening a week to help PJ fill her internet orders and get the books ready for mailing—and tonight to help decorate for Christmas.

  Skye was an independent researcher who worked part-time out of her winterized cottage just outside of town and part-time from her condo in Toronto, depending on the needs of her project of the moment.

  She’d started out doing research for anybody about anything but she’d somehow ended up with an impressive client list of writers, particularly historical romance authors who kept her hopping most of the time researching obscure historical details.

  Skye had come to the grand opening of Words to Live By, along with everybody else in the small town, and she and PJ had become instant friends, the coincidence of the two of them choosing to live in the same small town, both specializing in the romance novel industry, albeit in different ways, not escaping either.

  PJ smiled to herself. This gorgeous shop really was hers. She’d worked hard to make it what it was and she was proud of herself. She pulled in a deep breath of satisfaction and the tantalizing aroma of the spiced rum and eggnog she and Skye had been drinking all evening filled her nostrils.

  “Pssst, PJ!” Skye’s loud stage whisper from over by the window, her aggrieved tone indicating that this was not the first she’d called PJ’s name, startled PJ out of her reverie. “Here he comes!”

  “What? Who?”

  Skye looked at PJ as if she’d lost her mind and rolled her eyes. “Your tenant. Sebastian St. John. Who else?” She didn’t say it but PJ could hear the implied “duh” at the end of that question.

  Skye had turned back to look out the window and was practically drooling. “Oh, my God, that man is definitely eye candy!”

  “Too bad his disposition isn’t as sweet,” PJ grumbled under her breath. But she still stood, draped in her garland, and crossed the room to stand beside Skye. Skye was right. Sebastian St. John seriously had it going on. She and Skye had been surreptitiously checking him out—okay, fine, ogling him, ever since PJ had rented him her empty apartment two weeks ago.

  Just because PJ’s opinion of men was pretty low didn’t mean she didn’t still like to window shop. That probably made her as shallow as the men she’d just accused of thinking with their small brains. She gave a mental shrug. So call her a hypocrite. At least she wasn’t compelled to hit on every attractive man who crossed her path.

  “Still being Mr. Non-communicative-grunting-Neanderthal?” Skye asked.

  “And then some. Add cat-hating Scrooge with no sense of humor.”

  They watched as St. John crossed the town square. The snow had stopped falling and they could see his powerful, hard-packed muscles bunching and flexing even though his jacket. He wasn’t wearing gloves and he paused for a second in a pool of light under a streetlamp to blow into his cupped fingers.

  His gaze roamed leisurely over the park and street before he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his black leather bomber jack
et and continued across the street to the shop. He moved like some kind of prowling cat, all sleek, rippling muscle and sinewy strength.

  PJ drew in a quick breath and let it out in a slow, silent whistle. She heard Skye breath out a quiet “Damn, he’s like walking sex.”

  That Sebastian St. John was. Six feet two inches of denim-and-leather-clad walking sex. Early to mid thirties, dark spiky hair, laser blue eyes, straight nose, sculpted mouth with a slighter fuller lower lip and cheekbones a supermodel would kill for.

  And if that wasn’t enough, he had perfect teeth and his smile, when he chose to use it, which was rarely in her experience, was downright wicked sexy, complete with a dimple. That smile was guaranteed to melt a woman’s bones and make her think of twisting naked bodies and tumbled sheets. And it made PJ, who tended to view most men, especially men as good-looking as St. John, as lying, unfaithful pond scum, apply that unflattering opinion to her renter.

  St. John had reached the walk leading up to the wide veranda skirting the store and she and Skye scooted back from the window at the same time, not wanting to be caught staring stupidly like a couple of moon-eyed, star struck teenagers. It was a little late to worry about it now though, backlit as they were by the store lights. For all they knew, St. John could have been watching them gawk at him since he’d started across the park.

  PJ grabbed the other end of the garland hanging limply from Skye’s hand and they turned in unison to hold it up to the bookshelves while sneaking peeks over their shoulders.

  St. John was coming up the short walk and PJ saw the glint of keys in the shaft of light falling over his shoulder from the streetlight as he pulled his right hand out of his pocket. The keys slipped out of his hand and, with a curse, he turned, bending over to pick them up. Giving Skye and her a perfect view of his tight, perfect tush. Damn, he was fine!

  They watched in silence until he disappeared from sight up the three steps to the building. They heard his footfalls cross the veranda.