inside the cover, either, or anywhere that she could discover. No name of the owner, either. A shame, she thought. She might not have been the antiques hound that her mother or Mrs. Gillespie was, but she hadn’t spent a life growing up around them without some of the knowledge of provenance and the like wearing off on her. At least a little.
At the moment, there was more to her curiosity than simply dating the book or the desk it had been stashed in. Not that one necessarily had anything to do with the other. Anyone could have hidden the volume inside the desk at any time over the intervening years. But, though she couldn’t confirm with her mother at the moment, even Mrs. Gillespie had agreed that, as far as she knew, she’d never seen the little antique rolltop before. And given how it had been tucked so far back into the corner of a room used only for storage, and then behind several other large pieces that Holly had had to rearrange to make room for herself as well as do the inventory…who knew how long it had been back there. But, given the dust and location, it had to have been quite some time ago. A decade or more was highly probable, and possibly multiples of that. In fact, for all Holly knew, maybe the little desk had come with the place when her mother had purchased it from Mrs. Haversham almost fifty years back.
She shifted so the natural light illuminated the journal pages better, then eventually shifted back onto the divan the way it was designed to be used. She started reading…and within minutes, everything else faded away and she was engrossed in the unfolding story. A story, that as she continued to read, both moved her…and stunned her. Because the names mentioned in the book weren’t all unfamiliar to her. As the sun set, she pulled the chain on the standing lamp she’d positioned next to the divan and continued reading, without pause.
She’d had no idea how much time had passed until she heard the sleigh bells downstairs. Dammit. She’d never gone down and locked up behind Sean earlier. How long had she been sitting there? She glanced out the window and saw that it was fully nightfall. She heard heavy tread on the stairs and her heart began to race. But it wasn’t simply a reaction to what had happened between them earlier…and what she hoped would happen between them tonight, if she were completely honest.
No, her heart was racing, in part, due to the book laying in her lap. Because the people talked about in this personal journal weren’t just known to Holly…they’d be familiar to Sean as well.
He dangled the take-out box in the open doorway before stepping into view. “Hungry?”
She looked up from the journal she’d been carefully closing, and everything inside her growled. Oh yeah. She was hungry all right. Starved, in fact.
She’d thought it might be awkward, or that she, at least, would probably be awkward, seeing him again after what they’d been doing the last time he was up here. But he was all smiles and easy charm and hot, freshly prepared dinners, and it was like they did this all the time.
If you stay here in Willow Creek…you could do this all the time.
He pulled over a tassled, overstuffed ottoman with a very detailed Santa face embroidered on the top, then shifted her feet and sat down on the edge of the divan, next to her hip. “You know, there’s something weirdly disturbing about having Santa stare at you while you eat.” He put the boxes down on top of the oversized footstool, so all you could see was the velvety red hat and the snowy white beard.
“Tell me about it,” Holly said, shuddering in memory of all the Santas who’d stared at her over the years, and not just at the dinner table. In some ways, it was amazing she hadn’t developed a clownlike phobia about the man. “You know the part that goes ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping’? Yeah, that gave me nightmares for years, because he did actually watch me sleep. Every night. All year long.”
Sean laughed and she loved the natural, full sound of it, like a guy who did it often and openly. It made her feel all kind of warm and fuzzy inside. Which didn’t seem exactly right since she’d just Santa bashed, but she held on to the feeling