Halos by Kristen Heitzmann Page B

took off the jacket, and set it behind Steve’s desk with the sack. She didn’t see him in the store. Was he hiding again? She went through the back doorway and found him taping half a dozen mailing boxes by the door.
    She leaned on the steel shelf along the wall. “I thought maybe you were hiding again.”
    He turned, focused his gaze on her sweater, then raised it to her face. “You got that for twenty bucks?”
    “Actually ten, for being new in town and green-tag day.”
    Steve turned back to the box and stretched the tape over the seam. “Stacie felt sorry for you.”
    That stung. “Must be the Pity Me sign on my forehead.”
    He straightened. “More likely she did it to spite Amanda.”
    “How do you know it was Amanda’s?”
    He didn’t answer, just said, “It looks nice on you.”
    “Thanks.” But she wasn’t going to leave it at that. “You must know her.”
    “Oh yeah.” He gripped an armful of books and stood up.
    “A piranha?”
    “The school marm.”
    Alessi laughed. “That was good. I wouldn’t have guessed you witty.”
    He stopped and cocked his head. “Just humbug Scrooge?”
    “More like Heathcliff. With a gripe against the world.”
    He studied her a moment. “I presume you mean Bronte’s Heathcliff, not the fat ugly cat.”
    She laughed again. “Yes, I meant Emily’s timeless character.”
    He stacked the boxes and pushed past her toward his desk.
    “Are those orders?” She motioned toward the boxes he’d left.
    “Yep.” He circled around to his computer.
    “Rare books?”
    “Moderately.” He sat.
    She looked around for something to do. “Are you getting lots of orders for Christmas?”
    “Yes. I still have quite a few to locate and process.”
    She leaned a hip on his desk. “How do you find them?”
    He glanced up. “I have a special database I’ve built up. Actually, my father started it and joined with people around the world with collections like ours.” His attention and his fingers went back to his work.
    “Like us, they’re constantly on the lookout for estates and collections becoming available. Then we list what we’ve acquired and, when someone needs a certain tome, we search each other’s stock and make a deal.”
    It touched her that he still included his deceased father in the ownership. “That’s a great setup. I wonder what Ed would have thought of it.”
    “Ed?” He looked up again, his fingers pausing on the keys.
    “The man I worked for.”
    “Your best friend who had a stroke.”
    Her throat tightened a little at his tone. “Yes. Sometimes people wanted some hard-to-find title, and he’d search the Internet, but he didn’t have much luck.”
    “You have to know where to look.”
    The little bell jingled on the door and Alessi turned. A very shapely woman entered. Her red cable-knit sweater had what must be a mink collar around her ivory neck and was belted at the waist. Diamonds the size of her earlobes glittered through strands of coifed platinum hair. Her lips matched her sweater, with a glamour dot of gloss centered on her bottom lip, visible to the back of the store. Her eyes were a little narrowly placed, but she extended them a good distance with an artful liner pencil. In Palm Beach she would have been another beautiful face; in Charity she looked gaudy.
    Alessi started forward but made it only past the first case from the back. “Hi. May I …”
    The woman turned and stared. “That’s my … Where did you get that sweater?”
    “You must be Amanda.” She said it loudly enough for Steve to make his retreat.
    But Amanda was quick. No lingering over racks for her. She swept past on a gale and caught him rising from his chair. “There you are. I heard you were back.”
    “Just last night.”
    She stood her red nails on his desk like soldiers at attention. “I will not take no for an answer.”
    He finished standing and pushed the chair in. “No to what?”
    “I insist you have Christmas at my house. No more