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  The Book Lovers

  Victoria Connelly

  Copyright © 2015 Victoria Connelly

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Victoria Connelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Cover design by J D Smith.

  Published by Cuthland Press

  in association with Notting Hill Press.

  All rights reserved.

  Get a free e-book when you subscribe to Victoria Connelly’s newsletter.

  Contents

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Also by Victoria Connelly

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Free Ebook Offer

  To June Martin with love

  Chapter 1

  ‘You’ve moved where?’ Callie Logan’s mother bellowed down the phone.

  ‘Suffolk,’ Callie said brightly.

  ‘And what on earth is in Suffolk?’

  ‘Owl Cottage.’

  ‘Owl Cottage?’

  ‘My new home,’ Callie said.

  ‘You’ve bought a house?’

  ‘Well, I have to live somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, but buying a house is so final, isn’t it?’ her mother said. ‘I know things haven’t been perfect between you and Piers over the last few months, but isn’t moving to Suffolk a bit drastic? I mean, can’t you give things another go?’

  Callie twisted the simple gold wedding ring around her finger. She’d been trying desperately to get it off, but it seemed to be stuck.

  ‘No, Mum, I can’t give things another go. It’s too late for that. Way too late,’ she said and she heard her mother sighing.

  ‘But I still don’t understand what went wrong!’

  Callie bit her lip. She’d never had a close relationship with either of her parents: they’d had Callie late in life and she’d always been made to feel that she was a rather awkward surprise. So she didn’t feel that she could easily confide in her mother now. She’d only ever been vague with her mother about the failure of her marriage to Piers because she knew that she’d never be able to explain it in a way that her mother would understand. If she was perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure how to explain it to herself.

  ‘It just didn’t work out, okay?’ she said in a voice that had suddenly lost all of its colour.

  ‘All that money on the wedding,’ her mother said with a volley of angry tuts, ‘and it only lasted four years. I don’t know what your father’s going to say.’

  Callie closed her eyes, willing herself not to say anything she’d regret. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said instead.

  ‘Well, don’t expect me and your father to visit you in Norfolk.’

  ‘Suffolk, Mum. I’m in Suffolk.’

  ‘Same difference, isn’t it? It’s still miles from anywhere.’

  Good, Callie thought as she hung up because, more than anything else, she needed to be miles from anywhere.

  Callie Logan should never have married her publisher. That’s where it had all begun to go wrong for her. She’d been perfectly content to be single, happily writing her books in her rented flat on the outskirts of London and going out with friends each weekend, but then Piers Blackmore had appeared on the scene, praising her children’s book to high heaven and simultaneously sweeping her off her feet.

  Perhaps it had been gratitude that had made her marry him because it had been Piers who’d offered her that all-important first book deal. She’d been so desperately hungry to be published as well as just desperately hungry after living on tinned soup and cereal bars for so many years whilst fighting off all the rejections from publishers and juggling several temping jobs that barely paid the rent.

  ‘I’m going to make you a star,’ he’d promised the twenty-five-year-old, his bright eyes shining and his mouth curved into that movie star grin of his which had knocked the very breath from her body. How charming he had been. She’d never met anyone like him before and she’d fallen for him hard. But the cracks had appeared very quickly.

  Callie took a deep breath. She didn’t want to think about all that now. Instead, she looked around the little Suffolk home she’d only just moved in to. The cottage was a perfect jumble of her possessions which mainly consisted of a great number of books. In fact, her cottage seemed to be entirely furnished completely with books. That was all Owl Cottage was really, she thought: books and beams. There were even books on the beams where they were nice and low and not too undulating.

  She smiled in satisfaction and it was then that her eye caught a little plastic doll peeping from behind a cushion. It was the heroine from her series of books for girls which had been a runaway success, spawning a TV series and rather a lot of tacky plastic merchandise. Piers had kept his promise about making her famous, she thought. If only he’d kept his promise about making her happy.

  She shook her head to dispel her negative thoughts because they had no place in her beautiful new home.

  ‘I’m going to be happy here,’ she told herself as she walked through the cosy book-lined rooms. ‘Happy and single.’

  It hadn’t been as much of a wrench leaving London and her friends as she’d thought it would be. Other then the disaster that was her marriage, she’d enjoyed her time in the capital but, after starting proceedings for a divorce, she’d felt she needed a dramatic change and had fallen in love with Suffolk on a visit in the spring. It had just felt so right.

  Callie took a little tour of her cottage now, gazing with affection at the bookshelves that the previous owner had squeezed into every available space. She remembered noticing that most of Mrs Morrison’s collection had been gardening and cookery books with just a little line of fiction here and there. Callie had been lucky that old Mrs Morrison had been a fellow book lover and had agreed to leave a number of the bookcases as part of the sale.

  ‘My daughter’s told me that I can’t have more than two boxes of books,’ she’d told Callie, causing her to gasp. Just two boxes? It was unthinkable and yet Mrs Morrison seemed resigned.

  ‘Some of these have been my constant companions for decades now. Some even predate my husband. But life moves on and old friends are often forced to leave us.’

  Callie couldn’t bear to think about parting with any of her books because they were very much her old friends too, and she looked at them now with affection. There were the rows of tattered Enid Blyton paperbacks and the much-loved pony books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. Callie smiled as she remembered how her school friends had been divided into those who read romance and those who read pony stories and, thinking about her disastrous marriage, Callie now realised that she should have kept on reading the pony books into adulthood and not graduated to romance novels at all.

  Twenty-nine was, perhaps, a little young to swear off love, she realised, but her bruised hear
t wasn’t up to coping with another relationship and she’d promised herself that this move was going to be a whole new her. She was Callie Logan, writer, and she was going to dedicate herself to her books and readers – they deserved only the best from her after all their support over the years.

  The only trouble was that Callie seemed to have dried up as far as inspiration was concerned. In fact, she hadn’t been able to write a single decent thing since she’d left London.

  Strange misgivings plagued her. What if she couldn’t write in the countryside? She might have been brought up in a little village in Oxfordshire but, ever since she’d left home for university, she’d been in London, and that’s where she’d begun her writing career. Despite the constant noise from traffic, road works and neighbours, Callie’s words had poured onto the page in an effortless stream idea after idea filling notebooks and her fingers flying over the keyboard as she endeavoured to get everything down. There had been a brief period of adjustment when she’d moved into Piers’ flat. He’d given her the third bedroom, clearing out the mass of gym equipment that he’d spent a small fortune on, but which he never had time to use, and buying her a corner desk and a brand-new computer.

  ‘It’s my wedding present to you,’ he’d told her when he’d first shown it to her and Callie had loved it. It hadn’t been the most romantic of gifts, she thought. Rather like the four-day honeymoon in Capri, squeezed between two important meetings he’d had in London. But that was Piers – ever practical and only romantic if he had the time.

  Now, her desk was an old pine table in the second bedroom, overlooking her tiny front garden and the green at Newton St Clare. It was a beautiful village with no more than thirty houses, most of which were pre-nineteenth-century. Callie would never forget the first time she’d driven down the bluebell-lined lane that had led from the estate agents in Castle Clare, the nearest town. They say that there are pockets of the English countryside where you could easily think you’d travelled back in time at least fifty years and Newton St Clare was one of those places with its tiny flint and brick church, its graveyard wild with cow parsley and campion, its thatched cottages and old Tudor manor house sitting behind neat yew hedges.

  Callie had panicked and had looked at the details of Owl Cottage which the estate agent had given her. Could she really afford to live in such a place? The answer had been a surprising yes. In fact, the place seemed incredibly cheap compared to the overinflated prices of property in London. Yes, the thatched cottage was small. You would have been able to fit at least two Owl Cottages inside Piers’s deluxe London flat, but Callie loved it all the more because of that. She loved its simple cosiness and the fact that, even at her modest five feet and three inches, she could touch all of the ceilings.

  She had parked her car, opened the little wooden gate into a perfect cottage garden filled with roses, lavender and honeysuckle, and had just stood there, drinking in the scent, the sight and the silence.

  She stood there so long that the owner had stepped outside.

  ‘Are you here to view the cottage?’ she’d asked.

  Callie had nodded. ‘Yes please!’ she’d said and old Mrs Morrison had laughed.

  ‘I’m so glad you really like the place,’ she’d said after Callie’s viewing.

  ‘Like it? I love it!’ Callie had said, hearing the reprimanding voice of Piers in her head.

  ‘Don’t tell her you love it! You should be finding fault with it so you can knock the price down.’ That’s what he would have said, but Callie wasn’t like that. If she loved something, she said so.

  ‘And you plan on actually living here?’ Mrs Morrison had said.

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Well, you get so many people buying these little places as holiday homes or investments and they don’t really live in them at all.’

  ‘But a place like this has to be lived in,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t think I could bear to leave for a single minute.’

  Callie had seen bright tears swimming in Mrs Morrison’s eyes when she’d said that.

  ‘And I could only bear to part with it for somebody who truly loves it,’ she had told her.

  So, the deal had been done and Callie was now the very proud owner of a seventeenth-century thatched cottage with sloping floors, an inglenook fireplace and more beams than she had ever seen in her life.

  Owl Cottage. How she loved its name as well as everything about it. As she’d slowly got to know Suffolk, she’d become a little obsessed with the names of country cottages, noting how so many were named after popular animals and plants like Badger Cottage and Nightingale, Rose Cottage, Apple Tree and Jasmine. Her writer’s mind pondered the fact that you never saw a Rat Cottage or a Nettle Cottage, and how lovely would Rose Bay Willow Herb Cottage sound even though the plant was considered a weed?

  Yes, she was blissfully happy in her new home – happier than she had been in years. So why did she have writer’s block? Did complacency breed stagnation? Surely she hadn’t been there long enough to be stagnating? She certainly wasn’t bored. In fact, she had plenty to do even if she couldn’t write, she thought, picking up the old satchel-style handbag she’d bought at a car boot sale almost a decade ago and which had wound up Piers something terrible.

  ‘Really, Callie!’ he’d complained. ‘Let me buy you a nice designer bag.’

  But Callie loved her practical satchel and got a perverse thrill from taking it with her whenever they went out together, seeing the despairing little looks that Piers would give it. If she hadn’t hidden it at the back of her wardrobe each night, she felt sure he would have chucked it into the Thames long ago. He could be such a snob sometimes, she thought as she got ready to go out.

  Owl Cottage didn’t have a driveway, but the quiet country lane it was on allowed for ample parking and, stepping out into the golden September sunshine, Callie got into her car and sat for a moment, drinking in the scene. It was still so strange to be there and not in the centre of London.

  ‘But what if I can’t write here?’ she asked the empty car.

  She’d written nine books during her time in London. There’d been several standalone novels as well as the Perdita series which had been the runaway success with the TV show and everything. The bookshops of London had displayed her titles in their windows and Callie had given talks, taught workshops, signed books and generally pretended to be a celebrity. She hadn’t liked it, though. It had been a strange experience for her to be stared at and talked about when all she’d wanted to do was to lock herself away in the little study overlooking the river and write the next book.

  But then, as her marriage had fallen apart, her inspiration for the Perdita stories had dried up and, although she’d managed to buy Owl Cottage from the proceeds of her books to date, she dreaded to think of what would happen in the future if she didn’t write any more books.

  Callie sighed. If she didn’t find inspiration soon, she was going to run out of funds and her country idyll would be well and truly over.

  Chapter 2

  Callie tried to put thoughts of impending penury out of her mind as she drunk in the landscape on the short drive to Castle Clare. She felt sure the Suffolk artists Gainsborough and Constable would still recognise it with its high hedgerows, gently rolling hills and the enormous expanse of sky.

  As she entered Castle Clare, she was struck by the fact that it had more of the feeling of a village than a town as its few streets were wonderfully compact and there were floral displays everywhere despite the lateness of the season. Castle Clare, it seemed, was the kind of town that didn’t need an excuse to bring out the hanging baskets.

  The ruins of a castle dominated the little town, gazing down over the winding streets like a benevolent guardian. There were pubs, hairdressers, banks, a newsagents, a bakery and a cafe, a library, a hardware store that looked as if it stocked absolutely everything a home could possibly need and a little bit more, a gift shop, two antique shops as well as a three-storey antiques cent
re, and the estate agents which had sold her Owl Cottage. But, what Castle Clare was really famous for was its bookshops and it was one of the secondhand bookshops that Callie was heading to. She often found that a good browse around a few shelves usually got the cogs whirring and sincerely hoped that that would be the case now.

  She knew that there were several bookshops in Castle Clare, most of them run by the Nightingale family, and she soon found the street she was after, just off Market Square. There was the shop which sold new books, its window full of the latest bestselling fiction, a handful of gardening books and a few titles promoting the local area. On the other side of the road was the smaller children’s bookshop and Callie knew that she was going to lose herself for many an hour in there, but it was the secondhand bookshop which caught her attention with its old-fashioned shopfront painted in a deep green and its large bay window stuffed full of colourful books. The name “Nightingale’s” was written in gold above the door. It was the same with the other two bookshops – just a simple “Nightingale’s” because it was obvious what they were selling and everybody for miles around knew about the family and the trio of perfect shops.

  What a treat it would be to have these three bookshops on her very doorstep, she thought. Not that she hadn’t had plenty of bookshops to choose from when she’d lived in London, but those stores had promoted few titles outside the latest celebrity biography or the choice of the newest popular book club. No, in Callie’s eyes, nothing could beat a proper independent bookshop where the owner had hand-picked the books through love rather than having to stock a limited list of bestsellers pushed by the publishers.

  She opened the green painted door of the secondhand bookshop and smiled as an old-fashioned bell tinkled merrily. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard such a joyous sound. For a moment, she just stood on the wooden floorboards, drinking in the silence and the wonderful aroma of secondhand books. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that could compete with the all-enveloping feeling of warmth and comfort that came from the scent of an old bookshop. It was a kind of mental sanctuary and Callie felt as if she had found her true home.