The Wrong Kind of Page-Turner
Rain hammered the front windows of Whimsical Pages like it had a personal grudge against the glass, and Emma Carter hummed along with the chaos, utterly unbothered. Thunder rolled somewhere over the rooftops of the city, a low grumble that rattled the teacups on the shelf behind the register, and she just turned up her humming a notch louder, some half-remembered show tune she couldn't name if her life depended on it.
"Byron," she said, hoisting a stack of paperbacks against her hip, "I think tonight calls for something dramatic. Wuthering Heights weather, don't you think?"
The cat in question, a portly orange tabby currently occupying the entire windowsill display meant for staff picks, opened one eye, regarded her with the specific contempt only felines could master, and closed it again.
"Rude," Emma said, though she was smiling. She wedged herself between the Romance and Contemporary Fiction sections — a border that, in her shop, was more of a demilitarized zone than a firm boundary, since half her customers wandered over from one to the other anyway — and began sliding the returned novels back into their rightful slots. A little Nora Roberts here. A slightly dog-eared…