Templar's Code

CHAPTER 45

“So this is what Shakespeare meant by ‘masking the business from the common eye,’ ” Marnie Pritchard complained aloud, frustrated. Squinting, she tried to bring the computerized spread sheet into clearer focus.

Still blurry.

Expediency trumping vanity, she opened the top drawer on the inlaid mahogany desk and snatched her prescription reading glasses. While Botox injections, monthly highlights at Daniel Galvin’s to cover the gray, and daily workouts at Gymbox kept Father Time somewhat at bay, there wasn’t much she could do about her deteriorating eyesight.

Oh, the vagaries of middle age.

Since Rubin was hopeless with numbers, she handled all of the financial accounts. Recently she’d computerized their outdated record system, Woolf’s Antiquarian having officially gone green. No more file cabinets full of dogeared vouchers and yellowing slips of paper. The boxed records were currently stacked in the upstairs stockroom awaiting pickup by one of those data storage companies.

Once again, she’d proved herself a model of professional efficiency.

Although in the nearly forty years that she’d known Rubin Woolf, she’d never had to prove herself to him. He’d always accepted her as is. No impossible expectations. No buyer’s remorse.

So different from her adopted parents, Rex and Lynda Pritchard.

When the pricey fertility treatments at the Swedish clinic failed to bring about the desired result, the barren couple returned to their native England. Whereupon they opted for the next best thing—adopting a blond-haired, blue-eyed four-year-old orphan named Marnie. A ready-made daughter. Old enough that Lynda didn’t have to bother with soiled nappies but young enough to still mold in their own image.

Or so they thought.

Imagine their surprise, and keen disappointment, when little Marnie turned out to be an introverted child, afraid of the dark, prone to screaming fits, and only able to speak in monosyllabic, barely intelligible phrases. Hardly the sort of child to make one beam. Well, Lynda, darling, what did you expect? The child was named after a character in a Hitchcock film. Fortunately for the Pritchards, they proved the fertility doctors wrong, Lynda giving birth to a scrunch-faced baby girl two years after the lamentable adoption. Soon thereafter the Pritchards began referring to Marnie as their adopted daughter, presumably to distinguish her from their biological pride and joy, the aptly named Felicity.

Relegated to second best, Marnie withdrew even more. Until she met her next-door neighbor Rubin Woolf. Five years older, he had funny hair that stuck straight up from his scalp at odd angles and wore thick Coke-bottle glasses that magnified his brown eyes, making him appear as though he were in a perpetual state of wide-eyed wonder. Like her, Rubin had a less-than-perfect family life. Without the buffers of adulthood to contend with, they immediately recognized each other for what they were, kindred spirits. Rubin, who had a precocious love of books, taught her to read. Soon they were performing Shakespeare plays in the back garden, complete with costumes and painted scenery. Her parents were delighted that “the little Jew boy” had managed the impossible. Although it didn’t escape Marnie’s notice that Mummy and Daddy still referred to her as their adopted daughter.

For the next five years, with her playmate Rubin at her side, Marnie continued to blossom. Until her parents realized that the little Jew boy had become a teenager who, they feared, had an unnatural attraction to eleven-year-old Marnie. In short order, calls were made, bags were packed, and before Marnie realized what was happening, she was shipped off to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Where she spent the next seven years imprisoned at one of England’s finest boarding schools.

By the time she was paroled from college, she’d acquired a haughty manner and a biting sense of humor. The best armor a girl could have. Particularly a girl making her way in London. Five feet ten inches tall, and blessed with a fashionably thin frame, Marnie soon found work as a fitting model for the avant-garde designer Vivienne Westwood. The uninhibited excess of ’80s London—couture, clubbing, and cocaine—nurtured her inner wild child; Marnie running with a very fast crowd. But as the bright lights around her began to extinguish—an anorexic model friend dying from a sudden heart attack, a flatmate tragically discovering what happens to bad boys who share needles—Marnie became disenchanted with the glam life.

And just like that, she packed it all in.

Steering a new course, she finagled a position with a charity-events planner. It was at a fund-raiser for the St. Stephens AIDS Trust that she ran into her long-lost friend Rubin Woolf. The rapport was immediate. And strong. As though the decade just passed had come and gone in the proverbial blink. Except Rubin’s hair was now spiky all over and he’d traded the Coke bottles for an ultra-hip pair of I. M. Pei-style glasses. He mentioned that having inherited the family house in Stanmore, he’d promptly sold it, using the proceeds to open an antiquarian bookshop in Cecil Court. Would she like to work for him? He needed an educated assistant with a bit of flash to chat up the male clientele. Some of the more valuable volumes could fetch upward of thirty thousand pounds.

If he’d asked her to set sail on HMS Bounty, she would have readily agreed.

Rubin’s estranged lover, Regina, had always been a tad bit jealous of their relationship, mistakenly thinking it was a sexual attraction. Simply put, it wasn’t an attraction. It was a bond. Different kettle altogether. And the reason why they’d never once slept together.

Over the years she and Rubin had weathered many a summer storm—his prostate cancer, her decade-long affair with a married man. Weight gains. Lost friends. Shaky finances. Lost faith. He held her hand when she’d had the abortion. She was at his side for the annual PET scan. They cried for the one and celebrated the other.

She and Rubin had now been together longer than most spouses stay married.

Admittedly there were times—usually when she saw a couple like Peter Willoughby-Jones and Edie Miller who, if not bound for happily ever after, were on track for a few good years—that she regretted the path not taken. She’d never married. She had no children. Had never even owned a dog.

From Blitz kid to woman of a certain age. Proverbial blink.

“You mustn’t brood. It’s not allowed,” she chastised.

Hearing the shop bell merrily tinkle, Marnie yanked off her reading glasses, stowing them in the desk drawer. Her movements well practiced, she stood up and smoothed a hand over her chin-length blond bob. She then checked her Jil Sander sheath for any stray pieces of lint, Rubin’s bit of flash ready to take the stage.

The customer stood at a bookcase, his back to her. She quickly sized him up. Hugo Boss jacket. Black leather messenger bag. John Varvatos calfskin boots. Not their typical customer.

“Good afternoon. Just browsing or are you looking for something specific?”

He slowly turned in her direction. “I’m looking for a volume of love poems.”

My God, he’s beautiful. Like a young Johnny Depp. And that accent. To die for.

“Perhaps you should try the public library,” she retorted. Uncharacteristically snippy, she suspected it had something to do with the fact that she was old enough to be the beautiful young man’s mother.

And that realization incited a tumult, the kind she hadn’t experienced since childhood, suddenly hit with a burst of gut-twisting insecurity. Twenty years ago she would have taken great delight in making this beautiful young man beg for her phone number. On your knees, boy. Proverbial blink.

The beautiful man took several steps in her direction. He came to a standstill less than an arm’s span from where she stood. Blatantly invading her personal space.

He winsomely smiled. “I’m too transparent, I fear.” “Absolutely see-through.” Even as she said it, Marnie wondered at his game. He’d just transmitted a sonar-strength vibe wrapped in a come-hither smile. But why?

Could it be that he was one of those men who actually preferred older women?

At that thought, she felt a small dribble of confidence.

“You do know that you’re an angel.”

“Ah, yes. ‘May she grow in Heavenly light,’ ” Marnie flippantly replied.

His smile broadened. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

“I very much doubt that.” Particularly given the fact that she’d quoted the Cheltenham school motto.

“Dine with me this evening.” He stepped even closer. “Please.”

Marnie finally deigned to return the smile, her confidence fully restored.

“Perhaps.”