Fearless (Dartmoor, #1)

by Lauren Gilley

Five a.m. was a blank-faced, indigo wall, trying to press her back into the house, into bed. Five a.m. didn’t want to be messed with or questioned. It wasn’t the insidious shifting shadow miasma of midnight. It was an angry schoolmarm that didn’t expect to be challenged.

Wherever she was, whichever city or state, whatever mood she was in, there was nothing like a book store to fill her up with happiness.

In this shop, she didn’t have to slog through the double-spaced, fast-read novels that leapt off the center displays in the chain bookstores. Here was where she found fat paperbacks with curling covers, cramped print, and coffee stains on the edges of the pages. Here were her favorites from the nineties, the lyrical novels that redefined genres. Here was where she stumbled across faded hardbacks with handwritten dedications in the fronts, that collection of Kipling poems dedicated to Martha, dated 1917. Fourth Down smelled of ink and dusty paper, collapsing bindings and musty cardboard covers. Dust motes swirled in big sprightly columns in the narrow shafts of sunlight that came in through the high windows. It was a magic place: books on shelves, on stools, in stacks on the floor, spread out in heaps on tables, piled to the ceiling between the windows.