Between the Pages - Lauren Baker Page 0,2

well-tailored suits. He looked tall, too, towering over Mayor Bloomberg in a picture taken at some City Hall function, and intimidating as hell despite his relative youth.

"Gotta admit the guy's hot," Natalie said with a sly elbow to the ribs, and Emmy laughed.

"Yeah, well, there's no contesting that. Dresses sharp, too."

"You're going to have to up your game if you want to impress him," Natalie added, echoing the thought in Emmy's head. Perhaps she'd bitten off more than she could chew.

That evening Emmy spent longer looking up Eric Oswell online, to the extent of taking notes about the guy. Apart from the fact that he was thirty-one, the son of Senator Charles Glenison and his wife Eleanor (née Oswell, British), there was little available about his personal life. He kept it under wraps, or so it seemed: no Facebook account, no Twitter profile, and virtually nothing personal online other than a couple of paparazzi shots of him entering or exiting bars or restaurants with beautiful young women. No mention of a wife, or girlfriends, or anything else. Perhaps he was gay, and in the closet, or else he could afford to keep his private life private.

His business life was another matter. There was quite a lot of information on Oswell Properties, the flagship of his business empire, which renovated and restyled residential buildings in New York City as well as managing an extensive commercial property portfolio. If the usual M.O. was anything to go by, the likelihood was that Open Book's building was going to be turned into another multimillion-buck home for some wealthy family who wanted to live in the heart of the metropolis, which was a dispiriting thought that didn't offer many options to save the bookstore.

What clues she could glean about his character didn't help either. Oswell was obviously single-minded and fiercely independent. He'd started young and conspicuously broke away from his father, according to one article, changing his name and refusing to take any seed money from the family. At the same time, his ability to wrangle a few loans so early in his career, name change or not, had to have been contingent on his dad's wealth and position. Emmy was prepared to bet that he wouldn't readily admit to that.

But there were a few tantalizing hints of the man behind the business tycoon — and he was interesting. Oswell had something of a reputation as a patron of the arts, which boded well for her, although predictably his taste tended towards opera at the Met, the usual retreat for the New York wealthy, rather than corner bookstores. But he'd also given money to a small film festival, and — hurrah! — sponsored reading workshops and free meals for disadvantaged school kids, according to an educational resources website that named him among the city's benefactors.

As she moseyed about her apartment later on, heating chicken noodle soup in her tiny kitchen while trying to listen to NPR's All Things Considered, Emmy's mind kept returning to the few pictures of Oswell she'd seen, how arrogant and sure of himself he seemed, and how unlikely to have his mind changed once he'd decided on something. She needed a strategy to approach him, and so far all she could think of was plying him with coffee, cake, and free books — and begging.

Somehow she could tell that wouldn't be enough.

For the next couple of days she made a point of dressing smartly, raiding her meager stock of designer clothes. She'd bought a new jacket this season, a dark brown number with a nipped-in waist, and she paired it with fitted black pants one day, and a bottle green pencil skirt that she could barely sit in the next, much to Natalie's amusement.

She wore the skirt that evening when she went out on a Tinder date — something Natalie encouraged her to do, against her better judgment — which didn't start very auspiciously, since the guy was already ten minutes late when he turned up at the midtown wine bar she'd chosen. Not bad looking — better than his picture, in fact, which was a nice surprise — Nick was a corporate lawyer in his late twenties, and he looked it, down to the bags under his eyes which spoke of long hours trying to impress the senior partners.

"I was stuck in a meeting," he said, apologetic. "What can I get you?"

A couple of Mojitos later, the conversation, stilted at first, was making slow headway — largely focused on Nick's