John kept talking in the hope of pushing past any objections. “We can meet somewhere neutral. There’s a quiet little café, Full English, that serves breakfast all day long. It’s not too far from here. Meet there tomorrow around 11:00?” He’d noticed the difficulty she’d had being flat-out rude, and he was taking advantage of it.

She finally reached a decision. She’d been looking at his card for a long time. Maybe being a statistician—what many people believed to be an incredibly boring and respectable job—had worked in his favor. He wanted to laugh at that. No one who knew him at all, would consider him either boring or respectable.

She reached out her hand to him, saying, “All right, John—” she glanced down at the card, “Braxton. Tomorrow at 11:00.”

Chapter 4

What the heck had she been thinking? He’d said “book,” and she’d said, “let’s talk.” He hadn’t even needed to use the word magic. Dang it. But Lizzie still couldn’t think of anything else that would have gotten rid of him. Especially now that she knew the book was his book. Or his family’s. Assuming he was telling the truth.

Lizzie was usually a fair judge of character, and while she thought John wasn’t telling her everything and he had a few hard edges she’d like to avoid, she didn’t think he was lying about the book. Or that he wanted to hurt her. She was even starting to doubt that he wanted to make off with the book. Regardless of her thoughts about John Braxton, she would certainly be more diligent about using the peephole in future. Maybe it was time to invest in an alarm system. The barking dogs hadn’t been a deterrent at all.

Actually, now that she thought about it, the dogs had been really obnoxious. Normally they barked once or twice when someone came to the door and that was it. Even the mailman, her older dog’s sworn enemy, only got about three barks. Weirdly, they hadn’t quieted, so she’d shoved them in the spare bedroom. Thinking back, she realized they had barked the entire time she’d been on the porch. It had been muted, coming from the back of the house, and she’d tuned it out at the time.

As she went back to let them out, she started thinking about whether her desk was really a great spot for the book. The lock was pretty flimsy. She was a web designer, for goodness sake—she didn’t need a gun safe or a vault. Just decent IT support and industry standard software security. This was way out of her league.

She opened the bedroom door. Both dogs were lounging on the spare bed, grinning, tongues lolling. Hmm. They seemed fine now. Maybe they were getting senile in their old age…at four and seven…?

Lizzie suddenly realized she’d forgotten about Kenna. She frowned, confused and surprised that Kenna hadn’t called by now. Weird. But more importantly, what was she going to tell her when she did call? Crap. With Lizzie’s luck today, her friend was probably driving over right now.