Cloudy With a Chance of Marriage Read Free Page B

the sound of Otis whimpering into his handkerchief again. Finally, he lowered it and looked accusingly at Captain Arrow. “You’re a sailor, and sailors are terribly superstitious. What do you plan to do now that you know Dreare Street is unlucky?”
    Captain Arrow shrugged. “Sell the house as always.”
    “But who will want it?” asked Jilly. “Who’ll want to buy a house—or books, for that matter—on an unlucky street?”
    She felt such despair, she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t burst into tears at any moment. But then she remembered how useless tears were, and the despair hardened into a knot of defiance in her stomach.
    Captain Arrow looked at her with the bland confidence of a man who seldom encountered misfortune—or if he did, quashed it. Perhaps with a broadside of cannon fire, or a saber, at the least.
    “One can thwart any superstition by employing one’s wits,” he said. “I’ve defied every nautical superstition there is without mishap. I’ve set sail on Friday, thrown a stone into the sea, stepped on and off a ship left foot first, and conversed with a ginger-haired person before boarding, all to no consequence. It shall be no different on Dreare Street. I’ll sell the house and be on my way in no time.”
    “You navy captains are so demmed confident!” Otis cried.
    “And so should you be,” the captain insisted, slapping Otis on the back. “It’s a waste of time, putting credence in luck and superstition. One simply needs to use one’s own resources, and the world is your oyster. Is it not, Miss Jones?”
    Of course, Jilly was reluctant to agree with him in any way, but she must. Here she was, the proud owner of a bookshop because she’d gone after what she wanted, which was wrong, according to the vicar in her home village. She was supposed to do only what the men in her life told her to do.
    “You’re correct, Captain,” she said. “There is no such thing as bad luck. We make our own fortunes. Therefore, I declare with complete certainty that Dreare Street is not unlucky. Just because there’s an inordinate amount of fog in the morning, and a man next door who’s a disturbance to the peace, and no customers in Hodgepodge, and an evil old woman with a frightening walking stick—well, that doesn’t mean it’s unlucky. All that can be dealt with, I assure you.”
    She crossed her arms and glared at her handsome neighbor. Woe to anyone who interfered with her plans for Hodgepodge. There was too much at stake for her to capitulate.
    Thoroughly unruffled, Captain Arrow looked at her with a devastating smile on his well-defined lips—the kind of smile that would make any other woman swoon—and a slow-burning gleam in his golden eyes. It was as if he found her the most appealing woman in the world.
    No doubt he looked at every woman that way, so Jilly refused to be flattered, even though her breath was a bit short and something depraved inside her wanted to eat him up, like a delicious pudding one licked off the sides of the bowl when no one else was looking.
    She must suppress that thought immediately.
    “Excuse me, Captain. I’m busy.” The rag-snapping had lost its luster, so when her eyes lit upon a book of poetry, she determined to read a line. Any line. She opened it to a random page, held it beneath her nose, and read:
     
To His Coy Mistress,
by Andrew Marvell
     
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
     
    My goodness! She felt scandalized, but better that than be required to look at Captain Arrow. She allowed herself to peek at a few more lines:
     
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest—
     
    “Enjoying yourself, Miss Jones?” Captain Arrow’s honeyed tones broke through her reverie.
    She slammed the volume shut, her face flushed and her temples damp. What a