“I’ll tell you when I’m done.”
I looked up. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m a thorough reader,” he said, and the ease in his expression, the way he was looking at me as if this was exactly where he wanted to be, made it very difficult to maintain any semblance of composure. “I like to finish before I form an opinion. You taught me that.”
I looked back at the books. “Do you like working for Paige?”
“I do, actually.” He sounded mildly surprised by his own answer, like he’d checked recently and confirmed it. “It suits me more than I expected.”
“How so?”
He considered it. “It’s not that different from the Corps, honestly. You’ve got a chain of command, you’ve got a mission, you’ve got to stay calm when things get loud.” He paused. “The main difference is that in the Marines, people weren’t usually drunk when they needed something from you. Mostly.”
I laughed, a real one, surprised out of me. “Mostly?”
“There were circumstances,” he said, with great diplomatic restraint.
“And Paige is a good commanding officer?”
“Paige is terrifying,” he said pleasantly. “Which I mean as a compliment. She knows exactly what she wants, she communicates it clearly, and she doesn’t tolerate anything that wastes her time. I’ve had sergeants with worse systems.” He tilted his head. “She also feeds me, which the Corps did not always prioritize.”
I looked up at him then, properly, and he was sitting on the arm of the chair with the easy settled look of a man who had found his footing and was quietly glad about it, and something about that—the fact that he was okay, that he’d come home and found something worth staying for—moved through me in a way I felt all the way down.
“I’m glad,” I said. “That it feels right. Being here.”
He held my gaze, steady and warm, and the shop was very quiet around us, and the distance between the floor where I was sitting and the chair where he was wasn’t very much distance at all. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
I looked back at the books. There were maybe six left to sort.
I took my time with them, drawing it out so he would stay.
Chapter 15
Cara
Eventually, the last paperback was in its pile, and I sat there for a moment looking at the sorted rows spread across the floor around me. Done. I pressed my palms flat against the hardwood and pushed myself up, gathering the stacks into my arms in stages and carrying them to the counter. Jasper unfolded himself from the arm of the chair without being asked, crossing the shop to take the last two piles from me before I had to make a second trip. Our fingers didn’t quite touch in the handoff, but it was close enough that I was aware of it, and I turned back to the counter and started organizing the stacks by genre without commenting on that at all.
He settled against the end of the nearest bookshelf, arms loosely crossed, watching me work through the last of it. I slid behind the counter and braced my hands against the wood and looked up at him, and for a long second, neither of us moved.
He leaned against the end of the bookshelf, arms loosely crossed. I was still standing behind the counter with my hands braced on the wood, my face hot, my heart doing something complicated against my ribs. The shop was quiet around us. A car passed on the street outside. Somewhere in the back of the building, the old radiator ticked once and went still.
I wanted to say something brave. Something clever. Something that would put us back on equal footing, or at least pretend to. I wanted to flirt with him and see what happened if I finally let myself go.
I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it as Eric walked in.
The warmth the morning had built drained out of me so fast it was almost physical. Not him. Not right now. Not in this shop, in this moment, with Jasper three feet behind me and the last hour still sitting soft and unfinished between us. I felt my shoulders go up before I’d made any conscious decision about my face, and I made them go back down, and I put the smile on—the professional one, the one I’d been putting on since I was old enough to work the register for my grandfather.
“Hey,” Eric said, looking around with the ease of a man who had never once in his life felt unwelcome anywhere. “Thought I’d actually buy something this time.”
“Sure,” I said. “I can ring you up.”
I stepped back behind the counter, and the counter helped, and I was aware in a way I was grateful for, of Jasper somewhere behind me, still and quiet near the shelf. I hadn’t looked at him. I didn’t need to. Just knowing he was there settled something in me, outweighing Eric’s presence, like two forces operating on opposite ends of the same room.
Eric grabbed a book off the table near the register—some thriller I didn’t particularly love but kept in stock because it sold—and set it on the counter and looked past me at Jasper. “Didn’t realize you had help today.”
“Jasper offered to help me move some boxes.” I kept my voice even, my hands moving through the transaction, not looking up.
“Generous of him.” The word landed with just enough weight that it pricked at my senses.
