I sat down on the edge of my bed. My body went soft and helpless. He had been awake too. Lying in the dark at the cabin with the river outside, not sleeping, and he wanted me to know that.
I was smiling at my phone. Smiling at it like a person in a romantic comedy, and I could not make myself stop.
Wentworth, watching from the pillow, made a small critical noise.
Me: Good morning. I slept worse than that. I am blaming you entirely
.
His reply came while I was still looking at it.
JASPER: Good. Blame me. I’ll take all of it.
I pressed the phone against my chest.
Me: I am going down to open the shop now and try to sell books like a functional person.
JASPER: You are the most functional person I know. The most beautiful too. Talk later?
Me: Absolutely.
I held the phone against my chest then sighed and got up. I had a shop to open.
The shop in the early morning was one of my favorite things in the world. The sun through the front window caught the display I had built yesterday afternoon, the warm fall colors, the dried orange leaves arranged against deep amber and cream. I stood at the counter and looked at all of it.
I turned the sign to OPEN.
Saturday unfolded in the shop at its usual pace. A couple browsing the local authors’ shelf. An older man was buying a birthday gift for his wife, who picked exactly the book I would have picked, and looked pleased when I told him so. A woman wanting a book club recommendation who told me more about her book club than I had ever known about any gathering of people.
I was usually good at my job. But today I was a woman who had been kissed on a landing in the cold air and who kept losing her train of thought mid-sentence for no reason at all. I was already thinking about Jasper again—him taking the long way home, him sayingI picked here on purpose.
I fumbled the change while ringing up a cookbook, three quarters scattering across the counter. The woman buying it watched me chase them down. She was in her sixties, with kind eyes and an amused expression. She took her bag and smiled. “Enjoy your Saturday, sweetheart. You look so happy.”
I watched her walk out and blew a breath up into my hair. I was going to need to do something about my face; it was giving me away.
The shop emptied out around lunchtime, and I went to the back to refill my tea and sit in the armchair in the reading nook for a few minutes before the afternoon crowd.
I was restocking the bookmark display when the bell over the front door chimed.
Eric stood just inside the door. I scurried behind the counter so there would be something between us when he came inside.
Something dropped in my chest—cold and sudden, the bottom giving way. I had not seen him in so long that I had started to relax, started to believe he had gotten the message or moved on or run out of whatever patience he had been running on when it came to me.
His eyes were already on my face—not browsing the things on the counter, not drifting to the shelves, just fixed on me with a steadiness that made the back of my neck prickle. He crossed the shop toward me slowly and stopped in front of me. Close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes.
“Long time.” He said it with a faint smile, like we were something. Likelong timewas a phrase he had the right to use with me.
I set the bookmark I had been holding down on the counter, because I needed my hands free. It had been a long time since our date. Each time I spoke with him, I had thought it was over, but it had continued. And here he was.Again.Nothing I did seemed to deter him.
“Can I help you find something?”
“I’m not really looking for anything in particular today.” The smile on his face was the shape of a smile—the right geometry laid over something else entirely. He set one hand on the counter between us, easy and proprietorial, and looked around the shop as if he were taking stock of it. “Been busy?”
“The shop stays busy.” I kept my hands where they were, flat on the shelf behind me, and stayed where I was. “So yes.”
“Mm.” He nodded slowly. “I heard you had a nice dinner last night.”
I went very still.
