Page 66 of How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop

“And then you got short-listed for the Booker,” Petra took up the tale, “and everyone said you wouldn’t win.”

“Exactly,” said Ross. “And quite right too, there were some fantastic authors on that list, I was—well—I was amazed it was me, actually.”

“Yours was the best book, end of story.”

“Ah, so you do know the ballad of Ross McCloud,” he told her, ruffling her hair, as the two of them slumped on the sofa in front of the fire, draped across each other and basking in the heat. Earlier they had been outside in his tiny garden with its view of the hill with their bench on it, but sunset had driven them inside, shivering in their summer clothes.

The bleak January day when they had first met seemed a world away now, Petra remembered. Not the most edifying of occasions.

“Remember when I thought you were a tramp.” She smiled.

He chuckled. “And the day you blew up the internet,” he reminded her.

Petra struggled to smile in reply. She certainly did. And soon she would be pitching herself right back into that world.

“Imagine if we could just stay like this forever,” she ventured, “with people not knowing who you are, and not remembering who I am—what I did . . .”

“You didn’t murder anyone,” he pointed out, giving her a comforting squeeze. “And no one can pause time. Imagine how bored we’d get . . . the same few months over and over?”

“Not me,” Petra said fiercely. “I would never get bored of this. Never . . .”

“So let’s just keep doing this,” Ross said gently, “forever and ever . . .”

“Hmm, not feasible, sadly,” Petra admitted. “Money, for one thing. I quite like eating.”

“Yeah, me too,” he agreed. “I do need to publish something else one day soon,” he admitted. “Either that or get a proper job.”

“I’ve got a proper job,” said Petra. “I could keep us.” But even as she said it, she knew, of course. She was only borrowing this job. It wasn’t hers. And it didn’t pay that much either. “I could get another job around here,” she said with a hint of desperation.

“We can’t just stop,” Ross said gently. “We’re like sharks, we humans. We need to keep swimming forward or die.”

They both stared into the flames for the longest time. Then into the silence Ross’s phone bleeped with a notification.

He didn’t move.

“Who’s that?” asked Petra sleepily.

“No one,” said Ross. “Now let’s go to bed. You need to get some rest.”

Petra wasn’t great with uncertainty. The future was a mystery, but one thing Petra was sure about was that the encompassing and comforting bookish arms of Capelthorne’s had wrapped themselves around her and restored her love of literature. She was excited to come into work in the morning; excited to speak to the customers, to divine which books they would love; to unpack the boxes of new stock arriving twice a week, feeling like Christmas every time; to listen to the visiting sales agents as to what was hot and what was not. At first, she had known full well which books they would tell her about, knowing from upstream the titles that were going to be traveling down the line with publisher support. But just recently, the books she was encouraged by the agents to get behind were titles she didn’t recognize, and that had ignited a wistful longing to be back in the London publishing world—to be preparing, even now in July, for the Frankfurt Book Fair in the autumn, where the big deals would be done, and the behemoth publishing companies, alongside the smaller independents, would go to preen and hustle and show off their acquisitions.

And this autumn, one of those acquisitions would be Ross’s new book. She, of all the literary agent mess-ups, was to be entrusted with the stewardship of that sale.

What if she screwed it up?

What then for this precious relationship? Their love was blossoming here in Portneath, in the liminal space between their respective worlds, but would it be crushed by the disappointments she routinely brought to her writer clients?

How could it not?

Wise, kind Alistair had foretold it of course, on that hideous day—her last day in London that January. He had known that Petra needed this sabbatical—a chance to fall back in love with books—but how was he to know that she would fall in love even more profoundly than that?

“What?” asked Ross that evening as they waited in the chip shop, a heavy, mouthwatering aroma of fried food filling the air.

She loved stealing glances at him, unwatched: the way the heavy lock of hair fell over his forehead as he stood, the way he pulled her against his lean body, steadying her. This time, amused, he met her analytical gaze.

“What happened?” she said, her heart pounding in response to her daring, to the danger of hearing something she didn’t want to hear. Something he couldn’t take back.

“Care to narrow it down a bit?” he replied lightly. “What happened when? With what? Or who? Are we talking big bang, or something more recent?”