Page 23 of Christmas By The Book

Maybe there was still hope for me and the store.

Chapter Thirteen

Seth

“CAN YOU PASS ME THAT paint?” Jorja asked, gesturing to the poster paint on the table beside me.

“Sure,” I replied, handing it over to her. Mia sniffed it as it crossed the table in front of her, and Jorja whisked it away from her quickly.

“No way,” she warned her cat. “I’d be picking this out of your fur for weeks. Keep clear, okay?”

I couldn’t help but grin. It was nice to hear her having a little fun, given how stressed she had been the last few hours. We were putting the finishing touches on everything for the book fair tomorrow, making sure everything was exactly where it needed to be, and she had been rushing around like a crazy person no matter how many times I tried to tell her that everything was going to be okay.

Right now, we were putting the finishing touches on the large posters that would adorn the windows of the store tomorrow, announcing a Christmas book fair. It turned out that the blizzard was only going to be catching Mastin Falls on Wednesday evening, after the fair had taken place, and I had fit that into the marketing for this event, sticking up a few notices on social media for people to come in and pick up some books so they could relax at home, all cozy, with something new to read. Jorja had mentioned that she’d already had a few people mentioning it to her when she had been at the grocery store that morning, and I knew it was starting to get some serious buzz going.

We might just do it—we might just make enough to save the store.

“There,” Jorja remarked, as she held out the poster in front of her. “What do you think?”

She turned it to face me, and I nodded in approval. In large letters, it announced the date and time of the book fair, with each capital letter adorned with a Santa hat.

“I love it,” I replied, and she grinned.

“Really?” she remarked, turning it around to take another look at it. “I don’t know, I thought maybe I could add—”

“It’s perfect, Jorja,” I assured her, and she stopped in her tracks, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. She had been a nervous wreck all day, and, no matter how much I tried to convince her that everything was going to go well tomorrow, she had been acting like she was waiting for a meteor to strike Mastin Falls and wipe it off the face of the map.

“You’re right,” she replied. “I guess we should get something to eat, right? I don’t have much in the house.”

“There’s a diner that’s open twenty-four hours, isn’t there?” I asked, as Mia climbed into my lap and bumped her head insistently against my hand. “We could go there for dinner, if you want.”

“Mmm, that sounds perfect,” she replied, stifling a yawn. “I’m too tired to cook anything.”

“Let’s get out of here, then,” I suggested, grabbing my coat. “We can bring this all down to the store tomorrow morning.”

The two of us headed to my car, and I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye as she gazed out of the window. Even though it was clear she was nervous about how everything was going to go tomorrow, she seemed relaxed, too. Like she was starting to believe it might really be possible to pull this thing off. I was sure it was going to be a long shot, but I would do everything in my power to make it happen.

The diner was lit up like a Christmas tree against the dark on the outskirts of town, and we headed in to grab a booth, one of the blue plastic tables separating us as we looked over the laminated menus. She ordered waffles, and I picked some toast and bacon and eggs.

“You a breakfast-for-dinner kind of guy, then?” she asked, as she took a sip of the orange juice she had ordered with her food.

“Oh, yeah, always,” I replied. Well, not always. My line of work had required me to be careful about what I ate most of the time, but these days, now I didn’t have to worry about it anymore, I was always happy to tuck into something breakfast-y for dinner.

“So,” she remarked, pointing her fork at me once her food had arrived. “What exactly was it you did back on the West Coast?”

I laughed. “What is this, an interrogation?”

“No,” she replied, raising her eyebrows at me. “I just realized after our first... after the first time we went out together that I had hardly asked you anything about yourself. And I want to put that right.”

I leaned back in my seat. I needed to be careful about how I handled this. I didn’t want to give anything away that I wasn’t ready to.

“I was an event planner,” I replied. Which was, of course, the truth. There had just been other things I’d done to pay the bills, too.

“That sounds like a lot,” she commented. “I don’t think I could deal with wrangling all those people all the time. I’d go crazy.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, it can be a little crazy-making sometimes,” I replied. “But it’s worth it. When you see an event come together like you wanted it to, it’s the most satisfying thing in the world.”

We chatted a little about my event planning days, and I watched her face as she spoke, scanning her for any hint of doubt that might have eluded to the fact that she knew what I had really done as my side-hustle back in LA. Truth be told, I had worked as the cover model for a romance book brand. Nothing too huge, but I had done enough that I occasionally saw myself turn up in book stores and on the covers of new releases. Most of the time, I could hardly recognize myself, given how they dressed me to match the hero of whatever book I was representing, but I didn’t want her to know about it. Not yet.