Page 32 of Christmas By The Book

I grabbed the lockbox and tipped out all the donations and checks on to the kitchen table, something to distract myself from everything rushing through my head right now. I didn’t want to let myself get lost in thought, not when there were more important things to worry about. Had we made enough to keep the store open?

As I counted it out, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of these people would have given me the help they had offered me today if it hadn’t been for Seth. Of course, plenty of them had told me about memories they had in the store, parts of their past that were tied up in that place, but would they have bothered to rescue it from Wharton if it hadn’t been for the arrival of a celebrity? I didn’t know.

I mostly kept to myself in this town. Haley was about my only real friend here, and she worked for me, so I wasn’t sure that I actually counted. I wanted to believe that I had a place here, but I just wasn’t certain of that. Even the bookstore, it had come from my grandmother, and if it hadn’t been for her hard work, I wouldn’t have been able to lay claim to any part of Mastin Falls at all.

The money was enough to cover everything. More than enough, actually. I could finally do a few of the renovations on the store I had been planning for the last few years, but never gotten around to. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel as though this money wasn’t mine. It was Seth’s.

He was the one who had signed all those books, posed for all those pictures. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have made a cent of this. I should offer it back to him. I mean, clearly he wasn’t struggling for money if he could hand this all over to me in the first place, but still, I didn’t like the idea of taking it from him. It felt like he should have had a chance to claim it back, especially if the novelty of being here had worn off by now.

I locked the money away and crawled into bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what on earth I was going to do next. Really, nothing had changed—it all started when he hadn’t kissed me goodbye, and I had gone spiraling down a stupid rabbit hole from there. I should have known better than to let my overthinking get in the way of things, but it was downright impossible, when a man this perfect had just dropped out of the sky and onto my lap.

I eventually dozed off, and woke early the next morning. It was Christmas eve, and the snow had fallen in a thick cover across the ground overnight.

My grandma always kept the store open late on Christmas eve. She’d told me from when I was young that people came in to pick up their last-minute gifts until the very moment it ticked over into Christmas, and that you could make good money if you just let the place stay open late into the evening. So many Christmas eves we’d spent there together, me perched on the counter, kicking my legs and reading whatever book she’d given me for Christmas that I had been allowed to open early, a constant stream of hot chocolate from the cheap coffee machine in the back office, and Christmas carols warbling out from her crackly old radio.

I missed her right now. As I made my way down to the store, I hoped she was looking over me somewhere—hoped she could guide me in the right direction. She would have known what to do in a situation like this, she always did.

But she would never have landed herself in this spot. She would never have found herself with next to no money, under threat from Wharton, feeling like the town wasn’t on her side. She always knew how to talk to people, whereas I had grown up shy, and I still hadn’t really figured out how to get over it. Of course, I wanted to be more outgoing, but I didn’t know how to make it happen. I felt like I was stuck in my ways, and the more I thought about it, the harder I found it to believe that someone like Seth would ever want to waste his time with someone who couldn’t get through a conversation without stumbling over a sentence.

My grandma was married by the time she was my age, and, though I hadn’t gotten a lot of time with my grandfather, she had always talked so highly of him. Of what a kind, good man he was, how far he would go to make sure people were taken care of, how hard he worked to ensure that his family was provided for. He had helped her every step of the way with getting the bookstore set up, and she had kept a little corner in it dedicated just to his favorite kind of books, detective mystery fiction; I still had it, too, a little shrine to a man I hardly knew, but who had clearly had such a huge impact on our lives.

I arrived at the store, plodding through the snow, and unlocked the door, slipping inside. Without Seth here, I knew it was going to be a lot quieter today, but maybe that was a good thing. I would get an idea of how many people were actually interested in the store instead of him. I appreciated what he had done for me, but I couldn’t rely on his appeal to get people through the door. It just wasn’t fair.

As I planted myself behind the counter to get ready for another day of work, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. Pulling it out, I saw a text from Seth, but I wasn’t ready to reply right now. I stuck my phone under the desk. Out of sight, of mind, right?

I would see him to offer him the money back, at least. It was the very bare minimum of what I could do. I just needed to make sure he was totally certain about what he was doing here. It didn’t feel fair to walk away with money that I would never have made if it wasn’t for him.

My phone buzzed a few more times through the morning, but I ignored it. I would speak to him when today was done with. For now, I wanted to focus on getting the store back in order after the rush the day before, and trying to organize my thoughts as much as I was trying to organize my books.

I felt a pang, when I picked up one of the romance novels with him on the front cover. He was dressed as a sexy firefighter, shirtless except for a pair of suspenders, with a helmet perched on top of his head. He looked incredible, no doubt about it, but instead of exciting me, it just made my heart sink.

Because what man who looked like that would ever want anything to do with someone like me? I needed to come back down to earth, and fast.

And accept that my life was better off without the fantasies that existed between the pages of these books. Because they could never have come to life for someone like me.

Chapter Nineteen

Seth

“YOU’RE GOOD FOR BUSINESS, Seth!” Ian exclaimed, as another woman left the hardware store, having just purchased a couple of tester pots of paint I was sure she didn’t need. I managed to paste on a smile, but, in truth, my head was anywhere but on work right now.

“I’m going to do inventory,” I told him, as I headed through to the back of the store. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

“I need you to stand outside and bring in all these girls,” Ian joked. “I don’t think we’ve had so many people in here in years!”

I grinned, but I didn’t really feel like it. He was right—it had been busier in here today than I had ever seen it before, as the stragglers who hadn’t been able to make it to the store yesterday scouted me out wherever they could find me. Normally, I wouldn’t have minded, but I was distracted by my phone—or, rather, the complete lack of activity on it.

I hadn’t heard from Jorja all day, and it was starting to worry me. She was usually quick to get back to my messages, but we were drawing up on the end of the working day, and there was nothing from her—not a word. What was going on?

I thought things had been going well, especially after everything that had happened the day before. She had seemed so relieved to bring in all that money, and more than that, to see the way the community had banded around her. Had something happened? I couldn’t help but wonder if Wharton had stuck his nose in again and starting causing more trouble, but I wasn’t sure how he would have pulled that off, given that she had the cash to silence him now.

I checked my phone again, and fired off another text to Jorja before I turned my attention back to work. It was Christmas Eve, and normally, I would have been winding down for the Christmas season once and for all today, but Ian had called me in and I had decided it would be best for the sake of my new job to stay on his good side. In reality, when I had gotten here, his wife had interrogated me about my modeling work and floated the idea of me doing another signing in the hardware store, which I hadn’t agreed to yet, but I hadn’t shut down either. If it brought a little more business to the small town, it was probably a good thing, right?

I would head over to the bookstore at the end of the day to make sure there was nothing going on with her, I told myself, no point in hanging over my phone like this, waiting for her to get back to me. I had to accept that she had her own life, and, no matter how well we had been getting along lately, there were going to be times when she needed to stay focused on it.

I finished up my work for the day, and, as soon as I had wished Ian a Merry Christmas, I headed out toward the bookstore. It had snowed heavily the night before, and a soft blanket of white rested over the town, virtually undisturbed aside from the sidewalks. It looked beautiful, and I wished I could have just relaxed and taken it in, instead of letting my mind run away with me.

When I reached the Mastin Bookshelf, I grinned as I spotted a few customers leaving the store with bags. Good, so there were still people visiting, even after everything that had happened yesterday. I didn’t want there to be a drop-off. I needed her to see that people really appreciated this place, and appreciated her for keeping it open, too.