Page 19 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“This one has particularly well-defined abdominals.”

I’m dying. I’m actually dying. My concussion has taken a fatal turn because Orion Halloran is standing in my bookstore discussing the abdominal definition of romance novel cover models with a seventy-three-year-old woman who definitely shouldn’t be reading books that spicy.

Mrs. Patterson toddles off to find the book, and I grab Orion’s arm before I can think better of it.

“You can’t recommend that book to Mrs. Patterson.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s… it has…” I lower my voice. “There’s a scene in a carriage that’s very… athletic.”

“Good.” His expression doesn’t change. “She seemed like she could use some excitement.”

“She’s seventy-three.”

“And?”

“And…” I sputter, searching for an argument. “That’s… you can’t just…”

“The book has excellent emotional pacing,” he repeats, as if that settles the matter. “I read it last night.”

“You read…”

“You had a lot of copies on your recommended shelf. I was curious.”

He read a romance novel. He read one of my recommended romance novels. He read about carriage sex and emotional pacing and apparently retained enough information to recommend it to customers with a straight face.

I don’t know what to do with this information. I file it away in the folder that’s rapidly expanding from “things about Orion Halloran that don’t add up” to “things about Orion Halloran that are destroying my ability to function as a person.”

Mrs. Patterson returns with the book, looking delighted.

“He has excellent taste,” she tells me, patting Orion on the arm like he’s a particularly well-behaved grandson. “Where did you find him, dear?”

In my hospital room. Like a very handsome fungus.

“Wrong number,” I say weakly.

By day three, I’ve accepted that Orion Halloran has invaded my life and shows no signs of leaving.

He arrives every morning with breakfast. He opens the store while I’m still fumbling with my coffee. He charms my regulars, handles my difficult customers, and recommends romance novels with an earnestness that would be suspicious if it weren’t so clearly genuine.

He also rolls his sleeves up to shelve, which I consider a personal attack. There is no reason forearms should look like that. There is no reason for the flex and shift of muscle under skin while a man alphabetizes mass-market paperbacks, and there’s absolutely no reason for me to be watching it happen from my stool while my coffee goes cold in my hands.

You’re recovering from a head injury. This is the concussion. Concussions make you stare at forearms. That’s medical science.

It is not the concussion.

And he reorganizes things.

Not in a pushy way, and never in a way that makes me feel like he’s criticizing my systems. Just… quietly. Methodically. Like his hands can’t help themselves.

I catch him in the back corner on the third afternoon, deep in the section I’ve mentally labeled “chaos shelf,” the place where I throw books that don’t fit anywhere else, that defy categorization, that I’ll deal with “later” (where “later” is a mythical time that never actually arrives).

He’s been back there for twenty minutes. I assumed he was looking for something specific.

“What are you doing?”

He looks up, and there’s something on his face that might be embarrassment if he were capable of that emotion. “Nothing.”