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Everything else could wait.
With each new kiss from Ethan she let all the worry and drama slip away. Money was money, and maybe it was worth it to have a few minutes like this.
At least she’d let herself believe that until the Visa bill came.
Chapter Twenty
Two weeks later
“I need something really naughty.”
The words on their own weren’t what Sam expected to hear on a bright Saturday morning, but coming from the miniscule, seventy-eight-year-old woman standing in her shop door, they were all the more out of place.
“I beg your pardon?”
Jessamine Bowler once claimed she began progressively shrinking after she turned fifty, and if things continued at their current pace, she’d vanish before she had a chance to die. She was currently under the five-foot mark, and that put her puffy orb of white hair under Sam’s chin. Bright eyes set under a deeply wrinkled brow stared up at her.
“I said…” Jessamine articulated her words slowly and clearly, as if Sam were the one losing her hearing, “…I need something really naughty.” The old woman thumped a pink-spined paperback against Sam’s chest and tapped the cover with a gnarled, pale fingertip.
Danielle Steel.
“I’m not sure what you mean.” Sam took the novel so Jessamine would stop shoving it at her.
The older woman stepped backwards, wobbling slightly, then gave Sam a conspiratorial smirk. “I want to read something…tawdry.” A wink.
Sam couldn’t pretend she’d heard wrong. Mrs. Bowler was pushing eighty, and she’d just requested literary porn. Smut. She wanted the dirty stuff. And these days, who didn’t? It seemed like every other person who walked into Sam’s bookstore lately—especially since she’d gotten home from Vegas—wanted their reading to be a little on the wild side.
“Not you too,” Sam groaned, though she laughed as she said it. With the recent surge of interest in erotic titles, each one she sold served as a reminder of her NC-17 romp with Ethan. “Are you sure I can’t interest you in something else? Some Mary Higgins Clark? Some Proust for light reading, maybe?” She raised her brows hopefully, directing Jessamine’s attention to the dozens of loaded bookshelves with a sweep of her hand. “Anything?”
“Nope. Romance. Hot, quick and nasty. I don’t have all the time in the world, you know.”
Hot, quick and nasty. A pang shot through Sam when a wicked thought of Ethan surfaced. A man she hadn’t seen and had barely spoken to since her plane had lifted off the tarmac at McCarran International.
Sam sighed and pointed to the newly expanded erotica shelf. “The ones on the front-facing row are all Publishers Weekly top picks,” she added. “Very highly recommended.”
“Have you read any of them?”
“Not really my thing,” Sam said, walking away from Mrs. Bowler and sitting on the high stool behind her counter. True, the dirty books weren’t her cup of tea, but not because she had anything against the content. More like nothing in the pages of those books could compare to the passion she’d experienced in real life under the skilled hands and tongue of E
than Silver.
Since she’d gotten home, she’d tried her best to forget what had happened in Vegas. It wasn’t easy considering she nearly had a coronary every time she looked at her statement online. But all the same, Sam had her shop, she had her small-town life, and that was enough for her.
It had to be enough, because Ethan hadn’t called, and their only communication now was via short one- or two-word texts that made her more sad than happy. They’d spent the whole weekend in bed, but once she’d left, he’d practically vanished from her life.
She tried to be okay with the idea of never seeing him again, but some days—like when ancient old ladies asked for smut recommendations—Sam had to wonder if she was only kidding herself. Her time with Ethan had been the most exciting week of her life, and she could admit she’d hoped there was a way it could have continued. Too bad that didn’t seem like a possibility anymore.
While Mrs. Bowler hemmed and hawed over different trade paperbacks with scantily clad women in various bondage gear on their covers, Sam opened her laptop and browsed an online catalogue of upcoming releases. She added some paperback mysteries—popular with the old men at the diner—and more romance novels. She wasn’t going to deny the folks in Edison Falls a little extra spice just because she was suddenly sex-deprived.
A biography of Vàclav Havel—a Czech politician—caught her eye, and she added it to the order for herself. Nice and dry, no sex there.
Who was she trying to fool? She was just doing everything in her power to resist Googling Ethan for the seven hundredth time since getting home. Much to her embarrassment, she had visited the picture of them he’d posted online so many times that whenever she typed “t” into her address bar, it autocompleted the Twitter link for the photo.
They’d been happy in that picture, with a world of possibility ahead of them. Then Julian had ruined everything.
“I’ll take these.” Mrs. Bowler plopped a stack of shiny books on the rough wood counter, and Sam added the pink Danielle Steel to the short tower.
As Sam was ringing the books up, the bell over her stained-glass front door tinkled. A cold breeze wafted into the store, and some determined snowflakes followed the new arrival in.
