If Books Could Kill

CHAPTER ONE

Mason, otherwise known as the most classically handsome man I’ve laid eyes on outside of a cologne ad, is making intense eye contact with me. His full lips quirk up at the corners, nudging dimples out of hiding, and he dips his head in an almost imperceptible nod. Then he darts for my purse.

“NO!” I shout, wrenching my body away while throwing out a hand to block him.

He tries to catch me in a headlock, but I duck out of it and twist his arm behind him, forcing him to the ground.

He jerks free and then he’s back on his feet, nimbly grabbing for the turquoise leather crossbody.

But I get to it at the same time, forcing him into a fierce tug-of-war.

And then, when he least expects it, I hit him with the switch-up—pushing instead of pulling, using the bag to strike at his head until Beyoncé starts riffing from within.

“Oh, shit. Hold on,” I say, out of breath. I fish around for my phone and silence its BOOK CLUB—FIVE MINUTES alarm. “I have to run.”

“Nice work, Mitchell,” Mason says, high-fiving me. My bare feet stick to the blue-matted floor en route to the doorway, where Uri leans against the jamb. He lets out a low whistle and shakes his bald head at me.

“You realize,” he says in his sandpaper voice, “if you got certified to teach, I would pay you to spend all your time here?”

I pat his shoulder as I pass by. “Yes, but then who would put your children through college?”

In the deserted locker room, I’m losing the battle to find my sweater’s armholes when my ever-punctual best friend calls.

“Don’t hate me,” Steph says as soon as I answer.

“I thought I was clear for book club, but now I have a ruptured appendix. Well, I don’t.

Some kid has a ruptured appendix, and I have to take it out.

Anyway, I only have ten minutes, but I really need to talk about this book before I have to go deal with that ruptured appendix. ”

I theatrically dry-heave into the phone as I rummage through my tote for my pants. Uri’s muffled voice interrupts the nineties rock on the locker room speakers to announce that the gym is closing momentarily. “Crap,” Steph says. “Is this a bad time?”

“No, no, I’m good,” I say, now fighting against my lime-green leggings and knocking over my water bottle in the process. “I just stayed late at the gym. And as long as you never say ruptured appendix to me again, I could never hate you.”

This is typical for us. We can schedule phone calls and FaceTimes to our hearts’ content, but Steph will always be subject to the whims of pediatric surgery, and I will always be racing from one place to the next in a disheveled flurry of scattered belongings.

Aside from special occasions and summertime reunions at Steph’s family’s summer cottage, our friendship survives and thrives on a text here and a ten-minute chat there.

“So,” I say, balancing my phone in the crook of my neck while doing up my jeans. “What’d you think of the book?”

The wistful sigh on the other end of the line tells me I picked a winner. Burning Love—along with every other Anna Matthews novel—has that effect on people.

“My logical human brain knows I’m nowhere near ready for a new relationship,” Steph says. “But my lizard brain would throw that all away in a second for a hot, sensitive fireman like Elijah Green.”

“Right?”

Of course, that’s the charm of the whole thing, and the reason I suggested this book club after Steph’s breakup.

You can’t throw it all away for a fictional man.

Romance heroes stay where they belong, tucked away between book covers, setting your heart atwinkle even when your life is declared a relationship-free zone.

You get to sigh and swoon, and your life stays decidedly unruined when it’s over.

And when it comes to romantic escapism, no one does it better than Anna Matthews.

Her love stories are contemporary, but in a timeless way—more handwritten notes, fewer u up?

texts. They give you the same butterflies whether they were written in the nineties or yesterday.

My only complaint is that none of them were written yesterday; it’s been three years since her latest release, and I’ve just about worn through my copies of her backlist.

Uri returns to the loudspeaker for a second closing announcement, then a third approximately one second later—“That means you, Roxie.”

I roll my eyes and yell toward the door that I’ll be right out.

I swipe my coat and bag from the bench, snow boots trailing shoelaces behind me, then double back when I realize I left my keys in my locker.

“How about that love confession?” I say to Steph.

“‘Yours is the one fire I can’t seem to fight.’ What real-life guy would say something like that? ”

“Someone, I hope,” she sighs. That’s the thing about Steph. Whereas I’m content to put the hopeless in hopeless romantic, she is all ceaseless optimism when it comes to love.

While Steph waxes poetic about the book, I leave the locker room and wave to the sex god at the front desk.

“See you Monday,” he says.

“Night, Mason.”

I immediately regret using his name.

As predicted, Steph gasps over the phone. “Hot Mason? He loves you.”

He does not love me. He once looked intently in my direction as I attempted a frontal attack defense, and it was caught on camera and posted on the Combat Zone Instagram.

The look of infatuation, Steph called it.

The look of trying not to get kicked in the balls, I corrected.

Still, she dubbed him Hot Mason and is unwavering in her assertion that we are soulmates. “Go back and ask him out!”

She’s so loud in my ear that it’s possible Mason himself can hear from across the lobby. I shush her and wave apologetically to Uri, who’s making a big toe-tapping show of waiting to lock up for the night, but still offers me a fist bump on my way out.

“I do not hook up with people I know from real life!” I protest the minute the door closes behind me, wincing as a whoosh of frigid air attacks my exposed throat.

Three seasons a year, I love living in Boston.

This is the fourth, when I tend to step outside and immediately wish a car would swerve on the ice and knock me into a three-month coma.

“I’m not saying hook up,” says Steph in that easy tone of voice reserved for those calling from seventy-degree San Diego. “I’m saying fall desperately in love and get a house and have two and a half children.”

I faux vomit into the phone again, because I’m thirty years old going on seven, apparently.

“Fine,” huffs Steph. “Matching tattoos and a pet iguana.”

“Thank you.” Still a no. “So, Burning Love. Five stars?”

“Maybe four and three-quarters,” Steph says.

“First off: mayhaps is too silly a word to use as often as Anna Matthews does. And second: the ending. I know Sophie needed to get Elijah’s attention to finally tell him how she felt, but purposely starting a kitchen fire was a bit much.

I feel like she could have done that in a way that didn’t tie up public emergency services. ”

“I won’t argue with you on mayhaps. But fictional dilemmas call for bold fictional actions,” I counter, shrugging on my coat as I turn a corner.

I seek shelter by a canopied door, where a bearded man with not one but two fedoras—one on his head and one in his hands, collecting change—already stands.

There’s something uncanny about him. He sniffs and shifts his balance, but is otherwise unruffled; his long, gray beard, his black overcoat, even the dollar bills in his upturned hat are undisturbed by the wind.

The flimsy handwritten sign in front of him reading MAKE A WISH doesn’t so much as quiver in the breeze.

It’s like all his accessories have decided that he’s one of those living statues and he didn’t get the memo.

“I guess the drama of it all does work in a book,” Steph concedes as I zip up my jacket. “Plus the fact that you know it’ll end with a happily ever after and not an arson arrest.”

“Exactly. Everything always works out in a romance novel. The men are all good and kind and sexy, and willing to overlook a little class C felony in the name of love.”

I lean against the building to tie my boot, and a brusque throat-clearing notifies me that I’m encroaching on Fedora Guy’s turf. I look up to meet his glare, and that is when I get struck by lightning.

Figuratively, anyway. The man stares at me with the most surreal, electric eyes I’ve ever seen.

Ringed in silver, they’re the nearly fluorescent white blue of a blinding yet overcast sky.

But it’s not just that; there’s a shimmering motion around their dark pupils, as if they’re swirling.

As if I were suspended above the earth, looking straight down into a hurricane.

Weird.

“Amen,” Steph says, pulling my attention back with a dramatic sigh. “I wouldn’t mind if a few Anna Matthews heroes fell out of their books and into the real world.”

“Forget that,” I say, facing a fresh slap of icy wind.

“I wish I could be the next Anna Matthews protagonist. I’d get the guy, plus the nice apartment and the fun job.

And maybe a city that’s not hell-bent on cryogenically freezing me before my time.

” I nearly tip over and bump into Fedora Guy as I tug my shoelaces into submission, and he clears his throat again.

I dig an apologetic dollar bill from my coat pocket to toss in his hat. His scowl brightens to a sly grin.

“Your wish is my gift,” he says, reaching a hand into his pocket. He pulls out a handful of purple glitter, then tosses it with a flourish in my direction.

It lands in an anticlimactic clump on the sidewalk in front of my feet, where we both stare at it for a second.

“… Okay,” I say, sidestepping the sad pool of sparkles. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Who was that?” Steph asks, a trace of mischief creeping into her voice. “Was it Mason? Is he finally proposing?”