Chapter Two
Had she ever been this angry before?
Jenna felt like every organ inside her body was literally shaking. Quaking with rage.
“Who is this woman anyway?” she asked the empty bookshop.
“Who? And what is her beef with romance?” A scoff, a snort.
“Well, I mean we know what her beef is: She probably never had any romance. Probably never had anybody bring her flowers or candy or sweep her off her feet or make her feel like the sexiest, most desirable creature on the planet.” She glanced at the portrait of Nora Roberts on the wall across from the counter.
Beneath it was one simple line: You can’t have a life without love.
“I mean, to be fair, I haven’t had a lot of that stuff either, but I’m not bitter about it like this chick clearly is. ”
Shane came up from the back of the store carrying a box of books. “Are you bitching to Nora again?”
Jenna sighed. “Only because I’ve already caused your ears to bleed and I wanted to leave you at least a little bit of your hearing to take home with you in case one of your kids has something important to say when you pick them up from school.”
“You are a selfless woman.”
“It’s true.”
“Does Queen Nora have any advice for you?” Shane set the box down behind the counter and began entering the books’ ISBN numbers into the computer.
“You know how she likes to think about stuff for a while before she offers a solution.”
“Mm-hmm.” He tried to hide his grin.
“You stop that,” she said, pushing at his arm.
“Stop what?” Shane widened his eyes almost comically, Mr. Innocent.
“Mocking me.” She feigned a pout as she arranged more of the new bookmarks in a little holder on the counter.
“I would never mock you. I just think it’s adorable how pissed off you are about the blog of this one woman.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug.
“She trashed my shop!”
“I know. That wasn’t cool. But—”
“Between the Lines is a book blog that has almost thirty thousand followers. That’s thirty thousand people who’ve read that what I sell here is ‘sappy fluff.’ ” She made the air quotes with her fingers.
Shane stopped what he was doing and stared over at the shelves for a beat before saying, “I mean, some of what we sell is exactly that…” He met her gaze. “Intentionally so. That’s what some people want, right?”
Jenna’s lips trilled as she blew out a defeated breath.
“Sometimes, yes. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
” She took a moment, calmed down a bit, but then remembered another line, and her ire ratcheted right back up again.
She held up a finger to Shane and said, “She also said—and I quote—that the romance genre ‘peddles unattainable dreams to the sad and lonely.’ And how my ‘hearts and flowers décor only perpetuates the lack of reality around the genre itself.’ I mean, the nerve of that woman!”
Shane stopped what he was doing to look at her for a moment. “Did you memorize the whole blog?”
She blinked at him with a frown. “I might’ve read it a few times.” A beat went by before she woke her phone up and showed him the blog page, which she had bookmarked. “See?” She stabbed the screen with her finger. “See what she says?”
“Wait.” Shane reached over and poked his own finger at the screen, scrolling back until he got to the beginning of the blog with the photo of the blogger.
He pinched his finger and thumb together and enlarged it.
“Oh, I remember her. She came in looking for a thriller.” He went back to his box of books. “She was really pretty.”
Jenna groaned. “So what if she was pr-—” She squinted at the photo, then used her thumb and forefinger to enlarge it more.
A simple headshot, this Sawyer Hall—what kind of name was that anyway?
sounded like a dorm on a college campus—was brunette, her dark hair shiny.
Her eyes were a soft blue behind black-rimmed glasses and— “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“I ran into her on the street.”
Shane tipped his head. “What?”
“I literally ran into her on the sidewalk. Almost knocked her over. Now I wish I had.” She made a sound of disappointment. “And you’re right, she was gorgeous. Well. She’s a lot less attractive now, isn’t she?”
“I don’t know, I’d have to see her again to be sure.” He smothered a grin.
She glared at him. “Funny. You’re a funny guy.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
She read the blog one more time, just to keep her anger brewing, then went to work shelving the new books that Shane had entered into inventory.
The day zipped on by, and Jenna’s anger at the blog stayed somewhere between a simmer and a slow boil all afternoon. Shane left to pick up his kids from school, and Jenna ran the afternoon alone.
At four forty-five, Delia DiMarco, Jenna’s other employee, who worked evenings and some weekends, breezed through the front door like a gust of wind.
“Oh my God, did you see the Between the Lines blog this morning?” Dee was clearly angry, possibly just as angry as Jenna was, and Jenna loved her for it.
She wrinkled her nose. “I did.”
“Maybe we should relay to our customers that they’re just sad and lonely people looking for unattainable dreams. See how that goes over.
” Dee walked toward the back of the store, pulling off her jacket.
“I’ll give her sad and lonely,” she muttered as she returned.
She sidled up to Jenna and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, gave her a squeeze.
“Don’t you let people like that get to you. ”
“I won’t,” Jenna said.
“You already have. I can tell by looking at your face.”
Damn it. Dee knew her too well. After all, she’d been Jenna’s English teacher in high school, and Northwood was a small city, so they’d known each other for nearly two decades.
She sighed. “It’s just so infuriating. Why?
Why does somebody like that have to crap on something that makes other people happy? What’s the point? I don’t get it.”
“Some people are just unhappy, and the only way they feel better is to make other people unhappy as well.”
“Well, that’s just stupid,” Jenna said with a pout.
“I agree.”
They worked together for about an hour before Jenna left BookLove in Delia’s capable hands and headed out to meet her friends for dinner.
Because BookLove was right in Jefferson Square—a giant block of small businesses, bars, and restaurants—and Dakota was coming from her café only a couple doors down, they met at a new little bar and grill called Lizzie’s and made Veronica travel from her office on the west side to meet them.
Lizzie’s was comfortable. That’s what Jenna liked about it.
It wasn’t pretentious. It wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t—not fancier than it was, not trendier than it was.
It was simply a bar and grill with a good liquor selection and a small menu of decent bar food.
Jenna arrived first and she knew Ronni liked the high-top bistro tables, so she snagged one across from the bar, draped her jacket over the back of her chair, and took a seat to see Dakota coming in.
“Hey, bitch.” Dakota pulled the hair tie out of her hair and ran her fingers through it. “Damn ponytail gave me a headache today.”
“If you worked in a bookshop instead of a café, you wouldn’t have to wear a ponytail and hat every day.”
“Yeah? You hiring?” Dakota asked as the waitress brought them menus.
“Nope. Sorry.”
“Tease.”
Jenna grinned and opened her menu, and a few minutes later, Veronica showed up.
“Hey, bitches.” She took off her jacket and hung it on a nearby hook, draped her purse over the back of her chair, and flopped down into her seat with what sounded like a relieved sigh. “What a day.”
“Tell me about it,” Jenna said.
The three of them had been inseparable in high school.
They’d drifted a bit as they went off to different colleges and experienced new friends and new partners, and focused on what they each wanted to do with the rest of their lives.
Surprisingly—or maybe not, given how much they all loved their home city—they all returned to Northwood to start their adult lives.
Reconnection hadn’t taken long, and the trio was inseparable once again.
Once they had cocktails and had put in their food order, they began the game of Catch Up.
“How’s small business life, you two?” Ronni asked as she sipped her cosmo.
Jenna and Dakota glanced at each other and nodded in tandem. “Café’s doing well. Fall’s on the way, so coffee orders will pick up, so that’s good.”
“To pumpkin spice, baby,” Ronni said with a grin and held up her glass to cheers with them. She turned to Jenna. “And the world of books?”
“The books are good. I did have a thing happen, though.” She proceeded to tell them about the stupid blog, and whatever calmness her rum and Coke had trickled into her was washed out by a resurgence of that irritation from earlier.
“Ugh. What a bitch,” Ronni said. “And not the good kind of bitches, like you guys. The bad kind.”
“It’s just so infuriating,” Jenna said with a shake of her head.
“Like, if you don’t like romance books, then don’t wander into a romance bookstore.
And why do you need to trash a little shop like mine?
” She took a sip of her cocktail and looked from Ronni to Dakota and back.
“Her blog has lots of followers. She could hurt my business if she wanted to. It’s just so not cool. ”
Dakota reached across the table and gave her forearm a squeeze. “I’m sorry, boo.”
“Oh!” Jenna held up a finger. “I almost forgot. She’s local.”
“The blogger?” Ronni asked. “Like, she lives here in Northwood?”
“I assume so, since I ran into her on my way to see you yesterday,” Jenna said, pointing at Dakota. “Literally ran into her. I had to grab her to keep her from falling.”
“Shoulda let her tumble,” Dakota said.