He led the way upstairs and down the hall before stepping back to wave her into his second favorite space in the house. “This is when I confess I actually have more than one whiteboard.”
“Of course you do.”
As she stepped into the room, he reached in and hit the switch so soft natural light flooded the room. The one drawback to the house was that the pitch of the roof didn’t allow for big windows up here like he’d put in downstairs. There had been a lot of trial and error with the lighting for his office until he’d found ones that gave him enough light to work without feeling as though he was in a commercial office space. There was also a ceiling fan that was always on low, whether it was summer or winter.
He watched Kenzie slowly turn, taking it in, and he tried to see it through her eyes. Was it disappointing? Had she expected massive mahogany furniture and a leather executive chair? Bookcases with leather-bound editions and copies of his own books displayed artfully on a glass table? He’d seen the obligatory office photos in profiles of authors, so he wouldn’t blame her for expecting a little more than a small Shaker table with a mesh office chair that didn’t look like much, but was the most comfortable and supportive of the approximately three hundred he’d sat in while chair shopping.
There was a treadmill in the other corner, with a whiteboard hung over it. That one he didn’t write on, but instead covered with sticky notes he added, moved around, removed and mostly stared at while he walked. There were sticky notes and markers in the treadmill’s cup holder.
The big whiteboard was on a stand with wheels, and he couldn’t even calculate how many hours he’d spent standing in front of it, staring at the barely legible scrawls that accumulated over the course of writing.
Under the eave was a low, wide bookcase that held copies of his books, plus practically every notebook he’d ever written in. And on the walls were a framed copy of the first bestseller list he hit and framed covers of his books.
“I like this,” she said after she’d looked around. “I can picture you working in here.”
“Really?” For some reason, that pleased him. “I wasn’t sure if you were expecting something more… I don’t know. Leather. Chrome and glass, maybe?”
She wrinkled her nose. “You mean something stuffy? That’s not you. Plus, wouldn’t there be a lot of pressure if you had some ‘stuffy literary author’ office?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Alotof pressure.”
When she wandered over to the big whiteboard, he tried not to tense up. The next book was in the earliest stages, when it wasn’t even a story yet, but just a collection of random notes scrawled on the board. They wouldn’t make any sense to her without context, and as much as he enjoyed brainstorming with her, that’s not why she was here.
“So did you think of anything you want to do this afternoon? Go to the mall? Bowling. Get a tattoo?”
She laughed, and then cocked her head. “How far are we from the big bookstore in Manchester?”
“It’s about a half hour or so from here. Do you want to go there?”
A blush spread across her cheeks as she shrugged. “No, that would be silly. I mean, your whole life centers around books, and you probably go there all the time.”
“I do go there a lot, because I love bookstores. When’s the last timeyouwere there?”
“It’s been a few years, at least. Rhylee’s not a huge reader, but I’m able to drag her into the library once in a while. But to drive all the way down here and back in an afternoon to browse a bookstore isn’t on her top ten list of favorite things to do.”
“We should go. You can help me pick something out for that empty spot on my shelf.”
She hesitated, but he could see the eagerness in her eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Are you kidding? It’s mynumber onefavorite thing to do. I was just letting you choose to be nice.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Wow. They keep a lot of copies in stock,” Kenzie said, running her fingertip over the spines. “Kowalski. Kowalski. Kowalski. And, oh, look, a whole nother shelf.”
“Okay, smart-ass,” he said, pretending to tug her away from the shelves of his uncle’s horror novels while she laughed. “He’s been writing books since before I was born, you know. That’s quite a head start.”
“Aww.” She fixed her face into an expression of mock sympathy as she patted his chest—and damn, the man had a very solid chest. “If it makes you feel better, I haven’t actually read any Joe Kowalski books. Horror’s not really my thing.”
“That does help, actually. But look at this one.” He plucked one of the titles from the shelf and handed it to her.
The book had a waterfall on the cover, shrouded in fog, with a very creepy shadow figure lurking in the trees. “This waterfall looks familiar.”
“Rob took that photo for Uncle Joe as inspiration while he worked, and they used it for the cover.”
“That’s so cool.” She ran her hand over the cover and then frowned at him. “They added the creepy guy after, though. Right?”
“Yeah.” He took the book and chuckled as he reshelved it. “Though they managed to convince my cousin Cat—or second cousin or however that goes, but she’s my dad’s cousin’s daughter—that the camera captured it, and it was fun until she said she was never, ever going to northern New Hampshire again. And this may come as a shock, but Kowalskis can be pretty stubborn, so they had to tell her the truth.”
