She found Eveline in the stockroom, surrounded by toppled boxes.
“Putain de merde,” Eveline muttered, pushing her hair back from her face with a hand that trembled slightly.
“Are you okay?” Emery asked softly.
Eveline jumped, clearly not having heard her approach. For a brief moment, her guard dropped, and Emery saw something in her dark eyes. Exhaustion, frustration, maybe even a hint of defeat.
Then the mask slipped back into place. “Fine. Just another day in paradise.”
Emery surveyed the scene. “Bit of an accident?”
“Brilliant deduction,” Eveline said dryly.
Despite everything, Emery found herself smiling. “Let me help.”
“Haven't you done enough?”
Emery wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, so she shrugged. “Think of it as making amends,” she suggested, already moving toward the boxes. “Besides, I'm pretty good at cleaning up messes. I make enough of them.”
“I’ve noticed,” Eveline said.
Together they picked up the books and stacked them back in their boxes. Emery couldn’t help but smell Eveline’s perfume, rich and fruity.
“You know a lot about books,” Eveline said as they stacked.
“I like to read,” said Emery carefully.
“You seem to know about publishing too.”
Emery paused, uncertain of where this was going.
Eveline stopped stacking. “I heard you talking to Abe about the profit margins on hardbacks versus paperbacks while you were picking up books.”
Emery hadn’t been aware the Eveline was listening as she’d chattered away while working. She took a breath. “Um, I have friends in the industry,” she said weakly.
“Right.” Eveline went back to stacking, her long fingers carefully picking books up.
Emery gulped. “Um… you seem sort of stressed,” she said, getting back to work. Not the greatest line she’d ever come up with, but anything to get Eveline off the subject of publishing.
Eveline sighed, her lips pouting in a way that Emery thought she’d have to remember so that she could write about it. “It’s been a day. A few days, actually. Between plumbing issues and my assistant quitting to do study abroad… I’m understaffed and overworked, rather obviously.”
“Right,” Emery said, biting her lip. She was trying not to watch Eveline’s profile. She really was a very attractive woman. Which probably explained why Emery couldn’t go for more than a minute without knocking something over.
“That and I have an order of yet more romance novels coming in, which I’m trying to clear space for in here.”
She said ‘romance novels’ in the way that most other people might say ‘toxic waste.’ This should probably be seen as a red flag, but Emery decided that she was thoroughly going to ignore it. Mostly because she’d just had an idea. A crazy idea. But onethat would let her spend just a tad more time around Eveline, something she thought she might quite like.
Eveline could be inspiration for her writing, she told herself, just what she needed to force her out of her writer’s block.
At least that was the excuse she gave the more logical part of her brain. The part that was yelling at her to remember that actually she already had a job and more than enough to do and that she really, really shouldn’t put herself in the position of embarrassing herself yet further in front of someone who was, let’s face it, quite massively appealing.
“I don’t suppose you could use some help for the day, could you?” she found herself saying.
Eveline stopped what she was doing and turned to look at her. She narrowed her eyes, then obviously decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Maybe,” she said.
“Because I could stick around for the rest of the day,” Emery said, hurrying to clarify just in case Eveline wasn’t getting what she was suggesting. “You’ve said yourself that I know about books and I don’t mind. If it would help, that is?”
She leaned against a box, trying to look casual and suave, and succeeding only in knocking over yet another stack of books.
