Plus he plainly and obviously hated her guts.
The only times he ever spoke to her were to tell her off. In fact, her strongest memory of him was that time he had caught her crying over the mud she’d gotten her little shopping cart stuck in. He’d absolutely fumed over the whole thing. Then yanked the cart free so violently her potatoes had exploded out all over the path.
Which had only seemed to make him more frustrated.
Doubly so, when she hadn’t been able to help being frightened. He’d just seemed so angry, and everything felt weird suddenly, darker somehow.I’m sorry, she had tried to tell him,I know that I’m a disaster. But he had just looked at her as if she’d horrified him, or something about the situation horrified him, and stormed off before she could.
Though he hadn’t exactly stopped being angry over the things she did.
He had just done it from afar—as if getting too tangled in herproblems only made him madder. He had to jab a finger at her broken taillight, and nothing more. Maybe throw up his hands to see her walking her silly little dog, Popcorn, down the spooky back lane behind Main Street. And the less said about the janky bolt on her shop door that anyone could bust past, the better.One good push, he’d yelled, from all the way across the street. Like he was the one who was going to do the pushing. He wanted to break in and ransack the place.
Starting with the paperbacks, of course.
But she could imagine him moving on to everything else.
He clearly despised anything warm and welcoming and sweet. She’d seen him seethe when his desserts had sprinkles on them. His pet peeve was any kind of coffee that wasn’t just plain black. Happiness made him angry, and pretty things made him even angrier than that.
And her bookstore—Better Off Read—was all that and more. There were plump chairs filled with chintz cushions all over the place. Twinkly fairy lights hanging in garlands from the ceiling. The hardwood floor was covered in plush rugs of the warmest hues; the walls were the most forest-in-fall of umbers. It was the prettiest place in all of Hollow Brook—and that was really saying something.
Hollow Brook was known for being pretty. It had an actual bandstand in the town square. Once it had been voted the cutesiest town on earth. They were a few days from Halloween and everything was festooned in fun decorations. And every single one of those facts blatantly annoyed the shit out of him.
So what the heck was he doing in here? The most adorable store in the most saccharine town to ever exist, run by a person he despised? It didn’t seem right. More than that, in fact. It didn’tlookright. The soft colors clashed violently with his hairy face andhis tattered jeans and his ridiculously unbrushed mop of dirty blond hair.
It was honestly like seeing a single dark cloud just hanging around in an otherwise pristine sky. In fact, he was so grumpy all the time that she often thought she could see just that, constantly surrounding him. A hazy, gray shadow that followed him wherever he went, of the kind that her friend Cassandra had seemed very interested in when Nancy had mentioned it the other day.
Then she’d blink, and it was just him.
Making everything seem dark, with his angry enormousness.
Because that was the other way he contrasted with everything in here:
His size.God,the size of him. He was so immense he made everything around him look like something built for dolls. The shelves barely came up to his chest; the book in his hands seemed tiny in his enormous paws. And every time he moved he came close to knocking something over.
Or, at least, his fabulously rounded butt did.
Though she tried not to think too much about that.
It made her eyes want to go to it, and that seemed like a bad idea. Goodness knows, she didn’t want to seem like she was ogling him. Shewasn’togling him. He turned, and that ass of his accidentally nudged against something, and then suddenly her eyes were just there.
Right on his juicy double.
He would probably kill me with his bare hands if he knew I mentally talked about him like that,she thought. Then tried to focus on anything else but him. She organized her little counter area, and broke out a new tube of quarters, and did her best to hide the domed glass–covered display of cupcakes behind a book so it didn’t trigger his seething rage at the sight of swirly pastel pink frosting.
She finally settled herself in the squidgy chair behind the counter with the book she was reading. A vintage romance, with the most spectacular cover she’d ever seen in her life—all big hair and entwined bodies and waves crashing in the background. Delightful, and delightfully romantic, in a way that should have made it easy to pay no attention to him.
But it didn’t. She had barely made it thirty seconds before her gaze started to drift back upward. Slowly, slowly, but it was definitely doing it. There was his hubcap-sized elbow, resting on top of the nonfiction shelves. Followed by his meaty right bicep, just above it. Then there was the solid side of his face, bristling with that darker-than-the hair-on-his-head stubble of his.
And finally she climbed to those wild blue eyes.
That were staring right at her.
Oh no, he was staring right at her. And boy, did he look madder than hell. His brow was practically pile-driving a groove between his eyes. That fist-like jaw had clenched so tightly, she could make out every muscle beneath the skin. He looked like a beast on the verge of throwing her into a dungeon for the crime of trying to save her father. Give it another second, and the teacup next to her on the counter was probably going to start singing a song.
Unless this was the bad version of the story.
In which case, she was in big trouble.
And what did she do, in response to this realization? Go back to her book immediately? Attack before he could attack first? Call the police, and have him arrested for murdering her with a look? Of course not. Of course she didn’t.
