Chapter One
Rosie
“Who’s ready to take a trip to the magical land of books?” Rosie Lucas asked as she set a plate of pancakes down in front of her granddaughter.
“I am!”
Olive’s beaming face lit up every single inch of Rosie’s heart.
The three-year-old girl and her mother, Rosie’s daughter, Emma, had been back in Oregon for less than twelve hours but Rosie already knew she never wanted them to leave again.
“Can I get a new book there?” Olive asked. She sent a sideways hopeful look to her grandmother that Rosie found impossible to resist.
“I believe that can probably be arranged.”
Rosie still owned The Rainy Day Bookshop after all, though she hadn’t handled the day-to-day operations in years. What was the fun of owning a bookstore if a woman couldn’t spoil her only granddaughter by letting her choose a picture book to bring home if she wanted?
The two of them chattered about some of Olive’s favorite stories and television shows while the preschooler ate her breakfast. It was a thoroughly enjoyable time. Olive had nearly finished devouring her plate of pancakes when her mother rushed into the kitchen, her T-shirt still untucked and her purple-streaked auburn hair slightly messy.
“Sorry,” Emma said, sounding frazzled. “I know we talked about trying to get there before the store opens in—” shelooked at her watch “—five minutes. I must have overslept. I don’t know what happened. I never sleep through my alarm.”
“I turned your phone off,” Olive informed her with a cheerful smile. “It was too loud. I didn’t want it to wake you up.”
Emma gave her daughter a frustrated look, even as she leaned down and kissed the top of her curls, the same auburn as Emma’s own, minus the streaks of color. “That’s kind of the point of an alarm clock, honey.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Rosie assured her. “I know we said nine but nothing was written in stone. We don’t have to leave at nine on the dot. We have all day. I only suggested nine when you said you wanted an early start.”
“Right. I do. I need to know what I’m up against. From everything you’ve said, it sounds like I’m going to have my work cut out for me.”
Had Rosie given her daughter a task beyond her abilities? She really hoped not. She wanted to challenge Emma, not scare her away.
Ever since she and her daughter had reconnected after years of estrangement when Olive was six months old, Rosie felt as if she constantly walked a tightrope suspended two hundred feet in the air. A thin wire covered in baby oil, where one misstep would ruin all their hard work toward healing the rift between them.
She didn’t want to do anything to drive her daughter away again.
“You don’t have to fix everything wrong with the bookstore in one day,” she said carefully. “I hope I didn’t give you that impression.”
Emma poured herself some coffee. “I don’t know. You were giving off some solid desperation vibes on the phone.”
Rosie definitely needed Emma’s help but if she had soundeddesperate, it was more from her burning desire to play more of a role in the lives of her daughter and granddaughter. Despite her and Emma’s wary reconciliation after Olive’s birth, Emma still lived in Las Vegas, hundreds of miles away from their small town on the central Oregon coast.
“You really are saving the day. I hated the idea of having to close the store for several weeks while your grandmother recovers from her accident, especially right as we’re heading into the busy tourist season. The bookstore has barely covered its operating costs for years. I don’t have time to run it myself and I don’t really have time to train someone else to manage it. Not someone with your level of skill, anyway.”
“You do know I have zero experience at this, right?”
“You managed a restaurant, though.”
She made a face. “Not a restaurant. A Starbucks. That’s not the same as handling the day-to-day operations of a busy bookstore.”
“First of all, The Rainy Day Bookshop is not that busy, unfortunately. Mom hasn’t exactly made drawing in crowds a priority.”
“I’m fully aware of Grandma’s philosophy. Books are meant to be enjoyed. Throwing in silly concepts like profit and loss somehow ruins the experience.”
Rosie’s mother, Sylvia, loved running the bookstore. She adored ordering new books, talking with customers, helping a reader find the perfect selection. All the things Rosie had loved when she ran the bookstore herself.
Sylvia did not, however, enjoy having to reconcile the budget or focus on the bottom line. As a result, the bookstore wasn’t exactly a profitable enterprise.
Many people had asked Rosie over the years why she hadn’t sold the bookstore after Gary’s death. She never had agood answer for them, mostly because she didn’t really know the reason. It made no business sense whatsoever. Her focus for years had been Lucas Construction, the company she and Gary had started together that she had muscled back from the brink of near bankruptcy after his tragic death.
