Page 2 of Booked Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

“Dean doesn’t know that. Dean thinks if it goes in a salad, it’s a vegetable.”

“That’s…not how it works.”

“That’s what I said.” He pushes off the counter and starts walking the aisles like he owns the place, running his fingers along the spines, reading titles at random, picking up a paperback and putting it back in the wrong spot. I resist the urge to fix it. “You got a gardening section?”

“Second shelf, far wall.”

He doesn’t go to the second shelf. He stops at the display near the front window. My display. The books I’ve hand-selected because they matter to me.

He picks up the top book and reads the first line out loud. “’The morning I decided to disappear, the sky was the color of old paper.’” He turns to me. “So it’s a sad one.”

“It’s not sad.”

“First line is about disappearing. Sounds sad.”

“It’s about reinvention.” The words come out before I can stop them. “She’s not disappearing. She’s shedding a version of herself that everyone else built for her. The whole book is about the difference between being invisible and choosing to be unseen.”

He’s looking at me. Not at the book. At me.

“That sounds like two very different things,” he says.

“They are.”

He holds my gaze for a beat longer than makes sense. Then he grins again, sets the book back on the display, and picks up another one. He reads the first line with exaggerated drama, voice pitched low and serious, getting the tone completely wrong.

“That’s not a thriller,” I say.

“The cover has a knife on it.”

“It’s a chef’s memoir.”

“A chef with a knife.”

“All chefs have knives. That doesn’t make it a thriller.”

He laughs, full and loud, and it carries to the ceiling. Something about the sound catches me off guard.

I laugh.

Out loud. Not a polite smile, not the quiet exhale I give customers when they make a joke about judging books by covers. An actual laugh. It surprises me more than it surprises him.

He stops.

The grin fades. Like someone turned the volume down on his whole face. For half a second, he’s standing in my bookstore without the performance, without the noise, and I can see something behind his eyes that isn’t smiling at all. Something that looks like a person who doesn’t know what to do when someone actually sees him.

Then it’s gone. The grin is back, bright and practiced, and he sets the chef’s memoir on the wrong shelf and heads for the door.

“I’ll come back for the tomato thing,” he says. “Tell Dean I’m building my case.”

The bell rings. He’s gone.

I’m standing behind the counter in a room that feels different than it did ten minutes ago. The quiet is the same quiet. The shelves are the same shelves. But something shifted, and I can’t put it back where it was.

I walk to the display and straighten the book he moved.

My heart is racing.

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