Page 7 of Booked Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

Mack is watching me. The grin is gone and so is everything that goes with it. His eyes are steady and serious, and the shelf is the only thing holding him up.

“You’re wrong about yourself,” he says.

“I didn’t say anything wrong.”

“You said you stopped caring about it. That’s not the same as not needing anything.”

My breath catches. I cover it by reaching for my coffee mug, but it’s empty, and now I’m just holding an empty mug like a prop.

“You’ve known me for two days,” I say.

“I’ve known you for two days, and I can already tell you think you’re the least interesting person in this town. You’re not.”

I set the mug down. “I didn’t say I thought I was uninteresting.”

“You didn’t have to.”

The courtyard catches my eye through the window. Laurelle is carrying a bucket of wildflowers to her shop doorway, arranging stems against the frame, her hands moving through the blooms with the kind of easy confidence that makes it look effortless even though I know it isn’t. She tends living things. Lea feeds people. Kendall outfits hikers for the mountain. Neve pours candles that smell like someone’s best memory.

I shelve books.

I put other people’s words in order on other people’s shelves, and I tell customers why those words matter. But at the end of the day, I lock the door and read alone.

Through the window, someone crosses the courtyard toward the florist. Dean. I recognize him from the firehouse crew, though he’s never come into the bookstore. He’s carrying something—a piece of paper, maybe an order form. He reaches Laurelle’s door and pauses. Adjusts his collar. Straightens his shoulders. Then he goes in.

I note it the way I note everything. Quietly. From a distance.

“Hey.” Mack’s voice pulls me back. He’s moved off the shelf and he’s closer now, standing at the end of the counter. “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere.”

“You were looking out the window.”

“I do that.”

He watches me for a second. Something in his expression shifts, and I get the feeling he’s filing a piece of me somewhere he won’t lose it. Tucking it into a pocket I can’t see.

I do the same thing, but I do it from behind the glass, from across the courtyard, from a safe distance. Mack is doing it from three feet away, looking straight at me, and I have nowhere to hide.

“Same time tomorrow?” he says.

“You said that yesterday.”

“And here I am.”

He grins. It’s back now, the full thing, bright and loud and easy. But I saw what was underneath it again, just for a second. The serious look. The one that says maybe I’m not the only person in this room who watches more carefully than anyone gives them credit for.

The bell rings. He’s gone.

I pick up my empty coffee mug and carry it to the back. My hands are steady this time. But something behind my ribs isn’t.

4

MACK

She’s closing up.

I’m sitting on the floor between the shelves with my back against the poetry section, watching her move through the shop. She doesn’t know I’m watching. Or maybe she does, and she’s letting me.