Page 31 of Bittersweet

“No loitering.”

Logan laughed.

“If you aren’t here to buy something, you can find someone else’s goods to ogle.” She kept pushing him toward the door.

“I wasn’t ogling.”

“Whatever you say.”

He swiftly spun to face her, and her continued forward momentum had her running straight into him with her hands flat against his chest.

He laid his hands over hers. “Nobody else’s goods compare to yours, Harper.”

“Oh my gosh.” She rolled her eyes and yanked her hands from beneath his.

He started laughing as did the book club ladies.

“You two are adorable,” said Nancy, the one with the sleek silver bob.

“What a cute couple,” said Sandy, who very well could have been named after the color of her blonde hair.

“Nope! Not a couple,” Harper corrected them as she moved back to her spot behind the counter.

Logan sauntered over to the ladies. “Used to be a couple,” he explained.

Another of the women, Darlene, with short teased hair the color of cinnamon, laid her romance book on the table and gave him her full attention. “Oh, do tell.”

“Pull up a chair,” said the final member of the group, Renee, who joined Sandy in making half of their book club blonde—except hers was more salty than sandy, with a little grey showing through.

“Logan!” Harper called from across the room. “If you touch that chair …”

He wore a teasing expression as he laid his hand on the back of a nearby chair. “Perhaps another time, ladies.” He winked at them and walked toward the counter again.

Harper’s shoulders relaxed. No way did she want him telling strangers their story. It was nobody’s business but theirs. And it wasn’t like it had a happy ending like the novel they were reading probably did.

“I meant to thank you for the cookies for Kayla,” Logan told her. “She loved them.”

“I’m glad.”

“Although, she wouldn’t eat them at first. She thought they were too pretty, so I bit the horn off one to show her that they were, in fact, cookies.”

Harper laughed, which made Logan’s face light up.

He moved around the counter to stand next to her.

“Hey, no customers back here,” she teased.

“I’m more than a customer. We’re practically business partners now.”

“More like business acquaintances.”

He moved closer. “I’d like to get reacquainted.”

She elbowed him away, not sure if she could take much more of his flirting.

“So, we never did get to talk more the other morning. I was hoping we would.”

If she hadn’t opened her big mouth about where he and Kayla were living, maybe they would have. There was still a lot more to say. “I thought maybe you were mad at me.”

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