Page 152 of One Touch

“You shipped everyone out!” I said, grinning.

“I needed moral support.”

Ava’s eyes widened as we pulled up beside them. She bounced on her toes, her blue eyes sparkling.

“Did she say yes?” Ava blurted out. “Is she giving you another chance?”

I felt my face split into a grin so wide it almost hurt. “I said yes,” I confirmed, my voice thick with emotion.

Before I knew it, Cole was helping me down from the horse, and we were all tangled in a group hug. Ava’s arms wrapped tightly around my waist, her face pressed against my stomach. I smoothed her dark hair, marveling at how right this felt.

“Does this mean you’re coming back to Bluehaven Beach?” Ava asked, her voice muffled against my shirt.

“You bet,” I replied, catching Ethan’s eye over her head. “If that’s okay with everyone?”

As we stood there on the busy New York sidewalk, surrounded by honking horns and curious onlookers, I felt a sense of belonging I’d been missing for far too long. This was my family now—Ethan, Ava, and me.

“It won’t always be like this, I’m afraid,” Ethan whispered in my ear. “Sometimes, we’re gonna have to do stuff like . . . empty the dishwasher.”

I laughed. “Sounds like heaven to me.”

The thing was, I knew that life wouldn’t always follow the plan of a romance novel. But even so, even the mostrealof real lives had magic moments. And that’s what got you through the messy times.

Chapter 26

Lily, One Month Later

Ibalanced precariously onmy stepladder, stretching to hang the “Welcome, Marge Statten!” banner across the front window of Happy Ever Affogato.

“A little to the left,” Yolande called out. “No, wait. A little to the right.”

I felt the rickety ladder wobble underneath me. I let out a tiny yelp, but then I steadied myself. “Why is this so hard? All I want is for the banner to be totally perfect!”

“Perfection is unattainable,” Yolande said with a shrug. Then she walked back over to the bookshelves and continued brushing off the fake cobwebs she’d decorated the place with while I was gone.

It’s not like Ihatedthe changes Yolande had made in my absence. I just felt it was important that they were confined to one very specific corner of the bookstore. Right at the back, in the Supernatural Swoons section. After all, I didn’t want our regular customers to think they needed to bring garlic and holy water just to browse the latest Nora Roberts novel.

But I had to hand it to Yolande—beneath all the plastic fangs and fake blood, she had a genuine passion for romance. While I was off in the big city, she’d somehow managed to breathe life back into our struggling sales figures.

Now that I was back, our odd-couple dynamic was working wonders. My New York experience had been a whirlwind of pitch meetings and power lunches, but it had taught me a thing or two. How to chase down a sale like it owed me money. How to brand yourself so shamelessly even the Kardashians would blush. How to find your USP and ride it like a gothic vampire romance heroine astride her nightmarish steed.

Turns out, when I put my heart and soul into something—and wasn’t stretched so thin I started to resemble a piece of Yolande’s decorative cobweb—I could do pretty amazing stuff. Who knew all it would take was a stint in the city that never sleeps and a goth assistant with a penchant for the paranormal to turn our little bookstore into a romance reader’s dream?

We had an ‘Adopt a Single Dad’ table, where people could rent a single dad romance novel for a week for just a couple of bucks. Then there were our lucky dip tables and sign-up forms for our Romance Novel of the Month club that Yolande had started. For a monthly subscription, you got a romance novel hand-selected for your taste, as well as a themed snack and a special gift. This month, it was a pen with a hunky lumberjack on. When you turned it the wrong way up, the guy’s plaid shirt slowly disappeared, leaving his tiny abs on full display. I can’t tell you how much I loved those pens.

I climbed down from the ladder, admiring the store. It was almost ready for Marge’s arrival. Some of Marge’s fans were already here, browsing the shelves and buying up her books.

Because Marge was now a friend of mine—I had to pinch myself about that every day—I got her to pre-sign some of her backlist titles, and I even ordered a few copies of the specialeditions of her Lighthouse of Love series. They were leather-bound, with a jewel-encrusted lighthouse on the spine and oh, did I mention that they go for around $150?

Well, we’d sold all ten copies this morning already.

“This place is looking awesome!” Yolande said, giving a rare grin. She was very pretty when she smiled, with cute dimples in her cheeks. It was a shame she tried not to do it very often. Although she did seem a lot happier since working back at the bookstore again. She had even moved into my apartment now that I was living with Ethan properly. She was renting it off me, which gave me a little extra income. Apparently, she'd painted my old egg-yolk yellow front door midnight black, but hey, the girl had a right to express herself.

“We make a pretty great team, huh?”

“So?” she asked. “Did you read book three?”

I nodded. “It’s amazing. I always love the final book in one of Marge’s series. She ties up the storylines from all the novels so beautifully.”

---