by Teri Wilson
Sawyer’s jaw clenched. He wondered if Aubergine carried ibuprofen. Doubtful. “Yeah, I get that already.”
“And she’s single.” Rick shot him a smile and rounded the corner toward the produce section.
Sawyer paused. So Jamie Vaughn was single? Now this was the sort of pertinent information he was most interested in.
Not that it mattered. Whatever he and Jamie once shared had been over for a long time. Fifteen years, as she’d been so quick to remind him.
He chased Rick down and found him contemplating a purple cluster of radicchio. “So what happened with the dentist?”
Rick abandoned the radicchio in favor of something that looked sort of like grass clippings. “He moved to Texas last year.”
Sawyer let out a breath. “So they weren’t that serious.”
“Oh, no. They were serious.” Rick picked up another bundle of weeds, smelled them and added them to his pile. “But he got some job offer that he couldn’t turn down. He asked her to move with him. She declined.”
“Why?” Sawyer’s throat grew tight.
He couldn’t help comparing himself and the mystery dentist who had asked her to move with him across the country. It was more than Sawyer had done when he’d left for Columbia.
But they’d been kids. It would’ve been crazy to make such a serious commitment at that age. Right?
He found it more and more difficult to swallow while he waited for Rick to respond.
“You’ll have to ask her,” he finally said.
Sure, because that would go over really well. Jamie probably couldn’t wait to have a good old-fashioned heart-to-heart with the man who wanted to tear down her precious bookstore and put something “hideous” in its place.
“Given how she reacted when she found out I was working with Ridley, that feels highly unlikely.”
He couldn’t even blame her. The plans for the new development definitely didn’t include keeping True Love in its present form. But how could he have known the bookstore belonged to her now?
Her words from their walk in the courtyard spun round in his mind, taunting him.
I bought it a few years ago, just like I always said I would.
Maybe he should have known. Once Jamie made up her mind to do something, she usually made it happen.
“Does she date anyone now?” he asked, dreading the answer. Rick had said she was single, but Sawyer had a hard time believing it.
“No one.” Rick tossed a lemon in the air, caught it and shrugged. “She’s on a ‘romantic hiatus.’”
Sawyer laughed. “That does sound like something she would say.”
“Lucy thinks that, instead of dating, Jamie pours all her heart into the bookstore.” Rick gave him a grim smile. “The very one that you’re trying to tear down.”
Yeah. Thanks for the reminder.
Rick slapped him on the back, but it was hardly reassuring.
It’s not like that, he started to say. But then he stopped and sighed. The throbbing in his temples grew worse, until the ache was almost unbearable.
It was exactly like that.
With hours to go until closing time and not an inkling of a plan to save the store, Jamie passed the afternoon by dusting. Aggressively dusting, if such a thing were possible. Her feather duster flew across book spines in a furious effort to not only clean, but somehow whip up an idea—any idea—to push back against Ridley.
Which obviously meant pushing back against Sawyer too. They shared a history together, but that didn’t mean she was going to play nice. She couldn’t afford to play nice. Her entire livelihood was at stake, plus decades of True Love history as a Waterford landmark.
“We have to find a way to fight back,” she announced as she ran the feather duster over the top of the pink and gold piano in the Poetry corner.
Lucy shoved a copy of The Love Letters of John Keats into place on its shelf. “Okay, but how?”
“I have exactly no idea. But we have got to come up with something.” Jamie stabbed at the air with her feather duster. “I mean, this place just means too much for them to cavalierly tear it down.”
She picked up a little wooden duck knickknack to clean beneath it, despite zero evidence of dust bunnies. Come to think of it, she might have already dusted the entire piano an hour ago. Ugh. She placed the duck back in front of the row of poetry books lined up on the piano’s lid, but her knuckles knocked into a wax embosser kit in the process. She reached for the knob of the wax seal stamp, but it toppled off the piano quicker than she could catch it, slipping into the narrow space between the instrument and the wall.
“Oops.” Crouching down while wearing a pencil skirt was never ideal, but Jamie managed. Her hand slid into the tiny crack, but as she reached for the stamp, her fingertips came into contact with something bigger and bulkier.
She squinted into the dark space and caught sight of whatever it was, then slid her arm as far as it would go to grab hold of it. Success! She pulled it forward, and out tumbled the wax seal stamp along with a pale pink volume with The Story of Us printed on the cover in swirling gold script.
“What is that?” Lucy said as Jamie straightened.
“It’s a book.” Jamie had never heard of it, though. She’d definitely never seen it in the store before, so she flipped it open to take a peek. But as the cover lifted, she realized it wasn’t a book at all. It was a box designed to resemble a book, and it was filled with colorful cards decorated with hearts and flowers, yellowed with age.
She gasped. “It’s not a book. These are Valentines!”
Lucy peered over her shoulder, chose one of the cards from the box and opened it. “These are so cute.”
Jamie sifted through the Valentines. There must have been forty or fifty of them, at least. Most featured retro illustrations—a watercolor of a puppy carrying an envelope sealed with a heart, a tiny elfin girl eating candy from a frilly heart-shaped box. They were the sort of Valentines that pre-dated the cartoon cards children passed out at school nowadays. These were special. Precious…
But what were they doing tucked away in a box in a corner of her store?
She scanned the writing inside one of the cards and gasped. “These are Valentines from old True Love customers to True Love Books.”
“Awww.” Lucy pressed a Valentine to her heart. “This is ridiculously sweet.”
Lucy grabbed a stack from the box and carried it to the white Queen Anne sofa in the reading nook by the front window. “Ah, look! This one says it’s from 1965!”
Jamie lowered herself onto the sofa cushion beside her. “Mr. Ogilvy must have kept them.”
“‘Dear True Love,’” Lucy read. “‘Without you we wouldn’t have had our first Valentine’s Day coffee and found our own true loves. You’ll always have a place in our hearts. Love, Chris and Tara.’”
For the first time all day, Jamie’s sagging spirits lifted. She chose another card to read aloud. “‘A Valentine of appreciation to True Love Books & Cafe. You brought us together in the classics and helped us find our happily ever after. Forever grateful, Sam and Laurie.’”
Goosebumps cascaded over Jamie, head to toe. She’d always appreciated how important True Love was to Waterford, but she’d never seen such an outpouring of support for the store before. It was just what she needed, today of all days.
“We should put these out for the customers.” Lucy began lining the Valentines up on the coffee table in a neat row.
“Yes! And show how important True Love is to the community!” Jamie’s heart thumped as she was hit with a small epiphany. Her head snapped toward Lucy. “That’s it!”
A few nearby customers glanced over in curiosity.
“What’s it?” Lucy gave her blank stare.
Didn’t she see? This was the answer Jamie had been trying so hard to come up with all day. This box and
its precious contents were exactly what she needed in order to prove that True Love was far more important than the awful industrial development that Ridley—and Sawyer—wanted to put in its place. These Valentines could be the very thing that saved her store.
“That’s how we fight back!”
Chapter Six
Two hours and eight phone calls later, Jamie finally managed to track down the Editor-in-Chief of the Waterford Chronicle. It wasn’t easy. She’d had to navigate her way through a complicated phone tree of various voice mail messages, assistants and department editors, all while waiting on customers, closing up shop for the night and changing into appropriate evening attire for Rick’s Valentine’s cooking class. But all the effort was worth it, because the top dog himself finally took her call just as she and Lucy approached the door to Rick’s Bistro & Trattoria.
She talked as quickly as she could, lest he grow bored with her story and end the call. Plus, Rick’s class was supposed to have started five minutes ago.
“Yes. Yes, that’s right—Valentine’s cards from old True Love customers, people who met there. Some of them date back to the middle of last century!” Jamie paused on the threshold of the bistro just long enough to take a breath and let Lucy open the door for her. Technically, she could have opened it herself, but one hand was holding her iPhone while the other was gesticulating wildly. If she’d been wearing a Fitbit, smoke would have probably been coming out of it.
The editor took advantage of her need for oxygen to ask about the rumor he’d heard that True Love was a popular Waterford hotspot for couples to get engaged.
Jamie beamed at Lucy as she answered in the affirmative. It was actually happening! The newspaper was going to run a feature on True Love Books. She could feel it. “And yeah, this year alone we’ve had four proposals in the store.”
Lucy opened the second door—the one that led from the entry foyer to the main dining room of Rick’s restaurant—and Jamie practically danced her way through it.
“Now isn’t that a legacy worth saving?” she asked, really driving the point home.
Please let him agree. Please.
She bit her bottom lip while she waited for the editor to respond, feeling about as nervous as Eliot on bath day. When he said yes, she jumped up and down right there by the hostess stand in Rick’s fancy bistro. She couldn’t help it. Things were finally looking up.
“And when is it going to run?” She held her breath and nearly fainted when she heard the word tomorrow. “Great! Thank you so much.”
She jabbed the off button on her phone and squealed at Lucy, “We’re in!”
Lucy held her hand up and they high-fived as if they’d just won gold at the Olympics. Honestly, it felt like they had. Tomorrow could be the turning point…by the end of the week, Sawyer might just pack up his hideous spaceship model and go crawling back to Portland. She wouldn’t have to see him for another fifteen years.
If ever.
But as soon as she and Lucy finished their impromptu victory celebration, Jamie became aware of a loaded silence surrounding her. She glanced up, and sure enough, there was Sawyer O’Dell, leaning against Rick’s polished mahogany bar, looking straight at her as he sipped a glass of red wine.
To add insult to injury, Aunt Anita stood right beside him, wine glass in hand. By all appearances, it looked like they were having quite a nice time together.
Naturally.
Anita didn’t have a mean or judgmental bone in her body. She probably thought Sawyer was just doing his job.
Which he was. But that didn’t mean Jamie had to like it. Also, she might have been more inclined to overlook his participation in the Ridley project if he’d been upfront and honest about why he was back in Waterford when they’d first crossed paths. He hadn’t, though.
Not one little bit.
She greeted him with an exaggerated eye roll, the sum total of the politeness she felt he deserved. “Of course you’re here.”
Sawyer’s lips tugged into an annoyingly charming half-grin. His gaze slid to Anita. “This is a small town.”
Too small, actually—especially now.
Finally, something she and Sawyer could agree on.
Sawyer probably shouldn’t have felt so smug about the shocked look on Jamie’s face when she first spotted him at the bar, but he couldn’t quite help it. He’d been surprised at every turn since arriving in Waterford, and now the shoe was back on the other foot.
Anita had filled him in over a nice glass of Sangiovese, so he’d known Jamie would be in attendance. From their discussion, he’d also managed to discern that Lucy was, in addition to being the object of Rick’s affection, Jamie’s employee and best friend. Rick, being Rick, had left out this crucial bit of intel when he’d recruited Sawyer into being his wingman. He’d definitely taken Sawyer at his word when he’d told him he no longer wanted to hear about Jamie.
That wasn’t the case anymore, obviously. Now Sawyer wanted to know everything.
Purely for business purposes, of course. Still, his pulse kicked up a notch when Jamie slipped out of her red coat and he caught his first glimpse of her black chiffon dress with its sheer sleeves and flippy little skirt. He’d barely had a chance to get used to her librarian-chic polka-dotted pencil skirts, and now this. He was in no way prepared for the sight of grown-up Jamie Vaughn in a little black dress, the sudden hostility between them notwithstanding.
He somehow managed to look away, only to find that an amused Rick had been watching him watch Jamie. Sawyer sighed, and Rick’s grin spread wide.
Fine. Maybe Rick’s delight in Sawyer’s current predicament would help him relax long enough to tell Lucy that he’d orchestrated this entire evening just for her. Sawyer certainly hoped so.
“Okay, everybody.” Rick clapped his hands, and all eyes—including Lucy’s—swiveled in his direction. In his crisp chef’s whites, Rick looked like he’d just walked off the set of some show on the Food Network. With any luck, Lucy was into that sort of thing. “If you all would find a cooking station…”
Sawyer glanced at Jamie. This was, after all, a Valentine’s event, and Rick had set up the cooking stations in pairs. Maybe in between all the dicing, chopping and sautéing, they could bury the hatchet—preferably not in each other.
Before he could suggest a truce, though, someone from the other side of the room called Jamie’s name.
“Jamie?” Eric, the esteemed city councilman, grinned at her and pointed to a table near the front. “Would you like to…”
She lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yes, I would.”
Sawyer’s gut clenched as Jamie floated toward Eric, diaphanous black chiffon swirling around her legs. He told himself the only reason she seemed so excited about being Eric’s partner was because he was on the town council. He also told himself that was the only reason it bothered him—the idea that she might gain another ally against his project. But coming up with a justification for that sinking feeling in his stomach was little consolation. He wasn’t even sure he believed his excuses.
He turned toward Anita and offered her his elbow. “Well?”
“Okay. Thank you.” She slipped her arm through his.
“All right.” Sawyer nodded, and they made their way toward the cooking stations.
He absolutely did not choose the table next to Jamie and Eric’s on purpose. It was simply where they landed…
Just in time to hear Eric tell Jamie how great she looked.
Jamie smiled up at him. “Thank you. You do too.”
Sawyer had the sudden urge to stab a certain city councilman with the butter knife at his station. What. Was. Happening? There was a quiet storm brewing inside him, completely out of the blue. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was jealousy.
Fortunately—or not so fortunately for Rick—another disaster in the making tore Sawyer’s attention
away from Jamie’s impromptu date and his own inconvenient sense of unease. Lucy appeared as if she was on the verge of pairing off with a stranger as her cooking partner, and that definitely wasn’t part of the plan. An unattached guy in a chunky cardigan was smiling and crossing the room toward her with determined footsteps.
Oh, boy.
Rick cast a panicked glance at Sawyer. What was he supposed to do—physically throw himself between them? That seemed extreme, even for a wingman.
“Hi.” Lucy returned Sweater Guy’s smile. “Do you want to…”
She pointed at the only unoccupied cooking station, and Sweater Guy nodded. “Sure.”
“I’m Lucy.” Lucy extended her hand.
Sweater Guy shook it gently, and then offered her one of the aprons from their station. “I’m Quinten.”
Lucy pulled the apron over her head. “I like your sweater.”
Ouch.
At the head of the class, Rick visibly wilted, his spirit sinking faster than a ruined soufflé. Sawyer needed to do something. Fast.
He cleared his throat as he tied his own apron in place. “All right, Chef. What is on the menu?”
It worked—temporarily, at least. The room grew quiet as the attendees waited to hear what they would be cooking.
“We’re going to start off with an arugula salad, marinated figs, cherry tomatoes and feta cheese.” Rick sighed, shoulders slumped.
“Mmmm,” Lucy said, loud enough for everyone—including Rick—to hear.
Rick brightened somewhat. “Followed by our entree of miso-glazed salmon, roasted potatoes and bok choy.”
Lucy gasped. “I love glazed salmon!”
Shocker.
Sawyer bit back a smile. Watching Rick attempt to woo a woman by way of seafood would’ve been painful if it weren’t so amusing. He’d never seen Rick so off his game before.
“What’s for dessert?” Sawyer prompted, because again, Rick couldn’t seem to do more than just stand there staring at Lucy with a panicked grin plastered on his face.
“Raspberry chocolate torte.”