Kiss and Spell (Enchanted, Inc.) (9 page)

The meeting wrapped up, and everyone headed to their respective jobs, or to home, if they had later shifts. Most of the booksellers were already talking excitedly about how to rearrange the sections. Florence and I were less excited, since it was our department that had been singled out as a failure. Not that we disagreed—
we
avoided our own coffee shop—but it didn’t bode well for the owner to criticize us.

We hurried to get the café set up for the store opening. In spite of the nasty coffee and stale scones, we had our usual morning crowd. In this city, I was surprised that people hadn’t found better options, since I passed several on my way to work in the morning. The whole time, Owen Palmer hung around, lingering over a cup of coffee at the outermost table while he watched the flow of customers.

When the rush had died down and we were getting ready for the morning coffee break crowd, Owen came over to us. “Which of you is the resident coffee connoisseur?” he asked.

“She is!” Florence said, pointing at me and making herself scarce with a wink over her shoulder.

“I guess I am, though I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur. I just drink it,” I said. “She doesn’t. She doesn’t even drink caffeine, if you can believe it—and she’s in grad school.” I was babbling, giving him information he didn’t even want, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“Then I’ll want you to help me in selecting new suppliers and revamping the shop. We do good business, but I think we could do better if we had better stuff to offer.” He frowned. “In fact, I’m not even sure why anyone comes here at all. There’s better coffee at just about every corner deli.”

“I think people feel like getting their coffee here makes them smarter, or something,” I said without thinking, then mentally winced. I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth to my boss. He was just so nice that he lulled me into honesty. He was so good-looking that he addled my senses somehow. Then I wondered if maybe he was that guy who’d made the world go still that morning at the diner.

“Image means a lot,” he agreed. “And that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. Would you mind holding off on your job search for a little while? I think I could use your expertise while we revamp the store. I’m hearing rumors that one of the chains is going to open a branch nearby, and I want to make a big splash before they can get established.”

“So you’re not firing me?” I blurted.

“Is there a reason I should?” he asked, with a mildly amused smile.

“No, no,” I hurried to say. “But you didn’t see me at my best yesterday.”

“You were honest with me about the product you were selling and steered me to something I’d enjoy more.”

“And I was job-hunting on the job,” I said without thinking, then winced. What
was
it about this guy? He seemed to deactivate all my filters.

“The way I see it, it’s my fault if I can’t keep my employees happy enough to want to stay or if I can’t recognize talent and make the best use of it. So, this afternoon I’d like you to join me for some meetings with potential vendors and then what are you doing for dinner?”

“Dinner?” I parroted dumbly.

“I’d like to hash out some advertising and marketing ideas. It might be easier to do that away from the store, and if I’m asking you to work beyond your usual shift, I should at least buy you dinner.”

He sounded all-business, which dashed the romantic fantasy that had sprung unbidden into my brain. And then I remembered Josh. My boyfriend. The one I had a date with that night. “Oh, tonight. I can’t,” I said, stumbling over the words. “I have dinner plans already.”

“Then maybe we can talk tomorrow afternoon here at the store. My schedule will be a little more open then.” He grinned, and a slight flush washed over his cheeks. “I’ll buy the coffee, though that’s probably more of a threat than an incentive.”

“Okay,” I said, even as I felt a sting of disappointment that I didn’t want to analyze too closely. Getting my head turned by my new boss would be a very bad idea.

But there was just something about him …

Chapter Six

It was with a surprisingly illicit thrill that I left the store with Owen that afternoon. This was strictly business, but it felt like a first date—a first date with someone I’d had a crush on for ages, which was really weird, since I’d only just met him. I was back to feeling like there was music playing in the background, which made me question my sanity. I didn’t think most people went through life with a personal movie soundtrack playing in their heads. I hadn’t even turned on the radio that morning, so I wasn’t sure where the insidious tune had come from. Maybe from the store’s background music?

When we hit the first coffee dealer, the smell of coffee was so strong it nearly knocked me off my feet—in a good way. “I think I’m getting a contact caffeine buzz,” I whispered to Owen.

He grinned in response, a smile that lit up his eyes and made my knees go wobbly. He was so very adorable. And he was my boss, I reminded myself firmly. Plus, I had a boyfriend who had brought up the subject of marriage. Wobbling was out of the question. “I may not sleep for a week,” Owen said, “which is good because right now, I don’t have time to sleep.”

The coffee expert at this place took his work very seriously. I felt like I was at a snooty wine tasting and being encouraged to find hints of oak or lemon in the wine, only he was asking us to discern flavors of earth and spices in the coffee. The one time Owen and I dared to glance at each other, we both nearly spit out our coffee from laughing. I didn’t know the finer points of coffee, just what I liked and didn’t, and that I didn’t like supposedly gourmet coffee that tasted like it had been scraped up from the bottom of the coffeepot after sitting for a day or two. This stuff was definitely an improvement over what we’d been serving, but I wasn’t sold on it. Luckily, we still had two more places to go.

The rest of the afternoon seemed to go by in a blur—or in a series of quick scenes, all with that music playing in the background. We tasted coffee, made faces, laughed, and compared notes, and all the while, we really seemed to be bonding. I still didn’t know much about him as a person, but I knew he was nice, funny, smart enough to retain a lot of information, and he really cared about what he was doing.

As we headed back to the store from the last coffee vendor, both of us vibrating a little from the caffeine overdose, I dared to ask him, “Why did you decide to buy a bookstore? Isn’t that the worst possible business to get into these days?”

He thought about the question for long enough that I wondered if I’d been out of line to ask it, and then he said, “I’m not so sure I did it because of the business. It’s more like historical preservation, like one of those old-fashioned farms kids can visit to learn about the way life used to be.”

“So kids can take a field trip and we can show them these things called books that their grandparents used to read?”

He laughed. “Something like that, but it would be even better if I can do it well enough to make it cool again, even if it is in a retro sense. I can’t beat the convenience of buying books online, but maybe I can make it an enjoyable enough experience to lure people in from time to time.”

“You’re a romantic!” I said, then wished I hadn’t. That was probably being a little forward with my boss.

If he thought so, he didn’t show it. He nodded thoughtfully, then said, “Maybe I am. I don’t know that I’ve ever found the perfect bookstore, but I have one in my head, the kind of place where you browse for hours. You stumble upon a book you never would have known to search for online, and it ends up becoming your new favorite book and favorite author. You sit in a cozy nook and read for a while until you know you have to take it home, but you can’t wait to read more, so you buy the book and then get a cup of coffee and read even more, still sitting in the store.”

“And outside it’s raining, so it’s the perfect day to spend the whole afternoon in a bookstore,” I said wistfully. I’d had the same fantasy before I actually went to work in a bookstore.

He turned to me. “How did you know about the rain?”

“It’s always raining when I imagine myself in a bookstore. Unless it’s near Christmas. Then it’s snowing.”

“Maybe I should add weather control to my business plan,” he said. “If I could make it rain or snow on cue, I might get a lot more customers.”

There was something about what he’d said that gave me the strangest feeling of déjà vu, like I could imagine him making it snow, and the image was so vivid that it was like a memory. I glanced at him to find that he was looking at me, a little crease forming between his eyes from his quizzical expression. I got the impression that he’d imagined the same thing.

Then both of us shook it off. “Thanks for coming along today,” he said briskly. “I think we agreed on our top three choices, so now we’ll see what kind of proposals they offer us. Next we’ll tackle the bakery items.”

“I think the ones we’re getting wouldn’t be so bad if we got them fresh.”

“But it might be worthwhile to shake them up by considering other vendors. Then we might start getting fresher stuff.” We reached the store, and he stopped at the door to say, “Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a good time tonight.”

“Tonight?” I asked, then I remembered my date with Josh. “Oh, yeah, right, dinner. And I’d better get going or I’ll be late. See you tomorrow.” I hurried away before I’d be tempted to tell him my plans had fallen through and I’d love to have dinner with him.

*

As I rushed to dinner, I hoped seeing Josh would remind me of why I wanted to be there. But when I saw him, the anticipated frisson didn’t materialize. It was like he was nothing more to me than a random stranger who happened to arrive at the restaurant at the same time I did. I supposed he was cute enough—not a heartthrob, but was I the kind of girl who could expect to land a heartthrob? He was essentially the male version of me, the boy next door who probably got the “you’re such a nice guy and good friend, like a brother” speech a lot. That made us the perfect match. I knew he’d be reliable and would never stray. What more could I really want?

I had to work up a delighted smile as I approached him in the restaurant foyer. To help with the effort, I thought back to when we first met, but the memory was hazy. How
had
we met? Come to think of it, I could barely remember spending time with him. There were vague images, like a dream or something I’d watched on TV. They didn’t feel real. He didn’t seem to notice that I’d frozen instead of greeting him with any enthusiasm. He crossed the gap between us, kissed me dutifully and said, “Mmm, you smell like coffee.”

I raised my arm to sniff my sleeve. “Do I? Ugh. It probably permeates my whole body. Believe it or not, after today, I’m not sure I want to go near another cup of coffee ever again.”

“No, it’s good,” he said with a laugh. “I like the smell of coffee. Rough day slaving over the coffeepot and espresso machine?”

“No, not really,” I had to admit. “My new boss dragged me with him to evaluate new coffee vendors, and that meant tasting a lot of coffee. I didn’t know there were so many kinds, and that’s not even getting into the fancy flavors.” I made it sound like a chore, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had that much fun. I just didn’t want to tell my boyfriend that, and then I felt weird for wanting to hide that from him. “The new owner wants to really upgrade our coffee shop, and the first thing that needs to change is the coffee.”

“It
is
nasty.”

I bristled at that. It was one thing for me to say it, but I rather resented him saying that about my work. It was irrational, I knew, but I couldn’t help it. “I may not sleep for a week after all the coffee I had today,” I said, forcing myself not to frown, and then I realized I was quoting Owen’s quip.

“So, decaf with dessert tonight?”

“Even that might be too much.”

“Then maybe some wine will counteract it.”

When we were seated at our table, I had the strangest feeling that I was sitting across from a stranger. I knew we’d been dating for months, but this felt like a first date—the awkward kind of first date where you can’t think of anything to talk about because you don’t know enough about each other to even start a conversation and asking questions to get to know each other feels like an interrogation.

“What’s the new boss like?” he asked me.

I wasn’t sure how to answer, even though it was an obvious topic for discussion, because I was afraid I’d gush. “He seems pretty cool,” I said with what I hoped looked like a casual shrug. “He’s got a lot of ideas about making bookstores interesting, something people will leave their computers to visit.”

“Ah, an old fogy, I take it. None of those newfangled e-books for him.” He laughed, and I fought back my irritation and my urge to jump to Owen’s defense.

“Actually, he’s pretty young—around thirty, I’d say. But he is kind of old-fashioned, in a good way. I like his vision of bookstores, and he’s asked me to help with some advertising and marketing strategy.”

“That should be good for your résumé. Instead of having wasted the past year in a retail job, you can now call it a job within your field.”

I bristled again, but crumbled a roll from the bread basket instead of saying anything. “If I get to do interesting stuff, I may want to stay,” I said. “I’m not crazy about pouring coffee, but if I get to help on the business side of things, it might become a job worth sticking around for. I really seem to have clicked with Owen.”

He choked on the sip of wine he’d just taken, then had a brief coughing fit. “Sorry, that went down the wrong way,” he said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” But there was an angry, alarmed look to his eyes that I found oddly chilling. Was he jealous of a boss I’d barely mentioned? I’d worked so hard to talk about Owen in a neutral way. Maybe I’d overdone it to the point it looked like I was hiding something.

He barely spoke through the rest of dinner, and his mind seemed to be elsewhere, like he was mentally cooking up some scheme. It was so unlike him that I was worried, but I got the impression that asking him what was wrong wouldn’t go over well. I would have begged off of dessert and said I needed to get home, but he did it before I could. He didn’t even walk me home. He merely gave me a perfunctory kiss at the restaurant door and hurried away, like he was late for a meeting. And to think, I’d given up dinner with Owen for that very unsatisfactory date.