“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.”