Book People

by Jackie Ashenden

Genres: Women's Fiction; Romantic Comedy; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

You have to break some rules to write your own story . . .

When Kate, a fledgling bookseller, decides to open a bookshop that celebrates the kinds of genre fiction she loves to read (popular and fun!), she's surprised to find that not everyone in the town is as excited as she is.

Least excited of all? Sebastian, owner of the highbrow bookshop across the road, who has rules for everything: the kind of books he sells, the clothes he wears, and the people he dates (no-one local).

When the pair find themselves working together on the town's literary festival, their growing attraction becomes harder and harder to ignore. Professional rivalry aside, just one steamy kiss can't mean anything, can it?

Release date: January 28, 2025

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 384

Sample

I confess that I did not think much of you at first. I thought you were arrogant enough to shame the Devil. How wrong I was!

C

KATE

He’s doing it again.

I scowl across the narrow, cobbled street at the window of Blackwood Books, the bookshop directly opposite mine. Today the owner – the insufferably named Sebastian Blackwood – has clearly decided to make a big deal out of the latest Booker Prize winner. He’s got stacks of the book displayed prominently, along with excerpts of glowing reviews that he’s blown up and laminated, all arranged around some giant red letters that say ‘Booker Prize Winner’.

There are no exclamation marks after ‘Winner’, of course. It’s as if he’s making a point that there’s no need to shout. Yet his display practically screams: ‘Booker Prize winner! So much better than other books! Especially the books across the street!’

I may be projecting, but I’m sure he’s doing it to spite me, and, look, I’ve got good reason to suspect that’s what’s going on.

It’s been six months since I moved to Wychtree – the most picture-perfect of English villages, with a river on one side and woods on the other – and I opened Portable Magic four months later (why, yes, the name did come from a quote by the great Stephen King about books being ‘a uniquely portable magic’), and Sebastian Blackwood has willingly talked to me exactly zero times. You’d think that, since he owns the only other bookshop here, he’d have been thrilled to have another book person to talk to, but no. Apparently not.

I did try to introduce myself before I opened, because I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to say hi and, yes, I know I’m opening a bookshop opposite yours, and you could see me as competition, but I’m not. I know Wychtree is small, but people read different things and it should be plenty big enough to support two bookshops – at least I hope it will. We’re aiming at different markets, and the people who shop at Blackwood Books aren’t the same as the people who shop at Portable Magic, etcetera, etcetera.

Except he didn’t want a bar of it. Every time I went into his shop, he was apparently ‘very busy’, either with customers (fair) or ‘putting out stock’ (if you could call fiddling around intensely on his computer putting out stock).

Every. Single. Time.

I kept trying, because I didn’t want us to get off on the wrong foot. I even resorted to cheery notes slipped under his shop’s door. But he ignored those too, so in the end I gave up.

I assume it’s the competition thing, and he’s pissed off I’m here. Honestly, I get it. But he could at least talk to me about it, instead of giving me the cold shoulder or a being passive-aggressive dick with his shop window.

Turning away from all his Booker Prize nonsense, I glance over at my window instead. I spent most of yesterday arranging a nice little collection of romance novels, along with boxes of chocolates (the boxes, not the chocolates – I ate the chocolates) and mugs of fake tea, and cushions and blankets, and a cheerful, bright sign that says: ‘Indulge in some “me time”!’

Yes, there’s an exclamation mark. It’s jaunty.

I actually get a lot of pleasure out of doing shop displays. I find planning and arranging them restful. It’s a mindfulness thing, and I was pleased with what I’d done yesterday, but now I’m frowning at it and second-guessing myself.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have added the exclamation mark. Perhaps it makes the display look low-brow and trashy.

I growl under my breath, because how annoying to even think that, and all because of that ‘better than you’ window display across the street.

The bloody man did the same thing last week too, when I’d put out some cosy mysteries, countering with a lot of weighty true-crime nonfiction and a very serious sign that said – pointedly, I felt – ‘TRUE Crime’. As if the caps on the word ‘true’ suggests that a cosy mystery is somehow not as worthy because it’s made up, and usually has an animal in it. Then, a week before that, I’d put a lot of effort into a special display for a new shipment of graphic novels. A day later, he’d basically turned his front window into a paean to the classics and ‘Books everyone should read in their lifetime’.

And I’m sure he’d underlined the word ‘Books’.

I shouldn’t take it personally, but being ignored when you’re only trying to introduce yourself and be nice is insulting. Especially when I’m not actually his competition. His shop is very literary and high-brow, and he has a collection of rare books too, so it’s a totally different market to mine. I’m all about escapist reads, thrilling thrillers and romantic romances. Cosies and fantasies and science fiction. Also a bit of nonfiction, with family-friendly cookbooks, down-to-earth biographies of famous sports people, and a few travel and home-and-garden, coffee-table-type books.

It has to work and it will.

Anyway, good thoughts, good thoughts.

I came to Wychtree to find my joy again after my mother’s death and four years in an awful relationship, and being angry is not what I want.

Happy is what I want to be. Happy and optimistic, and loving each day because I’m living my dream.

Yet as I turn away from my shop window, I can’t help glancing reflexively at his again, and it’s terrible timing, because suddenly his tall figure comes into view. He’s leaning over to delicately place another copy of the Booker book on an already towering stack, and there must be something in the air because, with an abrupt turn of his head, he glances out the window straight at me.

And, really, all this – ‘all this’ being him – would be so much easier to deal with if it wasn’t for one thing: Sebastian Blackwood, snob extraordinaire, is hot. Legitimately, incontrovertibly, and supremely annoyingly hot.

He’s tall – I’ve always had a thing for tall men – and he wears his black hair cut ruthlessly short. His face is sharp and hawkish, and he has the bluest eyes this side of Paul Newman. Whenever they look at me, they’re always cold and distant, but sometimes . . . Sometimes, they’re not. Sometimes I’m certain I see sparks in them, though I’m not sure why. Not when he clearly doesn’t like me just as much as I don’t like him. Whatever, it’s not at all what I want, so I try to pretend those sparks aren’t there. Ignore the Paul Newman-blue eyes.

But despite the street being between us, I can see them now as his gaze meets mine, and for some inexplicable reason my face feels hot.

I’m blushing. What the hell?

Ordinarily I’d have been tempted to stand there and engage him in the mother of all scowl-offs, but I’m not doing that with my face on fire, so I turn very slowly and pointedly away and walk – unhurriedly – back into my shop.

Bloody man.

After Jasper, my boyfriend of four years, outed himself as a manipulative narcissist, I swore off men completely. And in the six months since I’ve been here in Wychtree, I haven’t changed my mind.

I don’t miss them. Men.

The most important thing is that I have my shop, and each and every time I step into it, all my anger and my sadness, my betrayal and my grief, melts away. It does so now. The delicate sandalwood scent from the scented candles I burn infuses my very bones, making everything inside me relax.

This is my dream job and has been ever since I was seven and Mum took me to my first bookshop. She was a single mother and we never had much money, so I’d never been in one before. But it was my birthday and Mum wanted to get me a present, so she told me that I could have whatever book I wanted. I was mesmerised by all the beautiful covers, the pictures of kids doing exciting things, and all the dragons and witches and fairies. It seemed so magical. I spent at least half an hour trying to choose the book I wanted, because choosing just one felt impossible. But eventually I decided on a book about a witch and a fairy – my first chapter book – and, when I got home, I read it in one sitting and all by myself.

After that I was hooked. Books became my escape, my happy place. Mum had a second job at a pub at night, and she’d often leave me on my own. But I didn’t mind. I’d curl up with a book, because with a book I was never lonely, and with a book I was never afraid. With a book I had friends and adventures, and I lived in a castle or in a tree or in an underwater city, and not in a dodgy flat next to a betting shop. Or a bedsit above a Chinese takeaway. Or the spare room of a friend of Mum’s . . . you get the idea.

Owning a bookshop of my own had been a secret dream for years, but with a childhood that was anything but stable, I wanted security. So I pushed it aside in favour of university and an entry-level publishing job in London with a steady pay cheque, and a man who worked in finance.

Then Mum died and my prince turned into a toad, and nothing felt steady any more, let alone happy. So I ran away.

I didn’t want to stay in London. When Mum died two and a half years ago, she’d left me a property in Wychtree, the village where she’d grown up but which she left when I was a baby. She’d had a falling out (never explained) with her own mother and had sworn never to return. She kept that vow. I’d been resisting making a decision about what to do with the property for a number of reasons, but, after Jasper, I was desperate to leave the big city. So it was to Wychtree I went.

The building had been standing empty for years, so it was a bit dilapidated. But after scrabbling around, trying and failing to find a bank who’d lend me some money, I redid my sums (sans the cost of labour, since I have two working arms and can slap paint on things) and eventually managed to claw a small amount out of a local building society.

So, I renovated it, aka I put some paint on the walls, and then dedicated the downstairs shop area to, yep, you guessed it: books. It took me a couple of months to get the space ready, and once it was done, I opened the shop.

Starting my own business, especially during tough times for the book trade, was daunting, especially in a village that had a bookshop already. But I was determined to make mine work, and, two months on from opening, I’m still as determined. No matter how much of a nuisance the competition just across the high street is turning out to be.

I hum under my breath as I neaten up a stack of thrillers, enjoying the peace of my little shop. I’ve gone for clean white walls and white shelving so as to best display all the lovely covers. There are white tables – with a bit of vintage distressing – where I lay out my new arrivals, and there’s also a section that I curate myself with a brightly coloured sign that says ‘Kate’s top reads’.

Down one end is a big couch covered in colourful throws and there’s a nice rag-rolled rug on the floor. A place for people to sit while they peruse their potential purchases. More brightly coloured signs have been stuck to shelving, some whimsical, i.e. ‘Happy reads for when you’re feeling sad!’, and some more serious: ‘You might want to grab some tissues!’

I wanted it to feel like you might be in your own living room. A place to grab a book, find a comfy chair, and then sit down and read and relax.

People like that. I had lots of villagers coming in initially to see what ‘the Jones girl’ was doing, and to have a general nose about, though now everyone knows I’m here, interest has died off a little. But I’ve had the nicest comments from customers. They’re so pleased someone is living in the building again. Some of them even said they never went into bookshops because they didn’t have the kinds of books they liked, but now they’d found Portable Magic, they were going to come in every week.

And they do.

I’m fiddling around with one of the displays on the table by the door when one of my regulars comes in. It’s Mrs Abbot, a retired district court judge in her late sixties. She was widowed a few years ago and loves romance novels; she can’t get enough of them.

I give her a smile and a ‘Good morning’.

‘Good morning, Kate!’ she responds – she’s always cheerful and everything she says sounds like it should have an exclamation mark after it, which definitely makes her one of my customers. ‘I love your window this morning!’

‘Oh, excellent.’ I beam at her. ‘Because I arranged it with you in mind.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly sold me on at least two of those titles!’ There’s a hint of wickedness in her brown eyes. ‘You know I like a hot read!’

Oh, yes. I know. And the spicier the better.

‘Speaking of,’ I say. ‘Those three other titles you ordered have come in. Do you want to pick them up now?’

She nods, and while I go behind the counter to retrieve them, she wanders over to the romance section and plucks a couple of titles off the shelf. Then she comes to the counter and puts them down, waiting while I ring up her purchases.

‘You must be looking forward to the festival next month,’ she says conversationally. ‘I always hope for fewer literary sessions, but sadly I hope in vain.’

I frown. I’m not sure what she’s talking about. ‘A festival? What festival?’

‘Oh, All the World’s a Page. You’ve heard of it, yes?’

A shock goes through me. I’d heard it talked about when I worked for James Locke Publishing. It used to be one of the oldest literary festivals in England, beginning in the fifties and running up until the early nineties. ‘Yes, but I thought it was shut down years ago?’

‘It was,’ Mrs Abbot says. ‘But Sebastian decided to revive it this year.’ She gives me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Surely he’s talked to you about it? I’d love it if we could have some more sessions aimed at readers like me.’

I’m trying to pay attention, I really am. But it’s very difficult, due to the sudden uprush of fury coalescing in my veins. Because, no, Sebastian hasn’t talked to me about it. Sebastian never talks to me at all.

So, to sum up: there’s a literary festival happening. A literary festival he is reviving. A literary festival that is happening in approximately one month and that he deliberately hasn’t told me about. And it has to be deliberate. There’s no other reason he wouldn’t tell the owner of the only other bookshop in the entire village.

My smile might as well have been cut out and pasted on, it feels so stiff. But I manage to keep it there as Mrs Abbot chats a bit more, then pays for her books and I put them in a bag for her. Then I wait for the minute it takes her to leave the shop before I’m striding out myself, banging my door closed and sticking on it the piece of paper I keep to hand that says ‘Back in ten minutes’.

I’m not normally confrontational. I prefer to pour oil on troubled waters. I don’t create the trouble myself. At least, that’s what I spent most of my time doing in my relationship with Jasper. But this is my dream we’re dealing with here, my dream of a successful bookshop, and I will fight to the death anyone who dares to threaten it.

So I stride in an absolute rage, my good thoughts forgotten, straight across the street to Blackwood Books.

It’s a ridiculously picturesque shop. Located in a half-timbered, historic Tudor building, the inside is like something out of Dickens. Old wooden floors and panelled walls. Built-in shelves that look like they’ve been there for centuries. The ceiling is low, with big, exposed beams, and there are enough Persian rugs to carpet the entirety of Persia. There’s even an ancient staircase that leads to a second floor, where all the rare books are kept in a special climate-controlled room.

It’s beautiful, but I don’t want him ever to know that I’m jealous of his perfect little bookshop.

What I do want him to know is that I’m livid.

He’s standing behind the huge, antique oak desk that doubles as his counter, and he’s looking down at the slim, black laptop he’s got open. He doesn’t glance up as I enter. He’s wearing a plain black shirt and black trousers, and has the most affected, hipster-looking glasses in the history of the entire world sitting on the end of his Roman nose.

Even while I’m furious at him, he’s still hot. His profile looks like that of an emperor, though I would literally die if he ever found out that I thought that.

‘Hello? Yes,’ I say, coming to a stop in front of the counter, ‘I need to talk to you.’

He doesn’t look up. ‘I’m a bit busy at the moment,’ he says, with frigid politeness. His voice is deep and I hate that I find it sexy.

I ignore his busyness. ‘It’s about the festival. The festival you didn’t tell me about.’

‘The festival is a literary event,’ he says, sounding absolutely insufferable. Then he deigns to lift his gaze from his laptop screen, staring at me coldly through his rimless glasses. The lenses make his amazing blue eyes even more amazing. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

He said that. He really said that. The . . . audacity.

My fury is growing, sitting in my stomach like acid, but I’m not going to be rude like him. I’m better than that. I’m going to take the higher ground, I decide, and continue my offensive by being aggressively pleasant.

I try a smile, though I’m pretty sure it’s turned into a feral grimace. ‘I am a bookshop owner. In case you didn’t know. And since this is a book festival, I’d say it has a little bit to do with me.’

His eyes glitter behind his glasses, and for a long moment he just stares at me. And for a second I think I can see those sparks again and it makes my heart give an odd little jump. Then, slowly, he raises his hands and, with deliberate precision, takes his glasses off, folding them up carefully and laying them down on the counter, the epitome of a very important man graciously granting a poor idiot a couple of moments of his precious time. ‘It’s not that kind of festival,’ he says, as if explaining to a child. ‘As I said, it’s a literary festival.’

‘Books are literature,’ I snap.

‘Not all books,’ he says, patiently.

Of all the . . . Anger grabs me around the throat and for a second I’m so furious I can’t speak. Ever since I opened, he’s ignored all my gestures of friendship, all my attempts to get to know him, and he’s rebuffed every single olive branch I’ve tried to extend. He’s even been passive-aggressive with his window displays. He clearly thinks he’s better than me, and now he’s trying to cut me out of a festival that could very well be good for both of us.

‘Give me a reason,’ I demand, my pleasantness slipping through my fingers no matter how hard I try to hang on to it. ‘Just one reason why you didn’t tell me about this festival.’

‘I believe I just did.’

‘No, the real reason.’

‘That was the real reason.’

‘It wasn’t.’ I glare at him. ‘You deliberately didn’t tell me.’

He lets out a breath and shifts on his feet, as if he’s got more important high-brow things to do. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you’re an insufferable snob,’ I say, before I can think better of it.

He merely extends an arm and looks down at the heavy watch around his wrist. ‘Is that all you have to say? I’ve got some orders to process and they need to be done fairly quickly.’

‘So you’re really going to stick with being an arse? I’ve tried to introduce myself for the past two months and all you do is ignore me.’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been very—’

‘Yes,’ I interrupt. ‘You’ve been very busy. I heard you the first fifty million times you said it. But what I really want to know is why you can’t even have a conversation with me?’

This time something sparks in his eyes. ‘Are we having a conversation? Or are you just here to harangue me?’

‘I wouldn’t harangue you if you hadn’t been ignoring me.’

‘Why would I ignore you?’ This time his tone is slightly less measured and slightly more impatient.

‘I don’t know, you tell me.’

For a moment we glare angrily at each other, tension filling the space.

Then, finally, he says, ‘I’ve spent the last six months putting this festival together and it’s opening next month. It’s too late to do anything about it now.’

He sounds just a little bit smug, making me want to smack him. It would feel so good to really lose my temper . . .

But, no, I’ve left anger behind me. I’ve left tension and stress and grief and bloody men back in London, and they’re not following me here, they’re just not.

So instead I take a deep, silent breath and let the tension go. Then I smile at him, very, very sweetly. ‘That’s what you think,’ I say.

Then I turn and, with extreme deliberation, I stroll out.



You were such an angry little thing. A real termagant. Did I ever tell you how much I liked that?

H

SEBASTIAN

I do not like Kate Jones.

I do not like Kate Jones.

I do not like Kate Jones.

I have to say it to myself three times as a calming mechanism, because otherwise I’m going to charge out of the shop door after her to continue our argument, and that would be a very stupid thing to do.

I don’t want her to know how angry she makes me. I don’t want her to know how she gets under my skin. Like a splinter of glass you can’t see to pull out, slowly working its way deeper and deeper, hurting like a bastard.

Instead, I watch her through my front window as she strolls casually across the road, the hem of her frothy pink skirt lifting in the light breeze, revealing a flash of pale thigh.

She’s ridiculous. She dresses like a Barbie doll, not a bookseller. Every gesture she makes is over-exaggerated and it’s the same with her expressions, every emotion on her face writ large enough for everyone to see.

I can’t stand how open she is.

I do not like her.

So I have no idea why I can’t take my eyes off her.

I do not like that either.

She walks with a confident swing of her hips, approaching that ridiculous space that I refuse to call a bookshop. Her hair is long and gathered into a low ponytail at the nape of her neck, spilling down her back in a fluffy golden cloud. She’s wearing little pink sandals that match her pink dress and she looks like the Sugar Plum Fairy. Sparkling and sweet, a delicious confection. Light and airy, without substance.

I don’t want anything to do with women who lack substance.

I don’t want anything to do with women full stop. Or at least not women who live in the village. I go elsewhere if I want female company.

Yet still I watch her as the breeze lifts strands of gold from her shoulders and she pauses to smooth them back. Does she know I’m watching her? Is she trying to prove a point? And, if so, what particular point is she trying to prove?

She was right, I was an arse to her just now. I know that. She had every right to call me a snob. I was being deliberately provocative. But I wanted to make it clear that I didn’t want her or her books anywhere near my festival.

And it is my festival. I’ve spent months. . .