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  Emmie nodded.

  “And I’d need all the stuff to open my own shop. The licenses and all that.”

  He was starting to look skeptical again, but Emmie was more and more convinced that this was an idea that could catch serious attention. “Tayla is a genius at paperwork and she’s helping me with the stuff for my place, so I’m sure she can help you with yours.”

  “Who’s Tayla?”

  “My best friend. I think I may have convinced her to move here from San Francisco. It was either my charm or the free apartment.”

  He turned around and sat on one of Emmie’s kickstools. “This is a lot.”

  “Haven’t you ever thought about opening your own shop?” Emmie asked.

  “Kinda?” He shrugged. “Yeah, I have. But it was always one of those… in the future things, you know? I have… my family. Never mind.” He shook his head. “Not important.”

  “I thought the same thing. Someday.” Emmie turned around in the empty store. “What do you think this is for me?”

  He let out a slow breath. “I can’t believe I’m considering this, but… I’m actually considering this. I’ve been saving up some money with this in mind. And I have a little from my grandpa.”

  Emmie refrained from jumping up and down in excitement. She couldn’t shake the feeling that combining books and tattoos was a brilliant move. Gimmicky? A literary purist might say yes, but the entrepreneur in her said no. This was a strategic move to brand her shop as a hip and different kind of bookshop that targeted a younger crowd. Ox could brand himself as the artistic, not-quite-as-edgy tattoo shop that catered to the same crowd. If this worked right, both of them could profit.

  “I need to check with my mom and my sister,” Ox said. “Our family has a ranch, and doing this would take a lot more of my time than working for someone else.”

  Emmie nodded. “Totally fair and I completely understand.”

  “And Emmie, I do have one condition,” Ox said.

  “What’s that?”

  He stood, walked over, and put both his hands on her shoulders. “I just need you to know—because this has messed up way too many things for me in the past—that if we do this, if we start this shop together…”

  She put her hands over his. “What?”

  “You have to promise me we will never get involved.”

  Chapter Seven

  He was going to fuck this up. He was going to fuck this up so bad.

  The slightly fallen expression on Book Girl’s face was enough to tell him, so was the immediate mask to hide her reaction. Ox could have handled shocked and confused when he mentioned getting involved. He was hoping for surprised and amused. But slightly fallen told him that—at least on some level—Book Girl was attracted to him.

  “Of course,” Emmie said quickly. “Of course. I mean, that would be… Obviously, we’d be professionals first. This is business.”

  He was fucked. Because she was too damn cute to ignore for long. Sometime on the ride home yesterday, he’d reclassified Book Girl—Emmie—from cute and kind of boring to cute with a side of quirky and intriguing. She had a dry sense of humor and a quiet passion for her job. She’d subtly put him in his place enough to show him that she wasn’t anyone’s doormat. A little on the thin side, but she had a sweet body under the oversized clothes, and he wasn’t pretending he hadn’t noticed that. Plus she had thick brown hair almost down to her waist with all sorts of red colors in it when the sun hit it. Hair like that gave a man ideas.

  So he was interested, and that presented a problem. Ox plus cute, intriguing girl equaled complications. Forget a bull in a china shop. He was an Ox in a bookshop and he was going to screw this up.

  No. No, you can do this.

  He had to. Because he agreed with Emmie. If they played this right, it could be killer, even if the idea of going out on his own was also slightly terrifying.

  “Okay.” He lifted his hands from her shoulders and rested them on his hips. Her shoulders were softer than his jeans, but he needed to get his hands off her. “Like I said, I need to think about this. Get some questions answered on my end. Talk to my mom and my sister, that sort of thing.”

  Emmie nodded.

  “But I have your number. So I’ll call you back by…”

  “Tomorrow,” she said decisively. “I totally respect wanting some time to think it over, but I’d like an answer from you by tomorrow. If you don’t want to take the space, then I need to find someone else. So I don’t want to be waiting weeks.”

  Ox nodded. He liked her attitude. “Fair enough. I’ll talk it over with my family tonight and make sure they can spare me at the ranch. Then I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.” She smiled big, and he mentally cursed himself.

  Ox, you are an idiot.

  “Okay.” He cleared his throat. “Well, I should…” He motioned toward the pile of boxes. “Should I leave these here?”

  Emmie shrugged and turned back to the catalog she’d been flipping through. “I don’t mind if you leave the boxes here. If you decide to rent that side of the shop, you’d just be moving them back. They’re not in my way.”

  “Okay.”

  She was staring at the catalog and not at him. He glanced down to see a tall, twisting copper-and-brass espresso machine with old-fashioned knobs and valves. It was cool as hell and would look amazing in the shop.

  “Are you getting that? It’s cool.”

  Color rose on her cheeks. “This one? No way. I wish. It’s like two grand, and I’m not opening a café, just getting something customers can use to grab a cup, you know? It’ll probably be used. This one is just…” She shrugged as if she was embarrassed for wanting something nice.

  “That’s the one I’d want for a place like this.” He looked around at the huge windows edged by stained glass and the golden wood of the bookshelves. “It fits perfectly.”

  “I know.” She turned the page. “But I don’t have the budget for it. Maybe in a couple of years.”

  “You gotta indulge sometimes.”

  “Not when I’m the one paying the bills.” Emmie closed the catalog. “I’m sure I’ll find a used one that works for me.”

  Discussion closed, Mr. Oxford. The message couldn’t be clearer. “Okay, well, if you’re sure it’s cool, I’ll leave my stuff here and call you tomorrow.”

  “Totally cool.” Emmie bobbed her head but didn’t look at him. He’d lost her attention.

  Which was fine. Because they were just going to be friends. Workmates. Associates of business.

  Professionals. What had she said? Obviously.

  He was definitely going to fuck this up.

  “Are you sure that this is what you want to do with your money from Grandpa?” Melissa sat on the fence with him, drinking a beer and watching the moon rise over the mountains. “You can only spend it once, Ox.”

  “I think I’m sure.”

  “I think is not I’m sure.”

  “I don’t do sure as easily as you.”

  “No,” she said. “You just don’t know what you want.”

  Melissa wanted the ranch. Always had. Always would.

  She’d used her money from their grandfather to plant orange groves on the lower hills. She’d been an agronomy major in college and had been preaching to her mother about utilizing some of the more fertile land in the lower part of their property for years. Orange groves were her first expansion of the ranch, and so far they’d been successful.

  From the time she was a child, she’d sat on a horse and yelled at steers. She’d been able to grow anything in their mother’s garden. She loved every inch of it. She’d mourned for their grandfather, but her determination had never wavered. Melissa was the ranch.

  Before her husband had been killed in a car accident, Melissa and Calvin had worked it together. Calvin had been the youngest son of an old cattle family on the west side of the valley. He and Melissa had met in college and gotten married and pregnant with their daughter as soon as they gradua
ted. Melissa’s life had been planned out with ruthless and loving efficiency until an eighteen-wheeler and a foggy interstate had destroyed her small world.

  But she still had the ranch.

  Ox did not. “I know you’ve been counting on me to help with some of the winter—”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Melissa said. “I can hire people. We’ve got cash right now.”

  “I can do my part.”

  Melissa turned to him and rubbed a hand over his buzz cut. “It’s not your job. You have your own thing, and it’s fine. It’s good. I just want you to think it over carefully before you put a bunch of money into this and have that girl invest a lot of hers in you. Make sure it’s really what you want.”

  Ox took a deep breath. “I’ve talked about my own shop.”

  “Yeah, but then you stopped talking a few years ago.” Melissa cocked her head. “You stopped talking about your own shop… after Calvin died.”

  Ox didn’t say anything. The wound where his brother-in-law’s memory lived was deep, but it wasn’t the aching void that Melissa carried. He didn’t need to rake things up and make them all bleed again.

  But of course Melissa wouldn’t be his big sister if she didn’t poke at him. “Why did you stop talking about your shop?”

  He cleared his throat. “You know why.”

  “I didn’t need your help.”

  “The fuck you didn’t.” He tossed his beer bottle in the bucket near the fence post. “Shut it, Lissa.”

  “Have you been putting this off because of me and Abby?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  She angled her shoulders toward him. “Then tell me how it is.”

  He forced a grin. “You’re not my mom.”

  “No, I’m way meaner than Mom, so spill.”

  Ox hooked an arm around her neck and pulled her into a playful headlock. “Don’t boss me around. I’m bigger than you.”

  Melissa dug her knuckle into the sensitive flesh just above his knee on the inside of his leg, causing Ox to yelp and almost lose his balance.

  “Ow! You little… Mo-om!”

  Melissa snorted with laughter and Ox couldn’t hold back. He started laughing too. He laughed so hard his sides ached.

  His sister was wiping tears from her eyes when Ox said, “I wanted to be close. I wanted you close. Wanted Abby close. She was still a baby. I needed… I just needed to be here. That’s why I moved back from Metlin.”

  “If you need to be here, you’re always welcome. You know that. Always. But if starting your own place, running your own shop, is what you really want, then you need to go for it. You need to put everything you have into it. Use your money from Grandpa. Dedicate the time. Make it something special that you’re proud of.”

  Ox nodded.

  “And tell me about the girl.”

  “There’s nothing to tell about the girl.” He glanced at her. “I told you. She’s nice, but we’re business only if I do this. Strictly business.”

  Melissa finished her beer, tossed her empty into the bucket, and narrowed her eyes. “She’s cute, isn’t she?”

  “Melissa…” He couldn’t say anything. If he said no, he’d be lying. If he said yes, his sister would never let up.

  “She’s Betsy’s granddaughter. Owns a bookstore. I bet Mom would love her.”

  Ox shook his head. “I’m not telling you—”

  “Don’t make me hurt you again, Ox. You know I can.”

  “You are so mean.”

  Chapter Eight

  The sign Ox was painting in the alley would hang over the 7th Avenue door. It simply read INK.

  INK. What else could they call it? Books and tattoos. Tattoos and books. INK.

  They were doing this, and Emmie asked herself every morning if she was making a horrible, awful mistake.

  “It’s not too late to call it off,” Daisy said. “Then you can find a nice children’s retailer to work with while I convince Ox that the two of you are meant for each other.”

  Daisy had hopped on the INK train and immediately hopped off when Emmie had told her about Ox’s condition.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, and keep your voice down,” Emmie said. The shop was finally clean, the shelves were empty with all salvable stock boxed and organized, and Emmie was standing on a ladder, starting the new coat of vanilla-cream paint that would set off the dark oak bookshelves and the counters that Ethan and his dad had ordered.

  “You and Ox would be great together,” Daisy hissed, glancing toward the back hallway that led to the alley. “I was thinking about setting you up. I was just waiting for him to break up with Ginger.”

  “You are full of shit. He may be hot, but I am the opposite of his type.” Emmie started the paint and immediately let out a happy sigh. Everything was better with fresh paint. She’d cleaned out her old bedroom upstairs and painted it a fresh green that reminded her of the mountains. The bathroom was sky blue. The living room she was waiting to paint until Tayla moved south next month.

  “He is a twenty-eight-year-old man,” Daisy said. “Trust me, he doesn’t know what type is good for him.”

  “Good for him? What about me?”

  “Trust me. That man would be very good for you. Or parts of you at least.”

  Emmie rolled her eyes. “We are starting a business together. Not getting involved was a smart condition, and I agreed immediately because I am a grown-up and business is more important than my hormones.”

  “And then you died a little inside,” Daisy said sadly. “Because you will linger alone, a poor village girl, slave to her virtue, never having felt the fire of passion in your too-short life.”

  Emmie laughed so hard she snorted and almost smudged the woodwork. “Have you been watching telenovelas in the kitchen again?”

  “I swear, Eddie works faster when they’re on in the background,” Daisy said. “I think I’m absorbing them subconsciously. Spider thinks you’re nuts.”

  “For not hooking up with Ox? That seems like none of his business.”

  “No, about putting a tattoo shop in your bookstore.”

  Emmie spun around. “He told me he liked the idea!”

  “He does. He just thinks you’re nuts.”

  Emmie turned back to the wall. “Well, all you doubters can stuff it. Tayla did some research and tattoo shops combined with other businesses are cropping up all over the country. We’re just pushing Metlin to the cutting edge.”

  “Because Metlin was just begging to be pushed to the edge.”

  “I am determined to make this town cool,” Emmie said. “I may go broke in the process, but I’m going to try. And Ox is going to help me.”

  “Help you what?” Ox walked down the hallway, unsnapping the air filter from his face. “Sign is painted. Looks good. Want me to start on the next one?”

  Emmie bit her lip and nodded.

  Ox held up a hand. “Are you sure?”

  “We’re not getting rid of the old sign,” she said. “I need to let it go.”

  Emmie had decided that with a new look and a new theme, they needed new signs. One for Main Street and one for 7th. But removing the Metlin Books sign that had hung over her family shop for generations was difficult. In the end, it had been Ox who had suggested cleaning up the old sign and hanging it inside over the built-in bookshelves. He’d already brought some of his grandfather’s old cattle brands and a few signs from his family’s ranch for his section of the shop. The Metlin Books sign tied in perfectly while giving space for the new branding outside.

  “Let’s do it,” Emmie said. “Do you need the ladder?”

  He nodded and Emmie climbed down, setting her paint roller in the tray. Together, they carried the ladder outside and steadied it as Ox climbed up with the electric screwdriver and started removing the brackets.

  “Help you with what?” Ox said.

  “What?”

  “What was Daisy talking about when I walked inside? Was there something else you needed help with?” />
  Emmie bit her tongue. Her eyes had been stuck on the edge of skin peeking from Ox’s shirt, and her very first thought would probably have made Daisy very, very happy. While also violating workplace sexual harassment standards. Yes, Mr. Oxford, I need some help taking off your shirt so I can see what delicious thing you have inked on your back.

  “I need help making Metlin cool.”

  He turned and smiled at her, his eyes squinting in the afternoon sun. “Silly Emmie. Didn’t you know? Metlin is already cool.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “When you and I decided to start this shop.”

  She smiled and Ox winked at her before he turned back to the sign.

  Emmie’s eyes landed on his ass. She forced them away because she was smart and focused. Business, not hormones.

  Daisy was holding up a sign inside the shop. Lingering alone. A slave to your virtue.

  Emmie held up her hand and showed Daisy a different kind of sign.

  The first confrontation with Ginger wasn’t nearly as dramatic as Ox had predicted, though it left Emmie rattled in completely unexpected ways.

  Emmie was kneeling in the children’s book section, painting the display platforms Ethan had built to go under the Main Street windows. She’d decided the back of the platforms could be turned into chalkboards since the children’s section faced the Main Street windows. The new platforms also protected the original trim from crayons and chalk.

  Emmie was painting the last side when she saw Ginger walking across the street from Bombshell.

  “Oh shit.” Emmie glanced over to the parking on 7th, but Ox’s truck was nowhere in sight. He was helping at the ranch that morning.

  Ginger pushed open the door and walked in, her hair perfectly coiffed and her makeup precise. Ginger was every inch the glamour girl. She totally sold her shop’s name. She looked like the bombshell painted on the window. In fact, she’d probably been the model.

  “Hey.” Emmie cleared her throat. “Can I help you?”