The Cinnamon Bun Book Store (Dream Harbor, #2)
Laurie Gilmore
This one’s for the readers. Thanks for returning to Dream Harbor with me.
Chapter One
Hazel Kelly loved a good story. She just didn’t have any of her own, which became abundantly clear as she stood behind the counter at The Cinnamon Bun Bookstore, in the exact same spot she’d been for the last fifteen years.
Well, not perpetually. She did get to go home at the end of each day and all that, but still, the feeling was the same. Fifteen years in the same place.
Hazel sighed as she rearranged the piles of free bookmarks in front of her. It was a slow day, bright and sunny, the type of day people wanted to be running around outside, not browsing the shelves of a bookstore. Not that Hazel understood that line of reasoning. She always wanted to be browsing the shelves of a bookstore.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love it here behind the same counter she’d stood at for her first shift at the end of her sophomore year of high school, it was just that nothing else in her life had changed either. Same job. Same town. Same friends. In fact, the only thing that had changed, besides a slight twinge in her back when she woke up each morning, was the name of the bookstore, which her boss changed every other year or so.
Hazel was literally surrounded by amazing stories, books filled with love and adventure and life, but Hazel herself was stuck.
‘And in two months, I’ll be thirty,’ she muttered to no one in particular since the shop was empty.
Thirty loomed in the distance, glaring at her menacingly. The date, September 28, was imprinted in her mind. For some people, Hazel assumed, thirty meant an end to the wild and storied days of their twenties. A time to settle down, to get serious, to be an adult.
Hazel had a different problem with thirty.
She’d forgotten to have wild and storied days. Her twenties had been ... calm? Responsible? Boring. Hazel had essentially been in her thirties since she was fifteen. Or more like her seventies if you asked Annie, without whom Hazel probably wouldn’t have picked her head up out of a book at all.
And it had never bothered Hazel before. She liked her bookstore. She liked cups of chamomile tea and rainy days and the Sunday morning crossword puzzle. She liked her quiet life. Except now, all of a sudden, with thirty sticking its proverbial tongue out at her, Hazel suddenly wondered if she’d missed out on something. Maybe she’d forgotten to try some things. Maybe, shockingly, there was more life outside of her books that she should have experienced by now.
The sun mocked her through the large front windows. She’d just put up a display of ‘Beach Reads’ for August, but Hazel couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a book to the beach. She had a tendency to burn if she was in the sun for more than ten minutes at a time, which was perhaps indicative of her current problem and maybe a vitamin D deficiency that she should probably look into.
Hazel needed an adventure.
And soon.
Or at the very least a good story to tell the next time she was at Mac’s pub listening to Annie’s latest theories about him and how he was out to get her. Or Jeanie and Logan’s plans to update the farmhouse whenever she finally decided to move in. Just once, Hazel would like to shock her friends, and shock herself. Just once, Hazel would like to do something very un-Hazel-like.
But not right now. Because right now Hazel’s gaze snagged on a crooked book in the Romance section and the Hazel thing to do was to straighten it. And frankly, that was her job. She wandered over to the shelf, glancing out the door on her way just in case anyone was walking by and might stop in, but the streets were empty. It was a perfect late summer afternoon and it seemed the whole of Dream Harbor was at the beach or out hiking a trail or relaxing by a pool, trying to soak the warmth in before the weather turned.
Even Annie had declared the day too beautiful to be inside and had closed up The Sugar Plum Bakery early to set off with some of her sisters to traipse around a vineyard. Hazel sighed. She was sure she’d hear all about it tomorrow while she had nothing to contribute to the conversation except the exciting tale of this crooked book.
She shook her head. She needed to snap out of this funk. And what better way to do that than tidying? The Romance section had grown exponentially over the past few years thanks to the lobbying of the Dream Harbor Book Club and their love of the genre. Hazel blushed just looking at some of the covers, but if it was good for business then she was on board.
The crooked book was not only crooked but also shelved in the wrong place so she pulled it out, avoided eye contact with the half-naked man on the front cover, and was about to reshelve it when she noticed one of the pages was dog-eared.
‘What’s this?’ she muttered. Did people have no respect? They hadn’t even bought the book yet but they marked the page? She nearly added, ‘What is the world coming to?’ but she tried to catch her old lady tendencies as much as possible these days so she only thought it.
She flipped open to the marked page and found a highlighted sentence. A highlighted sentence in one of her books! How totally unacceptable! Unbelievable! Someone just waltzed in here and defaced one of her books and hadn’t even bothered to buy it!
Hazel would have kept raging internally for the rest of the day if the highlighted line itself hadn’t caught her attention.
It wasn’t particularly good. Not pithy or profound. But it was like the book, or whoever had highlighted it, was speaking directly to Hazel.