Page 88 of Booked on a Feeling

“No, I think we’re done here,” she said evenly. “Thank you for the opportunity. I’ll show myself out.”

“You’re quitting on your first day?” he sputtered.

“Yes, I am.”

Lizzy walked out of the law office both thrilled and terrified. Once she got in her car, she released the breath that she’d been holding and waited for the panic attack to hit. She’d quit her new job on the first day. Not only that, she’d decided to walk away from the only profession she’d known. She was unemployed for the first time in her life, and she had no idea what to do next.

But the panic attack never came. Instead, a weight lifted off her chest as she found brilliant clarity. She had taken the long way around, but she’d finally figured it out. She smiled and turned on the ignition, looking forward to her drive back to Weldon. It really was a lovely town, but it wasn’t the place for her. She saw that now.

It wasn’t the big city or the big firm that had made her unhappy but her profession in its entirety. She’d been too afraid to let go of the one thing she knew she was good at. Even as she’d claimed that she wanted to live her life for herself, she’d been too afraid to acknowledge which part of her life really needed changing. For years, being a successful attorney was her identity—it was what gave her a sense of self-worth—but it had never been who she truly was.

She hated being an attorney. Whoever heard of a conflict-averse lawyer? She was not made to practice law. She wasn’t sure what shewasmade for, but she was crossing outattorneyfrom her list. Her mom was going to be disappointed in her—she might never forgive her—but Lizzy needed to be at peace with that. Because she was done living the life she was expected to live.

If anyone had told her two months ago that she would be an unemployed thirty-year-old without a profession, she would have laughed in their faces. Oh, the bliss of ignorance. But she preferred the turmoil of knowing—knowing that she didn’t know anything. It was the first step toward discovering the life she wanted to create for herself.

Even when faced with the knowledge that she didn’t know who she was or what she wanted in life, she was certain of one thing. She loved Jack. The truth of her love would never falter or change. That love anchored her. As for everything else, she would figure it out in time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Lizzy had moved back to Los Angeles from Weldon a couple of months earlier. During her brief stay, she’d helped out Shannon at Sparrow to keep herself from falling apart piece by piece—she missed Jack so much—and did some serious soul-searching to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. But the more she worked at the bookstore, the less she needed to search her soul.

It was so obvious. The answer had been waving its hands in front of her face, shoutinghellllo,since she’d first walked into Sparrow and offered her assistance. Working through the to-do list and seeing the bookstore flourish had been deeply fulfilling—as though her soul was being injected with joie de vivre. It had made her happier than she’d ever been while practicing law. But she’d been too stuck being who she thought she ought to be to understand what it had all meant.

Owning a bookstore—being surrounded by books—was all Lizzy had ever wanted. The dream she had as a child wasn’t a silly pipe dream. She might have been little, but her dreamhadn’t been. And when she searched deep inside her, she found that the dream had lived on as big and brightly as ever.

Being a bookseller meant helping people find their moments of escape or enlightenment—helping people fill a void in themselves to find a sense of wholeness and happiness. It could be through discovering new knowledge, being carried away by adventure, or having a good fright over a horror story. It could be something as simple as curing someone of mind-numbing boredom. There was a right book for everyone whenever they needed it.

Lizzy wanted to be there for those readers to help them find their way. And as always, books would be her friend and teacher. At this stage in her life, romance novels were still the right books for her but for slightly different reasons. She didn’t need them so much to feel the human connection anymore but to help her hang on to hope. She needed to be reminded that everyone made mistakes—pretty awful ones sometimes—but there would always be a happy ending.

She had messed up big-time. She’d lashed out and hurt her best friend—the man she loved with all her heart. She’d belittled his dream and disparaged the courage it took for him to follow it. All becauseshewas lost and frightened. She wished she could turn back time and unsay those words. It gutted her to think how much she must’ve hurt him. The radio silence from him for the last few months was indisputable evidence of how badly she’d messed up. Even so, she had to believe that there would be a happily ever after for her and Jack.

Weldon had felt like home because Jack had been there. He was her home. Her insistence that she had to move there to live the life she wanted was foolish and misguided. She’d wanted to convince herself that living in a small town would fix allher problems when she knew deep inside that her unhappiness would follow her wherever she went as long as she didn’t follow her dream. It was hard to accept that she wasn’t who she thought she was. But the identity she’d held on to for so long was an ill-fitting mask that hid who she really was. She wasn’t someone who belonged in a courtroom. She was someone who belonged in a bookstore.

“Bev,” Lizzy called out, “should we put this week’s new releases on this table up front? I want to lay them out front-facing, and the new release shelf is getting kind of crowded.”

“You’re the boss. Do what you think is best,” Beverly said from the other end of the store. “But that does sound like a good idea.”

“Awesome. Thank you.”

As soon as she’d returned to Los Angeles, she’d visited Bev at Hideaway and made an offer on her favorite bookstore. And… drumroll, please…Beverly had accepted the offer! Meanwhile, she’d asked the veteran bookseller to stay on as an employee for as long as she liked because Lizzy had a lot to learn about being a bookstore owner.

Hugging a stack of new releases to her chest, Lizzy sighed dreamily.A bookstore owner.Even two months later, she could hardly believe it. She woke up every morning excited to go into work because work was a freaking bookstore. Best. Job. Ever.

Her smiled waned and disappeared. She had finally figured out the life she wanted to live, but it would never be complete without Jack. She wanted to be brave and win him back, but she didn’t want to be his friend with benefits. She cringed remembering what he’d said during their fight.It’s a good thing… our emotions aren’t involved.But her emotions had been very much involved. She’d gone and fallen in love with him. In her weakest moments, she thought she wanted him back any wayshe could have him, but that wasn’t true. She wanted all of him. She deserved to be loved.

But she had far from given up. She was developing a strategy to make him fall hopelessly in love with her. That was also where the romance novels came in handy. Lizzy and Jack fit into the friends-to-lovers and second-chance romance tropes. Losing him had broken her heart, but how could there be a second-chance romance between them if she hadn’t lost him? She huffed a frustrated sigh. Honestly, she wouldn’t have minded skipping the whole second-chance romance thing, but what happened had happened. She had to work with what she’d gotten.

Often in second-chance romance novels, the hero or heroine returns to the town they had left because their life takes one horrible turn or another. For her, it was walking away from her job and profession in one fell swoop on her first day of work. But it really wasn’t very horrible since she’d rediscovered and claimed her dream because of it.

The next step would be running into Jack by pure chance. He would realize he never stopped wanting her, and passion would explode. In the books, the hero and heroine would resist each other because something—a painful past, guilt, or mistrust—always held them back. But that was when real life would diverge from the romance novels. Lizzy had no intention of pushing him away or letting her fears hold her back. She refused to engage in the one-step-forward, two-steps-back lovers’ dance. When he walked back into her life, she would hold on to him with all her strength—with all her love—and hope to high hell that he would someday love her back.

The problem was she had no idea how to orchestrate a chance meeting with him. If she planned it and went to stand around at his office lobby every day, then it wouldn’t be a chancemeeting. That would sort of be like cheating. Then again, she wasn’t above a little cheating if it meant she got to see Jack sooner. The problem was she wouldn’t even have a decent excuse for why she just happened to be at the lobby. If she were still an attorney, she could’ve said that she had a meeting or a deposition in the same building. But no matter how convenient the excuse might be, she had zero regrets about not being a lawyer.

She knew she was just going to have to suck it up and call him. This was their life, not a romance novel. She couldn’t wait for chance to bring them together. Every second he wasn’t in her life felt like a drop of blood falling from the crack in her heart. She couldn’t let life hemorrhage out of her. God, she missed him. She squeezed her eyes shut for a second as a wave of pain and longing crashed into her.

Lizzy turned to the door when the shopkeeper’s bell rang and froze to the spot. And the customer stopped in his tracks with his hand still on the door. Time resumed when her body forced out the breath she’d been holding and her heart remembered to beat again. It overcompensated for its brief pause by pounding extra fast. She pressed her hand against her chest to make sure that it didn’t pop out of her.

“Lizzy.” Her name left Jack’s lips in a whoosh of breath.

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