Page 29 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“Done,” said Imogen.
“This is going to be great,” said Jules happily.
Ha. There was no way Roman was going to match this.
Chapter 13
Life got increasingly busy as spring wore on toward summer. There was a prolonged spell of unseasonably hot, sunny weather that brought thousands of weekend holidaymakers. They took to wandering along the harbor in shorts, with dripping ice creams, for all the world as if it were August, not May, and all the businesses on the high street benefited from the extra trade.
Saturday was when new guests arrived for most of the local hotels and Airbnbs, so Jules was delighted the Cressida Cornworthy book was being published on the Thursday of the half-term break. It gave her a full five days to cudgel the heads of that week’s visitors with the message that Capelthorne’s was the place to buy their little darling the latest children’s blockbuster, just in time to keep them occupied on the long journey home.
She had primed the local paper with the idea that queues would form photogenically outside the shop in the lead-up to the opening that morning, and it had promised to send a photographer. Local radio had been promised interviews and vox pops, and Jules had been posting like mad on Instagram too.
Aunt Flo had even been persuaded that, for one day only, the shop would open at the earlier time of nine o’clock. Jules was blowed if Portneath Books was going to steal her thunder—andany of her sales—by anything as fixable as a half hour difference in opening times.
Thanks to some pestering and schmoozing, Jules was thrilled to have been promised two author-signed copies by the publisher too. One was going to be hidden in the middle of the stock as a kind of golden ticket, and the other was being offered as a prize in an art competition that Jess had kindly promoted through her schools in the lead-up to half term. Jules had promised to put the best entries in the shop window, and the mayor was lined up to judge and present the prize. Jules was quietly confident she was across the whole thing in a way she doubted Portneath Books was going to be. There was a finite number of sales to be had, and Jules was determined to get most, if not all of them, for herself.
To drum up some awareness in advance, Jules was out in the street with her phone, taking pictures of the newly arranged Cressida Cornworthy shop window for her Insta feed. It was tricky, with the bright sunlight reflecting against the glass. She had to get the angle just right. Soon, she was sweating as she repeatedly snapped, then jumped into the shade of the shop doorway to check what she had.
A humongous ice-cream cone suddenly appeared between Jules’s face and her phone screen, making her jump.
“For you,” said Roman, before taking a lick of his own ice cream—it was definitely a Ghirardelli cone, one of those waffle biscuit ones—piled high with what looked like their famous lemon meringue, thought Jules, a creamy white ice cream with chunks of meringue and streaks of lemon curd.
She took it from him, reluctantly licking up the incipient drips before they went all over her phone. It was delicious, of course, she noted with irritation.
“Why are you thrusting ice cream in my face?” she demanded, with her mouth full.
“You look hot,” said Roman simply.
“‘Hot’ as in warm, or ‘hot’ as in attractive?” Jules blurted out. Good grief! Talk about engaging mouth before brain. She desperately wished she could go back five seconds and keep quiet instead, but Roman just laughed.
“I think I’d better say the former, to be on the safe side, but now that you mention it, I do like your shorts.”
Jules glanced down at her red-and-white stripy cotton shorts. They were her pajama shorts actually—she hadn’t had that many options that morning—but she wasn’t going to confess that to her worst enemy. God, the ice cream was good, though. Lemon meringue was her favorite. How did he even know these things? Was she that obvious?
“I mean,” he went on, “I actually like your legs, but I feel like I should confine myself to your shorts...talkingabout your shorts, that is,” he added hastily. “I’mdefinitelynot suggesting I should beinyour shorts...” He broke off, looking confused, and addressed himself to his ice cream that was melting rapidly in the hot sun.
Jules found herself laughing out loud at this. He was unforgivably outrageous, but it was a relief she wasn’t the only one with an unfortunate habit of blurting whatever came into her head.
For a few moments, they both ate in silence. Jules immediately felt less hot and sticky, with the delicious, sharp but creamy ice-cream treat.
“Why are you being nice to me? It’s weird,” she said eventually, before biting a chunk out of the cone.
“Why wouldn’t I be nice to you? I’m a nice person.”
“No you’re not, you’re the enemy,” she said indistinctly as she crunched. “And you can’t just go aroundtellingpeople you’re a nice person. That’s not how it works. Anyhow, I know you’re not a nice person because you want to shut down my aunt’s shop.”
“I don’twantto shut it down,” Roman countered. “I just probablywill, as a side effect of my business objectives,” he said, with mood-shattering honesty.
“Yeah, so now you’ve just ruined the moment,” snapped back Jules, feeling depressed again. In another life, they could have been friends, she thought gloomily. More than friends...
But this was real life—and that was something else entirely.
Freya’s wedding preparations gathered pace. Jules was no longer convinced by Freya’s protestation that it was a low-key, low-fuss event: the WhatsApp group set up by the posse of women Jules was, she supposed, nominally heading up as maid of honor rose to a crescendo of ping notifications. There was everything from plans for a prosecco-drinking session to make up party favors, to another just to make bespoke paper chains for the town hall reception, plus exhaustive threads over dresses and shoes, with the various options all given copious airtime so opinions could be expressed as to what everyone should wear. There was even a thread on trial makeup looks, which was the final straw for Jules. She muted the group’s notifications and breathed a sigh of relief at the peace that followed. She knew what she was wearing—the hated yellow dress—and the less she indulged her inner egotist the better. The dress was hanging on her wardrobe door, reminding her whenever she saw it that she was not going to be parading her best look.
With the book launch on the Thursday and the wedding the following Saturday, she was glad she would have a day between the two to take things a bit easier.
The days in the shop with Flo and Charlie were long but rewarding. Her creativity and imagination flourished, and Jules began to recognize how risk-averse she had allowed herself to become in her previous job, where nothing she did was ever good enough and the fierce rivalry among the staff had meant fewopportunities for her to grow her skills. Flo, by contrast, seemed to worry constantly that she was holding Jules back in her career—and fell over herself to praise and encourage. Jules found this an almost tear-inducing contrast to her London life and tentatively started to have a little more self-belief.
