“Like a business proposition?” she said, and could not help but feel disappointment. It was just more of the same. Except it wasn’t. Jamie would not be looking like he was looking for it to be just more of the same.
She thought of those lions at the library. One urged her to patience.
“Kind of like that.”
“You should have emailed, then. It’s a long trip.” One that required fortitude.
“Can I come in?”
But she moved back from the door and he moved into her little space. It was so different from what he lived in, she wondered if he would laugh.
But he didn’t. He looked around, and then back at her. He took in the pajamas and smiled. Even though his smile was tired, it lit the room and her heart. “It suits you.”
She hoped he didn’t mean the damned ducks on the pajamas.
“Not as much as it once did,” she told him.
She gestured to a chair. It seemed too small for him. She took the couch facing him. Whatever his proposition was, she was saying no. Unless it was an indecent one, and then she would consider it.
“JHA wants you.”
As she had suspected. Was he going to ignore the message she had left him?
“Vivian Ascot wants you.”
Getting worse and worse.
“What about you?” she said, amazed at her own boldness.
“Well, therein lies the problem. I want you, too. Only I don’t want you in the way they want you.”
Her mouth went dry. “W-what?”
“I want you in a way that is completely inappropriate for a boss to want an employee. So we can’t offer you a job, Jessica.”
She realized she didn’t care about the job.
“And of course I can’t have you in the way I want you, either.”
“Why not?” she stammered shamelessly.
“Ah, Jessica, we both know you aren’t that kind of woman.”
“I could be,” she said.
“No, you couldn’t. I realized that when your dad came in and found us. That you weren’t that kind of woman and that you never would be. That you would compromise something integral to you if you tried to be.”
“Maybe that’s not for you to decide.”
He sighed. “I felt sick with shame that night. I nearly did something I would have regretted forever. But I want a chance to try again. Only to do it right this time. To see if I can be the kind of man worthy of a woman like you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I want to be a man you never have to be afraid to love. Worthy of what you have held out to me. I proposed to JHA and Vivian that we give you a private contract as a consultant. You can do everything you do best—run seminars and training sessions for bookstore owners—but you can still own your bookstore, too. You can go back and forth between New York and here. And I can go back and forth between New York and here. Because I’ve fallen in love with your world.”
Her world, she told herself firmly. But then he went on.
“And I am falling for you. Unlike you, I’m afraid as hell of it. But I have a feeling you could teach me the meaning of courage, if I give you the chance.”
It dawned on her, that’s why he was here.
They were going to give this thing—this powerful, mysterious force that was blossoming between them—a chance.
“Because you don’t work for me,” Jamie continued softly, “and I won’t be your boss, I can romance you the way a woman deserves to be romanced. Wooed, as the gals of the Smitten Word called it.
“I want to be that man, Jessica, the one who takes it slow and woos you and sees if what we have both been feeling over the last few days can go to where I want it to go. Where I hope you want it to go, too.”
“And where is that?” she whispered.
“I’m hoping, one day, you’ll be my wife. I’m hoping, soon, I’ll be the guy so in love—so unafraid of love—that I’ll buy the most expensive engagement ring in the store window.”
It was a pinch-me moment. She began to weep. And then to laugh. And then she wept some more. She had never felt joy as all-consuming as the joy of Jamie finding his way back to her, saying yes to all the possibilities love held out to them.
And then he was on the couch beside her, and he lifted her into his arms, and cradled her against the solidness of his chest and whispered love songs into her hair.
This was what she knew in that moment: this was the gift of having the courage to say yes to love. This place, her cottage, her parents, Timber Falls, none of these were home any longer. She did not need them, any longer, to feel the world was safe. And New York would not be home, either.
Home, that place of ultimate safety, where you were accepted and celebrated for yourself, would be, from this day forward, wherever love led them.
EPILOGUE
I READ THE report in front of me with a good deal of pleasure. For a while it seemed as if my attempt to repay Jessica Winton her kindness to me that day in Copenhagen was going to backfire. I got a number of emails from her, snappy in tone, letting me know she was not happy with an old lady meddling in her life.
She even called me that. An old lady! Imagine.
“It’s quite funny, isn’t it?” I said to Max. “I thought she was going to be the easy one.”
Max seemed quite bored with the discussion, and looked longingly at his cookie jar. The doctor has said I have to cut down on his cookies.
“Half,” I told him, breaking one in two. He nearly took my hand off as he grabbed it and gulped it down. He acted as if he was starving, as if he had been doing
