The Bookworm's Guide to Dating

by Hart, Emma

  Table of Contents

  THE BOOKWORM’S GUIDE TO DATING

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TWO – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER THREE – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER FOUR – JOSH

  CHAPTER FIVE – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER SIX – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER SEVEN – JOSH

  CHAPTER EIGHT – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER NINE – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TEN – JOSH

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TWELVE – JOSH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN – JOSH

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER NINETEEN – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY – JOSH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE – JOSH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR – KINSLEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE – JOSH

  EPILOGUE – KINSLEY

  THE END

  THE BOOKWORM’S GUIDE TO FAKING IT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY EMMA HART

  THE BOOKWORM’S GUIDE TO DATING

  The Bookworm’s Guide, Book One

  Copyright © Emma Hart, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Emma Hart

  CHAPTER ONE – KINSLEY

  rule one: don’t talk non-stop about your books.

  “Ahhh! You stupid dumbass bitch!” I threw the book at the wall and felt a satisfying rush of emotion as it hit it, the pages splaying everywhere, before it landed with a thud on the floor.

  Then I froze.

  “Oh, damn it!” I hauled myself out of the oversized beanbag and rushed across the room to retrieve the book. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, holding it against my chest as I straightened out the pages that had bent. “But it really wasn’t my fault. If you’d just picked Kieran, Alexandra, then I wouldn’t have gotten so mad at you.”

  Good Lord, being a romance reader was hard work.

  The door swung open and one of my best friends, Saylor, stepped in. She paused in the doorway and she took in the scene in front of her and sighed when her blue gaze fell on me crouching on the floor. “Kins, are you throwing your books again?”

  I straightened up and bristled. “Alexandra picked Will.”

  She frowned and tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder as she came over. She plucked the book from my hands and looked at the cover with a wince. “Ah, yeah, I wondered how you’d get on with that one. The love triangle is brutal.”

  “Brutal? Brutal? Until this last chapter, she was all about Kieran! Lovely, sweet Kieran.” I took the book back and slipped my bookmark in to mark the place of my betrayal. “But noooo, Will comes along with his magic dick, and suddenly Kieran isn’t that great after all. Never mind that Will is a raging jerk with an ego problem and an even bigger inferiority complex and Kieran has never done anything to hurt Alex! Will kissed his ex! Good God, take the damn book before I throw it again.”

  Saylor dutifully took it. “Do you want me to get rid of it?”

  “No. Don’t be stupid. I have to finish reading it.”

  “Oh, my bad. I thought you were done.”

  “If she doesn’t change her mind, this author is dead to me. You hear that, Saylor? Dead to me.”

  “No, she’s not. Her next book is about Will so I know you’ll buy it as soon as it comes in.” She grinned and tucked the book against her body. “Shall I put this under the counter?”

  I groaned and stalked out of the staff room. “Goddamn it. I have got to stop reading love triangles.”

  Holley looked up from the counter when I walked back into the store. “Oh, you got to the bit where she picks Will and his stupid magic dick, then.”

  “Has everyone read this book but me?” I threw my hands in the air and slumped against the counter. “Why did nobody warn me?”

  “It’s fun to see you flip out,” she said, taking the book from Saylor and checking the page I’d marked. “And it happened sooner than I expected. Saylor, you owe me fifty bucks.”

  I rolled my eyes. Sure, I was an emotional reader, but wasn’t that the point? I wanted to get mad like this at a book. I mean, the heroine was a dumbass bitch with terrible taste in men, but it’d been pretty enjoyable to be inside her head.

  “Nope, she threw the book at the wall, which means you owe me twenty,” Saylor mentioned.

  Great. Their bets were getting out of control.

  “Whatever, you still owe me thirty bucks, which means I’m getting white girl wasted on Sauvignon Blanc tonight.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, stepping to the side so Holley could serve a customer.

  Saylor waited until the customer had left four historical romances heavier and fifty dollars lighter before she said, “She’s right. It’s Kinsley’s birthday tomorrow so you have to be here early to open the store.”

  “Crap. Yeah.” Holley pursed her lips. “So… Does anyone mind if I run out to the party store?”

  I rolled my eyes at her. “Go.”

  Saylor swapped places with her. “We’ve been friends since we were four. How can you still forget her birthday twenty-something years later?”

  Holley held up her hands. “I know when her birthday is, but I’ve been so busy planning Ivy’s baby shower that I lost track of the dates. On the bright side, I have her birthday present already.”

  “You do?” I brightened. “Is it a book?”

  She tapped the side of her nose and grabbed her purse from the staff room. “You’ll find out tomorrow. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” She darted out of the store, and the bell above the door rang to announce her departure.

  “She won’t be back in twenty minutes,” Saylor said dryly, sitting on the stool and grabbing the paranormal romance she’d started reading that morning. “At least two hours.”

  “I’m not betting with you,” I told her, straightening up the display of White Peak, Montana magnets that our elderly tourists went crazy over. “Besides, we both know it’s going to be two hours. She’ll start in the party store, then hit the bakery because she’ll be hungry, then need a drink so she’ll just have to go to the coffee shop, then someone will stop her to talk about books. The conversation alone will be half an hour and by that point, we’ll have forgotten what she even went out for.”

  “Never mind us.” She flicked to the page she’d left off earlier and peered over the top of the book at me. “Holley herself will have forgotten what she even went out for.”

  “True story.” I stopped fiddling with the magnets and sighed. “I’m so mad about that book.”

  “Are you going to finish it so it’s over and done with?”

  “No. I think I’m too emotional. I’ll end up setting it on fire or drowning it in the sink or something like that. I think I’ll go and reorder the children’s books.”

  Saylor wrinkled her face up. “Rather you than me.”
<
br />   “Shout if you need anything.” I lifted my hand in a ‘see you later’ motion, because we both knew that when I got into organizing the shelves, I wasn’t surfacing for a long time.

  Bookworm’s Books was a labor of love for all three of us. We’d all had either weekend or part-time jobs here since we were teenagers and knew the store like the back of our hands. Unfortunately, as the previous owner, Mrs. Watford, had aged, she’d let the store fall into a bit of disrepair.

  When she passed away a little over a year ago, we found out that she’d written in her will that she wanted the three of us to have first dibs at buying the store if her kids decided to sell it. They all lived out of state and had for years.

  Of course, we were only twenty-four—nearly twenty-five—at the time, so when they told us they wanted to sell and were happy to do so at a vast discount in line with her wishes, we didn’t exactly have a lot of money put away for a rainy day.

  Thankfully, we did all have some savings, and with a little help from our families, we were able to cobble together the money we needed.

  We’d turned the store around and somehow, made enough money for all three of us to live relatively comfortably.

  Thankfully, people always needed books, even in the day of e-readers. There was nothing like the smell of a new book and reading on a device wasn’t the same.

  For example, if you got pissed off at an idiotic heroine in your book, it was a hell of a lot more expensive if you threw the e-reader at the wall.

  I wasn’t saying I’d done that, but they were not cheap to replace, and it wasn’t something you wanted to claim on insurance…

  “Oh, yes, and how did your e-reader get damaged, Miss Lane?” “Oh, I threw it at the wall because fictional people are stupid, sir.”

  It probably wasn’t covered in the terms and conditions.

  I pulled stacks of children’s books off the shelves. Holley was the one of us who had a degree in library sciences, but thanks to her innate ability to control everything around her, Saylor and I had unofficial ones.

  In other words, I knew how to organize these books so she wouldn’t lose her mind.

  Within ten minutes, I was shoulder-deep in every kind of children’s book you could imagine. Picture books, first books, chapter books, early reader books… everything from learning to count to middle-grade heroes slaying dragons and climbing mountains.

  I bet none of the kids who read these had to throw their books at the wall.

  Hmph.

  “Hey, what are—whoa.”

  I turned around to look at Saylor. “What?”

  “Holy book vomit,” she said. “How do you know what you’re doing in this mess?”

  “It’s all organized.”

  “What is it? An organized mess?”

  “Still organized,” I pointed out.

  She shook her head, and her hair that was now tied up into a bun on top of her head bobbed with the movement. “Whatever. I’ll stick to customer service.”

  For a moody bitch, she was great at that. I, on the other hand, was not.

  “What are you getting for Ivy? For the baby shower?”

  I paused. “I was going to get some clothes in a bigger size and some baby books.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Damn, baby books. That’s a way better idea than I had.”

  “What was your idea?”

  “I was going to give her a sex education book.”

  “I’m not sure a newborn baby has much use for a sex education book, Saylor.”

  “No, but since she got pregnant because she didn’t use a condom, Ivy clearly does.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. I was going to have to take back my comments about the good customer service.

  “Maybe go with the baby books,” I said. “I’ll find something else.”

  “Can I do the sex ed book anyway? Or maybe I’ll give it to Kai for Christmas. Hmmm.” She turned away without waiting for me to answer, muttering to herself about not being able to find baby books even if she wanted to.

  I selected a few baby books and set them on top of one of the small bookshelves for her to grab later. I knew she’d forget and get wrapped up in something else, so this solved that problem before it even became one.

  The bell over the door dinged, signaling the entrance of a customer, and by the sound of it, it was one of the nurses who looked after our grandparents at the retirement community.

  They got mad if we called it an old people’s home.

  I preferred ‘institution for the age challenged,’ but my grandpa told me that was ageist.

  I wasn’t even sure he knew what that was.

  I looked around at the books that littered the floor around me and sighed.

  Saylor was right.

  This was way more mess than organized.

  ***

  COLTON: What do u want for ur birthday?

  I frowned at my phone. It was eight-thirty, which meant my big brother was really cutting it fine if he was being serious. I hit reply to text him back.

  ME: A lie in and books?

  COLTON: I don’t know why I asked

  ME: It’s a bit late anyway, don’t you think?

  COLTON: I was going to offer to buy u dinner

  ME: We buy each other dinner on our birthdays every year, it’s hardly revolutionary

  And by ‘buy dinner,’ I meant that I cooked him dinner and dessert from scratch on his birthday, and he gave me a choice of the three takeout places in town.

  Such was my life.

  COLTON: Fine. What do u want tmrw? Pizza? Indian? Chinese?

  ME: I don’t know, it’s not tomorrow yet.

  COLTON: I’ll even push the boat out and treat u to a sit down meal in Bronco’s

  ME: Oh, so fancy. Careful there, you might break the bank.

  COLTON: We’re not all Michelin star chefs, Kinsley

  ME: Colt, I made you spaghetti Bolognese last year. I’m not exactly Gordon Ramsay.

  COLTON: Mm, that was good spaghetti though

  ME: I know.

  COLTON: Wanna make that?

  ME: Do I want to cook for myself on my birthday? Not really.

  COLTON: I know. Why don’t we all go to Bronco’s and I’ll pay for ur dinner

  ME: Who is all?

  COLTON: Everyone. Josh, Kai, Ivy, Tori, Say, and Holley

  ME: No Amber?

  His response about his girlfriend took too long to come. And by too long, I meant that it didn’t come at all.

  ME: Colton.

  COLTON: We’re not talking right now. I want u to have fun, not worry about that

  ME: I’m not doing karaoke. No way.

  COLTON: Aw, man. I wanted to serenade u with Bohemian Rhapsody

  ME: I cannot think of a worse birthday present, honestly.

  COLTON: Are u sure? Me and Josh have practiced our parts and I think Kai is on board

  ME: I’ve heard Kai sing, I’m still going to pass.

  COLTON: Spoilsport

  ME: Dinner at Bronco’s it is. Now go away, you’re interrupting my Sookie marathon.

  COLTON: Sookie? Isn’t that that dumb vampire show?

  ME: I’m sure it is dumb, but I wouldn’t know, I’m reading the books.

  COLTON: I have no idea how I got u for a sister

  ME: God liked you the day I was born, obviously. I’m a blessing.

  COLTON: Blessing to Satan, maybe

  ME: Stop talking about yourself, Colt. You’ll hurt your feelings.

  COLTON: Oh, go read ur book u brat, ffs

  I laughed and put my phone down. It was good to know that even as we got older, our sibling banter didn’t change. There was a weird comfort in that, even if he was a total shit.

  I also wasn’t surprised that he and Amber weren’t talking. Their relationship had been on the rocks for a long time, and while I was in no position at all to give any dating advice since I was historically very bad at it, I was firmly in the camp that it was time for them to end it
.

  Not only was my brother almost thirty, but he just wasn’t happy. As much as I loved Amber, their issues were too big to overcome, and I didn’t get it.

  But like I said, I was the worst dater in history, and probably wouldn’t know a successful date if it slapped me in the face.

  Not that it bothered me. I was twenty-six tomorrow, not ninety-six. I had plenty of time to dedicate to a relationship. Admittedly, it probably didn’t help that I had a terrible habit of comparing every real man I met to the fictional ones in books to the point that I actually stopped trying to meet real men.

  God, they were all so disappointing.

  I mean, look at my brother.

  It was a miracle he’d ever gotten a girlfriend with his lack of cooking skills.

  I sighed and put my book down. Maybe I was too picky. Maybe I’d set my bar too high. That was a thing, and the longer I went without meeting guys I even saw potential in, the more I wondered if I was being a bit of a relationship snob.

  Then again, was having standards a bad thing? If I felt I was worthy of a certain type of man, did that really make me a snob? Or did that mean I respected myself enough to hold out for someone who was everything I wanted?

  Or did it mean I had way too high of an opinion of myself?

  Probably a bit of it all, in all honestly.

  It likely didn’t help that the only thing I was ever really comfortable with talking about was books. Any books—romance, non-fiction, sci-fi, mystery, thriller… I could talk books until I turned into one, and the fact that I co-owned a bookstore didn’t even get away from it when I was ultimately asked, “So what do you do?”