very store.” I lowered my voice and smiled. “They weren’t too pissed when they found out who I was, but still, it wasn’t my finest moment.”
As we strolled through the books, I watched Presley, grinning when she would get excited about a book she remembered from her childhood. When she saw a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, she snatched it up and grinned like a kid in a candy store.
“I loved this book,” she said, peering up at me, a bewildered expression on her face.
“Yeah?” That was one of my favorites as well. “I’ve still got my copy from when I was a kid.” In fact, I had a lot of the books I’d read when I was a kid.
“I think I need this,” she said, staring down at it before clutching it close to her chest.
“I think you do, too,” I told her, taking her hand and leading her around the store as we continued to look at all the books.
Somehow we ended up in the section with all the journals.
“So, what made you want to write your book in one of these?” Presley asked, picking up one of the notebooks and flipping through the blank pages.
I picked up one of the leather journals and smiled. “I was suffering from writer’s block, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt. Abby, my niece, bought me one for my birthday last month.”
Presley’s forehead creased. “Do you always write your books by hand?”
“The computer’s more my style,” I told her honestly.
“But you’re writing the one you’re working on now—Unexpected?”
I noticed a woman standing behind us had just taken a keen interest in our conversation. I offered her a smile when she looked up at me, and that was when I realized she had recognized me.
“You’re Jacob Wild.”
I laughed. It wasn’t a question; it was a matter-of-fact statement. “I am,” I responded politely.
“Oh, my God!” The woman looked around her, searching for… “Charlene! Come here. You gotta see this. It’s Jacob Wild.”
Great.
I glanced down at Presley and offered an apology with my eyes. I noticed she had taken a step back, her gaze settling on the two women who had started to invade my personal space.
“Would it be possible for you to sign this?” the first woman asked, holding out a copy of Forbidden, which she’d been carrying with her.
“Of course,” I said, taking a pen when she offered it.
I scribbled my name in the front of the book and handed it back to her. I did the same with the next woman, and when I looked up, I noticed that I had drawn a crowd, and Presley was nowhere in sight.
Twenty minutes later, I had finished signing a stack of books at the store manager’s request, then wound my way through the shelves of books until I found Presley sitting in a chair in a corner, reading the Shel Silverstein book. She looked content, and I hated to interrupt, but I was ready to get out of there.
“Hey,” she said, glancing up at me suddenly. “Are you done?”
I nodded. “You ready to go?”
“Yep. It’s my turn, right? I get to show you the place I enjoy the most?”
“It’s definitely your turn,” I told her, then took the book from her hand as I led her to the front. I paid for it as well as the copy of Forbidden she’d picked up earlier, ignoring Presley when she insisted that she could do that herself, then snuck out before anyone else noticed me.
“Does that happen to you a lot?” Presley asked when we were back on the road.
“What? People wanting me to sign a book?”
“Yeah.”
“Not as often as you might think. In a bookstore … that one in particular, yeah. But most of the time no one recognizes me.”
“That’s surprising,” she said, and by the tone of her voice, I could tell that she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the fact that I’d been recognized.
I started to wonder why that was, but then it hit me. Presley had mentioned she had dated Gavin’s brother, Adrian. And Adrian was in a fairly popular local band, which meant he was probably recognized quite frequently. Far more than I ever was, I knew.
“Does it bother you?”
“No,” she said, but I could tell that it did.
Figuring we would get nowhere by hashing it out, I let it go. It didn’t bother me that people recognized me, and it definitely didn’t bother me that they wanted me to sign a book for them—though I still had