Beastly & Bookish (A Winter Bliss Romance)

by Catrina Bell

Demonkind are natural bargainers

Closer to my heart, this empty storefront is next door to the town library, my favorite place as a kid.

Demons, especially demons in a small town like this, gossip like it’s everybody’s business.

It’s the demon way. Make money and chase the bottom dollar.

Is there anything better than two weeks off with nothing to do except read books? The answer is, most definitely, no.

I run a hand over the metal covering my broken horn and tug the hair on the right side of my face further down to cover my scars.

My skin burns. My glasses fog up a little as I look her over. That’s when I notice she’s wearing roller skates. I grin. How can I not?

But unlike the kids who used to tease me for my face or having a stutter, she never laughed at me. We laughed together.

I have zero game with women. Less than zero, actually, more like forty below and my nuts are freezing off. They take one look at my face and no matter my business success, it’s a polite brush off.

I skate around for practical reasons — efficiency and health — but mostly I do it because it’s fun, because kid Noelle would have died to roller-skate around town in winter.

Aesthetics are key. I set one of my special edition “Monster Myth Makers” in the center of the spread. It’s a limited anthology making waves in the bookish community, and I was able to snag the variant with gold edges. Well, two. This is my reading copy. I keep a collector’s copy in my glass-paned bookcase at home.

I film for six seconds. Anything more doesn’t get the same traction on social media.

BeastlyandBookish: Enjoying some downtime with this beefy anthology and a cup of herbal tea. QOTD: What’s your drink of choice?

I switch up the decor on the table and take snaps and videos of three more books, enough content for the coming two weeks.

I keep my real identity anonymous online, but I show off my hands every few posts. For whatever reason, those get a lot more engagement.