Beastly & Bookish (A Winter Bliss Romance)

by Catrina Bell

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

It’s fun for me to share my love of reading and book collecting, but the biggest benefit is finding new online friends I can geek out with.

“Okay so . . .”

The amount of sentences I've started this way

“Jaromar Elond Perchaz,” I poke his chest to the beat of each name and push closer. “You are the gentle giant! The smart kid with glasses! The magic spark character that makes a book worth reading!” He gulps, cheeks darkening all the way up to his horns. “You think so?” “I know so! Ugly? Let yourself go? Ugh. That’s the kind of talk that sets everyone back. I mean, big guys are all the rage right now. Plenty of folks would love to climb you like a tree!”

😭😍😭😍😭😍😭😍

“I won’t have you talk about yourself like that!” “Or what?” he asks, voice darker. Intimate. “Or I’ll . . . I'll . . . I’ll show you!” And I kiss him. I grab two fistfuls of his white shirt and yank him down to my mouth. Oh.

This is what a library can do — celebrate everything all at once. It’s a place where treasures are kept on display, never hoarded and always shared. Anyone can pick a book up off the shelf and expand their mind or find a cozy place to reread an old favorite.

We. Rom and Noelle. We never spent time together other than in the library as kids, but now we feel like a team.

She’s the feeling I’m looking for when I escape into books. But she’s even more than that because she’s real.

Noelle wasn’t my first kiss, but I’ll be damned if she’s not my last.

“Collecting books and reading them are not always the same hobby,”

I glare at him, wishing every inconvenient curse upon his head. May his soft bread always come with hard butter. A check engine light with no diagnosis. Milk he doesn’t realize is sour until that first lumpy sip.

Fucking Chad

“You’re everything to me. My past and my future. There’s nowhere else I want to be than with you.”