A Bookshop Christmas Read online

  Also by Rachel Burton

  The Tearoom on the Bay

  KINDLE LINK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tearoom-Bay-uplifiting-heartwarming-Christmas-ebook/dp/B088ZG9Z4J/

  APPLE LINK: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/the-tearoom-on-the-bay/id1514672606

  GOOGLE LINK: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Rachel_Burton_The_Tearoom_on_the_Bay?id=aCLmDwAAQBAJ

  KOBO LINK: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-tearoom-on-the-bay

  GENERIC LINK: https://headofzeus.com/books/9781800241138

  The Summer Island Festival

  KINDLE LINK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Summer-Island-Festival-Rachel-Burton-ebook/dp/B08HDDCPMH

  APPLE LINK: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/the-summer-island-festival/id1530362967

  GOOGLE LINK: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Rachel_Burton_The_Summer_Island_Festival?id=lwz7DwAAQBAJ

  KOBO LINK: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-summer-island-festival

  GENERIC LINK: https://headofzeus.com/books/9781800241145

  A BOOKSHOP CHRISTMAS

  Rachel Burton

  AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

  www.ariafiction.com

  This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Rachel Burton, 2021

  The moral right of Rachel Burton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PBO): 9781801100571

  ISBN (E): 9781801100557

  Cover design © The Brewster Project

  Aria

  Head of Zeus

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.ARIAFICTION.COM

  To my husband

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Megan and Xander’s Playlist

  The Die-Hard Romantics Book Club’s Favourite Books

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Become an Aria Addict

  “We have entered a contract of mutual agreeableness…”

  —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

  Prologue

  May 2016

  She was watching the weak and almost undrinkable coffee drip into the white plastic cup when her husband died. She wasn’t with him because she was waiting by the drinks machine. She hadn’t even wanted coffee really, she’d just wanted a moment away from the dimly lit room, the smell of disinfectant and the gentle beep, beep, beep of the machines. She’d wanted a little bit of time on her own and that time made her miss those last moments.

  She would never forgive herself for that.

  When the nurse met her outside the room and told her, she dropped the cup of coffee and heard a choked, strangled sound that she thought was coming from herself. She pushed past the nurse and into the room, lay down on the bed next to him, took his still-warm hand in hers, and pretended that she’d never left and that his gentle slipping away was still to come.

  She didn’t know how long she lay there next to him; she didn’t know how much time had passed before the nurse came into the room and spoke to her in hushed whispers. It could have been hours or minutes. Slowly she got up and followed the nurse’s instructions to go home and get some sleep.

  “We can deal with paperwork tomorrow,” the nurse said. “Do you have anywhere you can go or someone who could be with you tonight?”

  She nodded, pretending. She didn’t want to go anywhere but home and she didn’t want to be anywhere but alone in bed, the bed she had shared with her husband for so many years.

  And she didn’t want to think about how she was going to live without him.

  1

  November 2019

  I was hanging the last of the paper chains in the shop window when the phone rang. If it had been my mobile I’d have let it go to voicemail, but it was the shop phone so I let the paper chain drop and walked to the counter to answer the call.

  “Taylor’s Bookshop, Megan speaking.”

  “Ah, Ms Taylor, it’s Philomena Bloom here,” a loud posh female voice boomed down the line and I held the receiver away from my ear a little bit.

  “Who?”

  “Philomena Bloom,” the woman repeated impatiently as though I was meant to know who she was. “Xander Stone’s agent,” she went on. I could almost hear the woman rolling her eyes.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m so sorry – you just caught me at a bad time.” You’d think I’d remember a name like that.

  A normal person would have asked me if they could call back at a more convenient time, but Philomena Bloom bulldozed on regardless. “I’m checking up on the details for Mr Stone’s book launch next week,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said again, cringing inside as I crouched down behind the counter to find the shop diary. I really needed to get more organised and get the diary online, along with the ordering and stock-taking systems. Missy had been nagging me to do it for months but there was something so comforting about a paper diary and I was reluctant to let it go.

  “Friday the twenty-ninth,” Philomena went on. “Seven for seven-thirty.”

  “Of…” I managed to stop myself saying ‘of course’ for the third time. “Yes, everything’s organised,” I said instead, even though I wasn’t sure about that at all.

  I was used to organising book launches, author readings and all sorts of other events at the bookshop – how else could we keep it running? – but Xander Stone’s launch was the highest profile event we’d ever hosted and I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. The man who’d self-published a book about the ghosts of North Yorkshire was one thing, but Xander Stone?

  “Because Mr Stone is very particular.” While my mind had been drifting Philomena had been bellowing so I forced myself to concentrate. “He will want to see the lay of the land for himself, choose the menu and so forth.”

  “Menu?” I’d thought it was just going to be champagne and nibbles.

  “For the nibbles, of course,” Philomena said slowly, as though speaking to an inattentive child.

  “Well, Mr Stone is very welcome any time at Taylor’s Bookshop,” I said forcing a smile that Philomena couldn’t see. “Just ask him to come by beforehand and we can discuss all his requirements. Or if he wants to talk sooner he can give me a ring.” Over the summer, a new café had opened on the corn
er by the bookshop – a couple from the coast specialising in artisan teas and unusual cakes and snacks. I’d asked them to cater for Xander Stone’s launch and hoped they would be up to his ‘very particular’ standards.

  “I think he’s in York at the moment, in fact,” Philomena said, and I heard her clicking away on her computer keyboard – she had clearly digitised her diaries. “Yes, here we are. He was due to leave London yesterday.”

  “Really? The book launch isn’t until next week.”

  “As I said, he’s very particular and superstitious.”

  “Superstitious?” I asked, surprised. Maybe he would fit in with the ghost experts and ufologists who had launched at Taylor’s Bookshop after all.

  “Yes, he always likes to be out of London when the reviews start to come in and The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph are all due to review this weekend.”

  “I see.” This raised all sorts of questions which really weren’t my business to ask.

  “So everything is organised?” Philomena double-checked.

  “Everything is organised,” I replied, finally opening the diary on the right page and seeing that I had, at least, got the date right. Along with the champagne and nibbles orders I didn’t really see what else I could do until the day. “But Mr Stone can pop by any time to let me know what else he might need.”

  “Excellent, well I’ll see you a week tomorrow,” Philomena said before ringing off. So she was coming too then. I wondered if Xander Stone was bringing any more of his entourage with him that I should know about.

  It had seemed like such a good idea when Philomena Bloom from Bloom & Cuthbert Literary Agents had first called. There was no Cuthbert apparently, just Philomena herself. “It makes people think there’s a man about the place,” Philomena had confided in me during that first conversation back in August. “Makes them take me more seriously.” I’d agreed noncommittally, not sure what to make of Ms Bloom or the non-existent Mr Cuthbert. I was just excited to be getting our first Sunday Times best-selling author launching at Taylor’s. Back in the summer it had felt like exactly the sort of publicity the bookshop needed but now, at the end of November with only eight days to go, it felt more than a little overwhelming. Did Xander Stone know that we were just a provincial bookshop? Did he realise that we were hardly Waterstones Piccadilly? He was the current wunderkind of postmodern literary fiction and his second novel, Interim, had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Did he really want his third book to be launched at Taylor’s? I suspected that we needed him a lot more than he needed us.

  I went back to hanging the paper chains, the last of the Christmas decorations in the shop. I always felt better once the bookshop was ready for Christmas.

  It had been Bella’s idea to try to get more high-profile authors to lead events at the bookshop.

  “You need to start building a relationship with publicists and agents,” she’d said with her marketing hat on. “It’ll help build up the shop profile.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start,” I’d replied, even though that wasn’t strictly true. I did know, I just didn’t feel ready to open that part of my life up again.

  “Well, I can help if you like,” Bella said. She worked in the marketing department of the Jorvik Viking Museum and I’d been so delighted not to have to start making the phone calls to my past life that I’d left her to it. I hadn’t expected those calls to end up in booking Xander Stone. I wasn’t sure if the bookshop was up to the task.

  I’d first met Bella when she had come into Taylor’s to do some Christmas shopping. It had been my first Christmas back in York and other than trying to give the bookshop the refurbishment and rebrand it so desperately needed, I’d mostly kept myself to myself, licking my wounds in the upstairs flat where I was living with my mother again, the flat I’d spent the first eighteen years of my life in until I’d moved across the city to the halls of residence at York University.

  When I first met Bella, I hadn’t really known anyone in York who wasn’t directly connected to the bookshop. Bella was Missy’s flatmate – Missy came into the shop three days a week to do the accounts and manage our stock-taking systems and payroll (“Missy is short for Artemis,” she’d explained when I first met her. “My dad’s a Classics professor at Yale.”) – and she had invited me to go out with them for a few Christmas drinks.

  I’d been reluctant at first, feeling it was still too soon to go out, to enjoy myself, to smile again. But Mum had insisted.

  “It’s been six months, love,” she’d said. “I’m not suggesting you should be anywhere near over it, but I do think it’s time you cut yourself some slack. And if you’re moving back to York for good, you need some friends your own age.”

  I’d forced myself to go, ignoring the feelings of anxiety and foreboding in my stomach and armed myself with an excuse to leave as early as possible. I hadn’t needed the excuse though because I’d found I’d enjoyed myself and felt distracted enough in Bella and Missy’s company to catch a glimpse of who I used to be. Three years later I was still grateful to past me that I’d gone out that night as it had been the beginning of a great friendship. Mum had been right – I had needed to meet people my own age.

  “The shop looks fantastic,” Mum said as she came down from the upstairs flat, interrupting my thoughts and making me jump. “I was never able to get it to look so beautiful. You’ve got a real gift for this sort of thing. After you left home the shop always looked a bit like I’d let primary school children run wild every Christmas! You must get it off your dad.”

  I’d been nearly eighteen when my father left, practically an adult myself. Apart from his ability to decorate bookshops for Christmas – although I personally remember his decorations being from the school of quantity rather than quality – Walter Taylor was also a published poet, who had, over the years, won prizes and slowly started to make a living from his writing. He’d gone to London and left us behind. I think he’d been waiting for me to not need him around anymore, but don’t we always need our parents around?

  “I need a bigger life,” I’d heard him tell Mum before he left, as I stood behind the living room door eavesdropping. “I need to get away from this city, this bookshop. I’ve been here my whole life.” Dad’s parents had opened Taylor’s Bookshop on a little cobbled street behind York Minster in the early 1960s and Dad, like me, had grown up in the flat above the shop. Mum had let him leave for his ‘bigger life’ without a word of protest, as though she didn’t care where he went, but then she’d cry herself to sleep night after night once he’d gone.

  I’d kept in touch with Dad after he’d left, although in the crazy days of A levels, university and meeting Joe I didn’t see him again until my wedding day, when I’d asked him to walk me down the aisle. It wasn’t until then that I’d realised how angry I was with him for leaving without us or how abandoned I’d felt. It had taken me a long time to get past those feelings enough to have a relationship with my father again and Joe had been pivotal in that. Once we’d moved to London after our wedding he’d insisted we take Dad up on his various invitations out – meals and parties, book launches and openings. Joe and Dad had got on so well, making me laugh with their banter and constant light-hearted bickering, that I’d slowly allowed myself to listen to Dad and to begin to understand why he’d left. After all, hadn’t I done exactly the same thing and left York and the bookshop behind at the first possible opportunity, looking for my own version of that bigger life?

  But once Joe wasn’t there anymore, Dad and I had drifted apart again. He’d moved to France by then, taking up a ‘writer in residence’ opportunity in Paris. I’d always found some excuse as to why I couldn’t visit him or talk to him on the phone for long. I didn’t want that bigger life now and I didn’t want Dad asking me why.

  A small, quiet life was exactly what I needed.

  I gazed around the shop – the extent of my life these days – pleased at how festive it was looking now I had all the decorations up.


  “It does look good, doesn’t it,” I said.

  “You’ve excelled yourself,” Mum replied.

  I wondered what Xander Stone would think when he saw it.

  “Have you finished for the day?” I asked. Mum, or Martha Taylor as her readers know her, wrote historical romance serials for magazines and had turned the attic space above the flat into a writing room for herself.

  “I’ve done all I can for now,” she replied.

  “Do you mind closing the shop for me? I just need to pop out.”

  *

  The supermarket was heaving. Tinny Christmas music was blaring out of the tannoy system, and it wasn’t even December yet. Were people really stocking up for the season already? I pushed my way through the hordes of shoppers towards the wine section, wishing I’d just bought some cheap Cava from the little grocer’s shop a few doors down from the bookshop. But I did really want some nice champagne for tonight’s book club meeting, because I had something a little bit special to announce.

  I’d cooked up the idea of the Die-Hard Romantics Book Club with Bella and Missy two years ago over one too many gin and tonics.

  “We don’t need to read a certain book each week or anything boring like that,” Bella had said, waving her hand in the air tipsily. “It’s just a group of women who love romance novels talking about romance novels. We read what we want to read; we recommend to each other…”

  “And we drink!” Missy had interrupted, holding her glass aloft.

  And just like that, the Die-Hards had come into being. At first it had just been the three of us along with Mum, but after we put some posters up on the bookshop noticeboard more people had been interested. During the book club’s first year people had come and gone but now we had formed a steady group that met every week and talked about romance novels, film adaptations and any other gossip we felt like indulging in.

  We didn’t always agree – there’d been ongoing disagreements about whether or not Love Story and Me Before You could be classified as romance novels because of their endings.