Booked and Hooked by Isla Wilde bonus chapter

Booked and Hooked — Bonus Chapter

Closing Time — The Anniversary
An exclusive scene by Isla Wilde

A scene too hot for Amazon. One year after they met, Noah closes the bookstore early. Lena thinks it’s for inventory. It’s not for inventory.

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat. 18+ only. You’ve been warned.

Closing Time — The Anniversary

Noah’s POV — One year later

I closed the shop at four.

Not for any reason Lena needed to know about. Not yet. I flipped the sign, locked the front door, and pulled the blinds down on the bay window — the window where she’d taken her first photo of the bookstore a year ago, the one that had started everything, the pane of glass between my old life and this one.

My hands were steady. The rest of me was not.

I’d never done anything like this before. Not in thirty-five years of being the man who maintained things instead of celebrating them, who showed up for the routine instead of the occasion. Birthdays were cards. Holidays were functional. Romance was something that happened in the books on my shelves, not in the spaces between them.

But that was before her. Before the woman who’d walked into this shop with a ring light and too many boxes and rearranged every part of my life I’d thought was in its right place. Before I’d learned that wanting things wasn’t dangerous. Before I’d learned that the most organized thing I’d ever do was build something beautiful for the woman I loved.

So. Candles.

I lined them along the counter — twelve of them, the good ones, the beeswax pillars she kept in the apartment for the nights when she wanted the light to feel warm instead of electric. I’d stolen them from the bathroom shelf while she was on a call with Devi that morning, tucking them into a paper bag like a man committing a very romantic felony.

The fairy lights came next. Hers, obviously. I’d unstrung them from our bedroom ceiling — our bedroom, in what used to be my apartment and was now the space where her chaos lived alongside my order in a truce that looked like love. I wound them through the shelf brackets the way she’d done for Cozy Night, the event that had changed the shop from a life-support system into a living thing.

Wine. The same Côtes du Rhône from the power outage. I’d ordered a case of it three months ago because I’d remembered and because I remembered everything about us — every detail, every scent, every sound she made that I’d filed away in the expanding library of my obsession with this woman.

The reading nook. New cushions — thicker, softer, an upgrade I’d ordered without telling her because the old ones had been through a lot and deserved an honorable retirement. The throw blanket. The lamp angled to cast the kind of warm circle that made the nook feel like the inside of a story.

And on the side table, a single book. The romance novel. Her romance novel — the grumpy-man-who-learns-to-want-things novel, the one with the sticky note that had broken me open in the dark six months ago and changed the entire trajectory of my life. I’d opened it to a page I’d marked and placed a new sticky note on it.

Purple ink. My handwriting this time, not hers. The letters small and precise and shaking slightly because my hands were doing the thing they did when I was about to be vulnerable and my body was protesting.

This one’s about a grumpy man who learned. He learned that the mess was the point. That she was the point. That the best thing he ever did was stop shelving his feelings and start living them. Remind you of anyone? — N

I stood back. Looked at the shop.

Candles burning on the counter where I’d first served her coffee and she’d first touched my hand. Fairy lights glowing on the shelves she’d rearranged and I’d pretended to hate and secretly loved. Wine breathing on the table where she’d laid out her first pitch deck with the conservative projections and the NYU business degree she’d mentioned like it was an umbrella. The reading nook she’d redesigned and we’d christened and that still smelled, on certain evenings, like us.

The bookstore looked like a love letter written in candle flame and fairy light and the accumulated tenderness of a man who’d spent thirty-four years not knowing how to say I love you and had spent the last twelve months saying it in every language except words.

I picked up my phone. Texted her at four-fifteen.

Noah: Need you in the shop. Inventory emergency.

Her reply was immediate.

Lena: An inventory EMERGENCY? Is that a thing?

Noah: Just come downstairs.

Lena: You’re being weird. I’m coming.

Lena: Should I bring anything?

Noah: Just you.

Lena: …

Lena: Noah Calder. What did you do.

I put the phone down. Smoothed my shirt. Ran my hand through my hair. Stood behind the counter in the spot where I’d stood every day for four years, except today the counter had candles on it and my heart was trying to exit my body through my throat.

Her footsteps on the stairs. The side door. The hallway. The specific rhythm I’d memorized in the first week and now carried in my bones like a second pulse.

She appeared in the doorway.

She was wearing the wrap dress. The green one. The one she’d worn the day I’d first noticed her collarbones and forgotten how English worked. Her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and she’d put on the earrings that caught the light when she turned her head. She’d dressed for this. She’d read just you and she’d dressed for it and the knowledge that she’d stood in our closet and chosen carefully because I’d been mysterious for the first time in my life made something in my chest expand.

She stopped. Looked around. The candles, the fairy lights, the wine, the nook. Her lips parted. Her eyes went bright.

“Noah.”

“One year,” I said. “Since you moved in. Since you brought me coffee I didn’t ask for and told me my Instagram had eleven followers and rearranged my entire life without permission.”

“You set up candles.” Her voice was soft, cracked at the edges. “You — Noah Calder, the man who thinks ambiance is a waste of matches — set up candles.”

“I also stole your fairy lights.”

“I noticed they were missing.” She crossed the room slowly. Not taking photos. Not reaching for her phone. Just walking toward me with her eyes on mine and the candlelight turning her skin to gold and the expression on her face — that complicated, beautiful, devastating expression she’d given me on the staircase the night of the almost-kiss and in the doorway the night I’d knocked and every moment in between when she’d looked at me like I was something worth wanting. “You did this for me.”

“I did this for us.”

She reached me. Put her hands on my chest. I could feel my heartbeat against her palms and I knew she could feel it too because her eyes softened the way they always did when she found evidence of what I felt — the physical proof that the quiet man behind the counter was anything but quiet underneath.

“Happy anniversary,” she whispered.

I kissed her.

Not gently. We were past gentle. We’d been past gentle since the radiator lie and the Poetry section and the back office and every surface in this building that had been consecrated by what we’d done on it. I kissed her like a man who’d spent a year learning that wanting things wasn’t dangerous and was now fluent in the language of his own desire. Deep, open-mouthed, one hand in her hair and the other on the small of her back, pulling her into me until there was no space left between us and the kiss was the only distance that remained.

She made that sound. The one from the first time — the soft, surprised exhale that melted into a hum. The sound I’d spent twelve months collecting like a man building a library of her pleasure, every volume catalogued, every edition memorized.

She pulled back. Breathing hard. Her lipstick was already smudged and her eyes were dark and her hands were fisted in my shirt.

“The blinds are down,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The door is locked.”

“Yes.”

“Noah Calder closed his bookstore early, set up candles, and locked the door.” She was grinning now. The dangerous grin. The one that preceded the best and worst decisions of my life. The one that made my blood run hot and my self-control pack its bags. “What exactly are you planning?”

“Inventory.”

“Liar.”

“Thorough, comprehensive inventory of everything in this shop that I’m grateful for.” I reached behind me to the counter. My fingers found what I’d left there — a length of silk ribbon, deep burgundy, the bookmark ribbon I used for the first editions, smooth as water and soft as the space between a breath and a moan. “Starting with you.”

Her eyes dropped to the ribbon. Went dark. The pupils swallowing the brown, the warm gold-flecked color I’d fallen in love with replaced by something deeper, something that looked like hunger and trust and the specific arousal of a woman who’d been with a man long enough to know his body and was still being surprised by his mind.

“Noah.” My name in her mouth. Low. Rough. The version that belonged to locked doors and candlelight and the spaces between their public life and their private one.

“Do you trust me?”

“With everything.” No hesitation. No performance. The immediate, instinctive answer of a woman who’d spent a year letting a man earn her trust and was now giving it with the same completeness she gave everything — fully, loudly, without apology.

I stepped behind her. She stood still. I could see the goosebumps rising on the back of her neck before I’d even touched her — the anticipation alone enough to activate her skin, the knowledge of what was coming making her body respond before the stimulus arrived.

I lifted the ribbon. Placed it over her eyes. The silk settled against her lashes, her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose. I tied it behind her head — gently, the knot precise, because I was a man who did everything with precision and the things I did to this woman’s body were no exception.

“Can you see?”

“No.” Breathless already. Her hands reaching behind her, finding my hips, gripping. “Just — you. I can feel you.”

“Good.”

I pressed my mouth to the back of her neck. Just below the knot. Just above the collar of the wrap dress. A single kiss, placed with the accuracy of a man who’d mapped this body like a book he intended to read forever.

She shivered. A full-body tremor that started at the kiss and radiated outward, her shoulders rolling, her head tilting forward to give me more access, her fingers digging into my hips.

Without sight, everything amplified. I’d learned this about her — that Lena Vale, the woman who saw everything, who observed and catalogued and filmed and curated, became a different creature when her eyes were covered. The visual processor went offline and the rest of her — the skin, the nerve endings, the exquisite sensitivity of a body freed from the tyranny of watching itself be wanted — came alive in ways that made my mouth go dry.

I kissed down her neck. Slowly. Each press of my lips deliberate and spaced, leaving intervals of nothing between them — seconds where she couldn’t predict where the next touch would land, where her skin prickled with the specific agony of anticipation. I kissed the curve where her neck met her shoulder. She inhaled sharply. I kissed behind her ear. She exhaled the beginning of my name and couldn’t finish it.

I found the tie of the wrap dress. A single pull. The fabric loosened, fell open, and I drew it off her shoulders from behind, my fingers trailing along her arms as the dress dropped.

She was wearing lace underneath. Dark green. The set I’d bought her for her birthday three months ago because I’d learned, over the course of a year, that buying a woman lingerie wasn’t presumptuous when the woman was yours and you knew her body well enough to choose the color that made her skin glow.

“You wore the green,” I said against her shoulder.

“You texted just you. I made an inference.” She turned in my arms. Facing me now, blindfolded, her hands finding my chest. “Am I right? Was the inference correct?”

“The inference was correct.”

I kissed her throat. Her collarbone. The swell of her breast above the lace. I unclasped the bra from behind — one-handed, practiced, the muscle memory of a year of undressing this woman in every room of this building — and it fell away and she was bare from the waist up and the candlelight on her skin was the most beautiful thing this shop had ever held.

I cupped her breasts. Slowly. The weight of them in my palms, warm and full, her nipples already hard against my skin. I ran my thumbs across them and she gasped — the blindfold turning a familiar touch into a surprise, each stroke arriving without warning, each sensation twice as intense because she couldn’t see it coming.

“Noah —”

“I’m taking inventory. Be patient.”

I lowered my mouth to her breast. Kissed the curve of it. The underside. Circled her nipple with my tongue and then took it in my mouth and she grabbed my shoulders and made a sound that was halfway between my name and a prayer. I sucked gently, then harder, and her hips pushed forward against mine, seeking friction, seeking the hardness she could feel through my jeans.

“Please,” she whispered.

“Please what?”

“Please everything.”

I dropped to my knees.

The position that had become our signature. Noah Calder on his knees in his own bookstore, his hands on the hips of the woman who’d taught him that worship was just another word for want. The first time I’d done this — on the counter, months ago, the night the Poetry section had needed structural rehabilitation — it had been a revelation. Now it was a devotion. A practice. The thing I was best at because it was the thing I cared most about.

I hooked my fingers into the waistband of the lace. Drew it down. Slowly. My knuckles trailing along her thighs, the inside of her knees, her calves. She stepped out of the lace and she was bare and I was kneeling before her and the candles threw shadows on the shelves and the fairy lights made her skin glow and she was the most important thing in the room. In any room. In every room I’d ever stand in for the rest of my life.

I kissed her hip. The bone, the soft curve below it. She was trembling — the fine, full-body vibration of a woman who couldn’t see what was coming and wanted it so badly her muscles were shaking with the effort of standing still.

I kissed her inner thigh. High. Close. She widened her stance without being asked — a tiny, instinctive adjustment, her body opening to me because her body trusted me even when her eyes couldn’t verify.

“Noah.” A whisper. A plea. “Please. I can’t — the anticipation is going to kill me.”

“I love this shop,” I murmured against her skin. My mouth an inch from where she needed it. “I love what you made it. I love what you made me.”

I put my mouth on her.

She cried out. Not quietly — the blindfold had stripped her of the self-consciousness that usually kept her first sounds contained. The moan tore out of her, raw and unguarded, ringing through the empty bookstore and bouncing off shelves lined with love stories that had nothing on this.

I worked her slowly. The flat of my tongue first — broad, unhurried, learning her again the way I learned her every time because her body was a text I would never finish reading. Then the tip. Focused. Precise. Finding the spot that made her thighs clench and her hand grip my hair and her breathing shatter into fragments.

The blindfold changed everything. Every touch landed without context, without the visual lead-in that usually let her brace. My tongue against her was a surprise every time. The pressure, the rhythm, the specific angle I’d learned after months of devoted study — all of it arriving unannounced, each sensation a door opening in a room she couldn’t see.

I gripped her hips to hold her steady. She was rocking against my mouth now — small, desperate movements, her body chasing the pleasure with an urgency that told me she was close. Her hand in my hair tightened. Her other hand found the edge of the counter behind her and gripped it. Her head was thrown back, the burgundy silk ribbon bright against her dark hair, and the sounds she was making were not words. They were music. A composition written for an audience of one in a bookstore after closing.

I sealed my mouth over her and sucked, gently, while my tongue maintained the rhythm that I knew — from twelve months of obsessive, devoted, comprehensive research — was the one that undid her completely.

She came against my mouth with a cry that shook her entire body. Her thighs clamped around my head, her hand in my hair pulled hard enough to sting, her back arched off the counter edge, and the orgasm moved through her in waves I could feel against my lips — pulsing, rhythmic, the physical proof that I had spent a year learning this woman’s body and had earned an advanced degree.

I stayed. Through the aftershocks. Through the trembling. Through the small, broken sounds she made as she came down from the height. I kissed her inner thigh, gently, and felt her pulse beating against my mouth like a second heartbeat.

I stood. Pulled the blindfold down so it hung around her neck like a scarf made of intention. She looked at me — eyes half-lidded, mouth swollen from biting her own lip, her whole face flushed and glowing in the candlelight.

“You,” she said. “Are going to destroy me.”

“I’m taking inventory.”

“You’re taking years off my life.” She grabbed my shirt. Pulled me to her. Kissed me hard and tasted herself on my mouth and moaned into the kiss. Her hands went to my belt and she had it open in seconds — the efficiency of a woman who’d been undressing this man for a year and had optimized the process. Belt, button, zipper. Her hand inside my jeans, wrapping around me, and the contact after twenty minutes of focused, single-minded worship of her body made my vision blur.

“You’re so hard,” she breathed against my mouth. Stroking slowly. Her thumb tracing the head. “You do this to yourself, you know. Spending twenty minutes on your knees and then expecting to function.”

“I function fine.” My voice was a wreck. She was stroking me in the rhythm that she’d learned made my hips jerk, and my hips were jerking, and the composure I’d been maintaining for the past half hour was dissolving like sugar in hot water.

“The stepladder,” she said.

“What about it?”

“Remember the first time? When I wobbled?”

“You didn’t wobble.”

“I want you to catch me again.”

She released me — the loss of her hand was physical, a protest from every nerve below my waist — and walked to the stepladder. Naked. In the candlelit bookstore. Walking through the aisles of my shop with nothing on but a silk ribbon around her neck and the confidence of a woman who knew she was wanted and had never been ashamed of it.

She climbed onto the stepladder. Two steps up. The height that put her waist at my shoulder level. The same geometry from the first time I’d caught her, the same position from which she’d slid down my body and everything had changed.

She turned on the step. Looked down at me. The angle was devastating — her above, me below, the power reversed, the fairy lights in her hair like a crown she’d always deserved. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I’d seen her in every state — morning light, evening dark, post-sex, mid-laugh, crying, furious, tender — and every time was the first time.

“Catch me,” she whispered.

She stepped off. I caught her. My hands under her thighs, her legs around my waist, her arms around my neck. The contact — her bare body against mine, the heat of her center against my stomach — was a full-body shock. I carried her to the counter. Set her on the edge. She wrapped her legs around me and pulled me between her thighs and the look she gave me — impatient, wanting, the look of a woman who’d had enough foreplay to last a year and needed the main event immediately — made my hands shake.

“Now,” she said. Not a request. A direction.

I reached into my back pocket. Condom. She took it from me, tore the foil, and rolled it on with the same efficient hands that had been stroking me thirty seconds ago. Her touch was confident, her fingers sure, and she looked me in the eye while she did it because Lena Vale did not look away during the parts that mattered.

I pulled her to the edge of the counter. Positioned myself. Pushed in.

The sound we made together filled the shop like a chord — her gasp, my groan, the mingled exhalation of two bodies connecting in the place where they’d first fallen and kept falling. She was wet from what I’d done on my knees and the slide was smooth and deep and I didn’t stop until I was fully inside her and her nails were in my shoulders and her forehead was pressed against mine.

“God, Noah.” Her voice shaking. Her legs locked around me. “You feel — every time, you feel —”

“I know.” I pulled back. Pushed in again. Slow. Deep. Watching her face. “I know.”

The counter was the first act. Slow, face to face, her hands in my hair, my mouth on her neck. The rhythm deliberate and deep, the kind we’d perfected over months of practice — the one where I hit the angle that made her eyes roll and held it, relentless, while she gripped the counter edge and said my name in the voice that made me feel like a man worth saying it to.

She came on the counter — quiet this time, a full-body shudder, her face buried in my neck, her teeth on my shoulder, a contained explosion that I felt from the inside. I held her through it. Didn’t stop. Kept moving. Kept the rhythm. Because the night was young and the candles were tall and I had inventory to complete.

The reading nook was the second act. I carried her there — still inside her, my arms locked, her weight nothing compared to the weight of how much I wanted her — and laid her down on the new cushions. She pulled me over her. Arched up against me. Wrapped her legs around my waist and said “harder” and I gave her harder. The nook was wide enough for two bodies if neither of them cared about spatial efficiency, which we did not. We cared about depth. About angle. About the sound she made when I pinned her wrists above her head with one hand and used the other to tilt her hips and drove into her at the angle that made her scream — actually scream, a sound that the fiction wall absorbed and the poetry section acknowledged and the empty bookstore held like a secret worth keeping.

The stepladder was the third act.

Her idea. Always her idea, the escalations, the creative applications of bookstore furniture. She stood, pulled me up, walked to the stepladder. Climbed the first step. Braced her hands on the second step. Looked over her shoulder at me.

“Catch me,” she said again. Different meaning this time.

I gripped her hips. Entered her from behind. The angle was — the step gave her height, and the height changed the geometry, and the geometry was deep and tight and devastating. She dropped her head between her arms and moaned and I moved and the stepladder creaked and the books on the nearest shelf vibrated with each thrust and somewhere Mary Oliver was nodding in approval.

This was the position where I lost control. Every time. The visual of her body arching in front of me, the sound of skin meeting skin in the quiet shop, the depth of the angle, her voice urging me faster, harder, right there Noah right there don’t stop — it was the combination that dissolved every organizational system in my brain and left nothing but instinct and want and the overwhelming need to make her feel everything I felt.

“I’m close,” she gasped. “God, I’m — Noah, I’m going to —”

I reached around her. Found her with my fingers. The combination — me inside her, my hand on her, the depth and the friction and the fullness — sent her over the edge. She came with a sound that was my name broken into syllables and scattered across the bookstore like confetti. Her body clenched around me and the sensation pulled me after her — a hot, shaking, obliterating release that started at the base of my spine and went everywhere, and I held her hips and buried myself deep and came with a groan that echoed off the shelves of a shop that had held a thousand stories and was now holding ours.

Afterward.

The reading nook. Where we always ended up. The cushions displaced, the blanket tangled around our legs, the wine still untouched because we’d been busy touching other things.

She was lying on my chest. My arm around her. The candles burning low, the wax pooling in shapes that looked, if you squinted, like tiny hearts, which I would never say out loud because I had limits.

She traced a shape on my chest. A letter. N. Then an L. Then a plus sign between them.

“You blindfolded me with a bookmark ribbon,” she said.

“I’m a romantic.”

“You’re insane. You set up candles and stole my fairy lights and wrote me a sticky note and then did things to me on a stepladder that would get this shop’s health inspection revoked.”

“The health inspector doesn’t inspect stepladders.”

“After tonight, they should.”

I kissed her hair. Pulled her closer. The shop was dark now, the candles down to stubs, the fairy lights the only illumination left — amber and warm and turning the bookshelves into a sky full of grounded stars.

“Did you read the sticky note?” I asked.

“I saw it. I didn’t read it. I was busy being blindfolded by a man with excellent hands and dubious morals.” She untangled herself, stood — gloriously, unselfconsciously naked — and walked to the side table where the book sat open. She picked up the sticky note. Held it close to the fairy lights to read.

I watched her face.

She read it once. Twice. Her lips moved around the words. A grumpy man who learned. That the mess was the point. That she was the point.

Her eyes went bright. She pressed the sticky note against her chest. Over her heart.

“Noah Calder.”

“Lena Calder has a nice ring to it.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Did you just —”

“I said it has a nice ring. I didn’t produce an actual ring. There’s a difference.”

“Noah.”

“Lena.”

“Is this — are you —”

“I’m saying that there are things you can’t shelve. Can’t organize. Can’t file alphabetically or stack by spine. And the thing I can’t shelve most is how much I want the rest of my life to have you in it. Every morning. Every evening. Every after-hours inventory.”

She was crying. Standing naked in my bookstore holding a sticky note against her heart, crying and smiling simultaneously, the most beautiful mess I’d ever seen.

“That’s not a proposal,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Yet.”

“Yet.”

She crossed the room in three steps. Climbed into the reading nook. Climbed into my arms. Pressed her face into my neck and held on with the strength of a woman who’d spent a year teaching a man to want things and had just learned that the thing he wanted most was forever.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to this bookstore,” I said into her hair.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Happy anniversary, Lena.”

“Happy anniversary, Noah.”

The candles burned out. The fairy lights stayed on. The books stood on their shelves, some alphabetized, some not, and the man who’d built a fortress out of order held the woman who’d taught him that the mess was the point, and neither of them moved for a very long time.

There was nowhere else to be.

There never would be again.

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