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    Sass and Snickerdoodles: Coffee Shop Series
    Sass and Snickerdoodles: Coffee Shop Series
    Sass and Snickerdoodles: Coffee Shop Series
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Sass and Snickerdoodles: Coffee Shop Series

    By Natalie-Nicole Bates

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Jonathan Oakes enjoys his reclusive lifestyle, living far away from people. It doesn't hurt that never being seen created a mystique for the author with his readers.

    Reluctantly, he accepts an author-in-residence offer from a fellow author who owns a bookshop in a sleepy little village.
    He thought it was a temporary trade of one quiet lifestyle for another.

     

    Until he met Sass, the server at the café next door who serves him his daily snickerdoodle latte.

     

    Sass totally embodies her name. She's fun, flirtatious, and sharp-tongued.

     

    But one night, he is lured into the café by the sound of a woman singing a sensual torch song. He sees a new side of Sass.

     

    A sexy siren!

     

    Can opposites really attract?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPerfectly Poisoned Press
    Release dateSep 13, 2023
    ISBN9798215632710
    Sass and Snickerdoodles: Coffee Shop Series
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    Author

    Natalie-Nicole Bates

    Natalie-Nicole Bates is a book reviewer and author. Her passions in life include books and hockey along with Victorian and Edwardian era photography and antique poison bottles. Natalie contributes her uncharacteristic love of hockey to being born in Russia. She currently resides in the UK where she is working on her next book and adding to her collection of 19th century post-mortem photos.    

    Read more from Natalie Nicole Bates

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      Book preview

      Sass and Snickerdoodles - Natalie-Nicole Bates

      Natalie-Nicole Bates

      Sass and Snickerdoodles

      The Coffee Shop Series

      Copyright © 2021 by Natalie-Nicole Bates

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

      First edition

      This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

      Find out more at reedsy.com

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      About the Author

      Also by Natalie-Nicole Bates

      Chapter 1

      Chapter Separator

      Nine o’clock at night on a Wednesday and nothing to do.

      This was the life Jonathan Oakes was accustomed to.

      The life he preferred.

      But somehow, the quiet was starting to fray his nerves.

      When he was home, it was different. Everything was his, the house, and everything inside it. He could walk around freely and do whatever he wanted. Play his music loud. Watch whatever he wanted on the television with no one to answer to. He could jump in his truck and just take a long drive wherever he felt like it.

      When he reluctantly accepted the author in residence at the Old Town Book Shop, he figured it was trading one quiet place for another.

      And it was – quiet.

      And he was bored.

      Very bored.

      Perhaps it was because he wasn’t home, and the surroundings weren’t his. He was restless and that was a feeling he wasn’t accustomed to.

      The bookshop and the upstairs flat belonged to his long-time friend and fellow author Hannah Drury. No, Drury was no longer her name, he thought as he stared out the window of the upstairs flat and into the darkness.

      Her name was now Salazar.

      Hannah Salazar.

      He wouldn’t have believed she was married if he hadn’t witnessed it himself. Hannah had always insisted that she would never marry. And why should she? She was not only a successful true-crime writer, but she was beautiful and smart.

      She didn’t need to ever settle for one man. If he had known she was in the market for a husband, he would have tossed his hat into the ring. But such was life – at least his life. Jonny comes lately, or Jonny comes not at all.

      But the previous year, she had talked him into flying in for the opening night party of Old Town Books. He was there to sign copies of his latest book, The Little Tree Hides a Secret. He seldom went to events or book signings. His reclusiveness turned out to be a blessing. It seemed that the further he hid from the public, the more it created a mystique with his readers.

      It certainly helped his sales, and well, it was often quite humorous reading all the theories of who he really was and why he kept himself in hiding. It was speculated that he was a woman.

      That wasn’t true.

      That he was a criminal hiding from the law.

      That was amusing, but also incorrect. He never committed a crime in his forty-something years, not even a parking ticket, and he didn’t intend to start committing crimes now or in the future.

      Another speculation was that he was simply another author who was already popular in another genre of publishing rather than mysteries, or wanted to start anew, and chose a pen name. A situation something like when the tremendously popular author Stephen King who in his past wrote under the name Richard Bachman.

      None of this was true.

      Jonathan just preferred a quiet life outside of the limelight.

      He broke out of his mystique when Hannah asked him to join in her celebration of the opening of her bookshop, and he found it difficult to say no to his friend.

      Even though he wanted to say no.

      But good friends were hard to come by, and since he didn’t want to lose Hannah as a friend, he agreed to come to Old Town and sign books. As a bonus, Hannah had her friend Arlen Roy, who was a popular comic book artist to design a comic book and a t-shirt based upon The Little Tree Hides a Secret.

      It turned out to be an amazing night and Arlen became a new friend.

      The following morning after the opening, Hannah phoned him at his hotel and invited him to her impromptu wedding to Justin Salazar, a man who made his fortune from being a member of a wildly popular heavy metal band that disbanded when the lead singer took a header off his Harley and died. In the bookshop hung a signed concert poster of Justin Salazar on stage, bass in hand, at least three feet off the ground, his long, wild, curly hair flying with a mind of its own.

      Jonathan was happy to attend the wedding which was held at the Registrar’s office. He had been happy for Hannah. His friend found love, and he knew it was true. Just the look on her face. She beamed happiness and love when she looked at her husband, and he reflected that happiness right back at her.

      Now, Hannah was about to give birth to the couple’s first child – a son – and she needed Jonathan to mind the bookshop.

      Author in residence was the term she assigned him.

      All he really did was sit behind a counter all day and help customers find books. He would also be

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