Tome for the Holidays

By Yolande Kleinn

Between grad school and the barista gig that helps pay his tuition, Cole Moreau's hands are full. He shouldn't have time or energy to maintain a hopeless crush on Isaac Hamlin, a coffee shop regular who happens to own the bookshop next door. But Isaac is sweet and gorgeous—and being friends with him only exacerbates the problem.

When a Christmas Eve blizzard strands Cole on Isaac's doorstep, the challenges pile up just as deep as the snow shutting down the city. A power outage, a mischievous cat, and only one sleeping bag… None of this leaves room for pining over impossible things.

Isaac is off-limits, but tell that to Cole's stubborn heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yolande Kleinn
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781946316370

Yolande Kleinn

Yolande Kleinn may be a shameless dreamer and a stubborn optimist, but she is also a proud purveyor of romance and hijinx. Excitable, fastidious and a little eclectic, she spends every spare moment writing the stories she wants to read. If she can drag other people into the pool along with her, then so much the better.

Book preview

Tome for the Holidays

by Yolande Kleinn

––––––––

Even without the looming threat of a blizzard, Christmas Eve is a crummy shift to be stuck making coffee.

At least the worsening weather has kept business quiet, leaving Cole Moreau and his two fellow baristas in relative peace. Every time Cole glances at the window, the sky looks darker, the snow heavier, the horizon more grim. By two in the afternoon, the snow that's been falling from the sky all day has turned unmistakably to sleet, and the clouds have gone a sickly green.

Through the window, downtown Minneapolis is barely recognizable beneath the snow and ice. It feels like being caught in limbo somewhere between dusk and midnight.

Worst of all, Cole hasn't caught so much as a glimpse of Isaac Hamlin this entire shift.

Not that he had any reasonable expectation of Isaac showing up. Unlike this tiny hole-in-the-wall coffee shop where Cole works—which would be closing early even without the nasty weather—the bookshop next door has extended hours leading up to Christmas. Isaac is definitely over there; the man is too soft-hearted to make any of his employees work on Christmas Eve. But that also means no chance to get away for the almost ritualistic caramel mocha he usually stops by to order halfway through Cole's shift.

When Isaac didn't appear at his habitual time, Cole seriously considered making him the usual and stopping over to deliver it personally—but he wasn't quite brazen enough to go through with it.

It's one thing to have a hopeless crush on the silver fox next door; it's another thing entirely to insert himself into Isaac's routine uninvited.

Still. They're friends, aren't they? Cole's been working this same job since undergrad, and he's well into his master's program now. He occasionally shopped at Catty-Corner Books even before he started working as a barista, but he's been a regular and devoted patron in the six years since. He was always destined to make a pest of himself, given his voracious literary appetite, but the gorgeous proprietor is a powerful extra motivation to stop in almost daily.

Isaac Hamlin is exactly the rugged, broad-shouldered, smile-warm sort of man to make Cole weak at the knees. Not that Cole considers himself to have a type, exactly. But there is something about the compelling intersection of attributes—attractive older man plus soft-spoken bookstore owner plus a wickedly wry sense of humor—that makes Isaac seem tailor-made to torture Cole, simply by being perfect and unattainable.

He doesn't know Isaac's exact age. In fact, for all that the past six years have formed a strange and impossible-to-quantify closeness between them, Cole knows very little about Isaac's life. A hundred other things—favorite authors, years in the book business, niche eras of history for which Isaac goes positively feral—have always been fair game, but Cole's never had the guts to push for more personal information.

And he's sure as hell never asked how Isaac might feel about dating a coffee-brewing grad student with an inconvenient crush.

He almost worked up the nerve once—the day after his college graduation, the day he stopped into Isaac's shop with no pretext at all, right at closing time, because he wanted to share the good news. Isaac hugged him that day. And then stepped