Me Thinks You're All Very Funny

I love how some of my dear friends clung to the hope that I did not leave the house after getting that urgent message from Kristie.

I have let you down.

Duh!

Of course I left the house and ran my ass (I mean, really, I drove my van because the idea of me running anywhere is just way too funny) over to Chapters only to discover that the book was not on the shelf.

It's okay. I'm an old hat at this. No worries.

I manage to flag down (and by this I mean I walked up to one of the employees and got in their face) one of the helpful and told them my dilemma. You know, the store shows you have 5 books on hand but none are on the shelf.

Turns out the person I picked sucked at math.

Either that or the desperation in my eyes made the male employee fear I would tear off his jiggly bits and cram them down his throat.

Nah. I'm too much of a princess, must have been his math skills.

Let's not dwell on the fact that said employee had obviously never heard of the Great Stuart and spelled it twelve different ways while I hovered in the background saying helpful things like 'there's no 'w' in the name. Stuart, S. T. U. A. R. T. No! Don't hit enter you left the ...' It was then I realized I may have also tracked down the only employee who couldn't hear. Three screens later he finally had the screen that I could have had up in 10 seconds if he had just moved but, I'm okay! We're getting somewhere. I felt like saying, 'See!! 5 copies, now run back into your stock room and get 'em'.

Turns out he felt the need to go to that special inner screen that only the employees know how to get to (yeah, yeah, it's to let them know when the last shipment showed up, whatever) and I'm pretty sure by this point he was just showing off because DUDE! Where's my book!!!

Sure enough it too says there are five books in the store. Geez. Wonder where they could be?

IN THE BACK ROOM????

And breathe.

Finally the gentleman (I let him live) decided that the books might still be in the back room (holy shit, why didn't I think of that) and left to go and see. Keep in mind that if this poor man came back without my book I was going to unleash C-Rex and then track down a new employee to repeat the drill.

Okay, who are we kidding, I would have went into the 'employees only' door and shown the SOB where the book was.

Police may have been called but, I knew I could call Kristie to come and bail me out.

Now that the search party (one guy) had been sent forth to find my book (and yes, it was mine!) I decided to peruse the romance section because some of you may remember my rule of never buying only one book at a time. Against my religion it is.

I drew a complete blank while staring at the now 32' romance section (when did it get so big?). What the hell else would be out right now? After giving myself a minute to think I realized that no new information would be entering my brain for the next bit so I just went with what I could see on the shelves.

Without further fanfare (shut up) I give you the books that I bought:

If you will recall I recently watched a romance book documentary and Kathryn Smith was one of the authors profiled. I know that she has turned now to paranormal historicals but I have a bit of a high threshold for an author to succeed in that genre. I picked up the books and read the backblurbs but knew I wanted to read her earlier books to get a good representation of her voice. I read the backblurb on this one about a ruined betrothal and how the hero will now have to win the woman back. Hmmm. Maybe he will have to grovel. All I know is that she was described on the documentary as writing sexy and emotionally charged romance. I'm in!

I really wish I could remember, OH! Nath wrote about this book when posting about her "Ten Books She Couldn't Live Without". I'm going to link to her post so you can read what she wrote. I'm thinking I have read Patti O'shea before and really liked her but I get her confused with Susan Grant who pushed all my 'I can't stand this!!' buttons. Now, I would suggest that Nath and I read at different spectrums but we seem to spark on the odd author so this one jogged my memory and I decided to run with it. I also knew I didn't own it because I never liked the cover of this one. So it was a safe buy.

Like Kristie I do enjoy a really well done historical western. This cover in no way says 'historical' to me but Kristie set me right when she blogged about buying this book a few weeks back so this one was also a no brainer.

Not only that, it also came with a 'special value' price which always looks cheaper than it is because it shows the U.S. price first and in huge letters. Heck, you can read the price off the little picture I've posted! Can you read the Canadian price? Hey, did you just blow the picture up!? It's okay, it was 5.99 and since books are about 10.99 up here it was still a deal.


Now, at this point I should mention that I had picked up all these books and was walking around. Just when I was beginning to think I had scared the 'helper' into running for the border he comes out of the stock room. The poor guy just about walked by me because he obviously forgot what I looked like but I once again stepped right up so that he would notice me standing there. I just managed not to snatch the book away from him and I guess I finally smiled because he felt compelled to ask if there was anything more he could help me with.

Sure, there was a bead of sweat, a nervous tick and a crack in his voice but, I thought it was real sweet that he had the guts to ask.

I thanked him, held the book to my chest and felt all aglow.

Thanks Kristie ;)