Reading Group Guide
1.Do you think Quinn really saw her sister’s ghost or was it all in her head?
2.If you think she was imagining it, was she was trying to work something out in her head? What might that be?
3.Did Carolyn do the right thing?
4.Did she wait too long to tell Quinn? If yes, do you find her sympathetic? If no, why do you think she took as long as she did to say something?
5.If Quinn hadn’t met Mick, do you think she could’ve been happy with Brock?
6.Was Carolyn a good mother to Tilly? In what ways?
7.How does Tilly’s relationship with Dylan compare and contrast with Quinn and Mick’s?
8.Were Quinn’s adoptive parents right to keep the adoption from her? How do you think you would handle a similar situation?
9.Was Quinn’s reaction to it understandable?
10.If Quinn hadn’t lost her sister, do you think she would have accepted her role in Tilly’s life as quickly?
11.Cliff started out with a minimal role, but by the end, he seemed to be a peacekeeper—why do you think he was so invested in seeing Quinn and Tilly’s relationship work out?
12.What do you think of Chuck? Was he someone who could have given Tilly a good life if Quinn had left?
13.Why do you think Quinn is happier cooking at the café than back in L.A.?
14.The rough-start relationship between Quinn and Lena seemed to lead to a real friendship. Do you think Lena can be a real friend?
Read On
Coming Soon . . . An Excerpt from Chasing Christmas Eve
Chasing Christmas Eve, the next heartwarming romance from Jill Shalvis, is on sale September 2017.
Keep reading for an exclusive sneak peek!
Chapter 1
#SonOfABeanBagChair
“Spencer Baldwin?” an unfamiliar female voice asked.
Shit. Anyone who used his full name was most definitely not someone he wanted to speak with. After the past few months, he knew better than to answer his phone without looking at the screen but when he was buried in work like he was, he always forgot. With both hands busy directing a drone around the room, he’d answered on voice command without thinking about it.
“Wrong number,” he said, his drone hovering with perfect precision—and engineering—above his head. Then, to prevent a repeat, he took one hand off the controls and chucked his phone out the high, narrow window of the basement.
Which felt great.
Directing the drone to continue hovering, he moved to the far wall of the huge basement below the Pacific Pier Building and climbed the three foot ladder that was against the window for just this sort of situation.
Yep. His cell phone had landed directly into the fountain in the center of the courtyard. “Three points,” he murmured just as the elevator doors opened and Elle entered.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked in a tone that only she could get away with and not die. “You killed another one? Why don’t you just stop answering to the reporters, wouldn’t that be easier?”
He turned his attention back to his drone. “Am I paying you to bitch at me?” he asked mildly.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” she said. “You’re actually paying me a hell of a lot of money to bitch at you. Why don’t I just change your phone number again?”
“He can’t,” Joe said from the other side of the room. He wore only a pair of knit boxers and stood in front of one of the three commercial grade washer and dryers, waiting for his clothes. “Me and the guys like it when he gets all the marriage proposals.”
“You mean you like the nudie pics that come with the proposals,” Elle said and her eyes narrowed in on Joe’s body. “What the hell are you doing in your underwear?”
Joe was an IT wizard who worked at Hunt Investigations on the second floor. He was second in charge there, a master finder and fixer of . . . well, just about anything, and fairly badass while he was at it. And although Elle terrified almost everyone on the planet, Joe just grinned at her. “Had a little tussle earlier on the job,” he said. “Spence let me in down here to use the machines.”
Elle was not impressed. “If by tussle you mean a take-down went bad and you got blood all over yourself again, you best not be using those machines.”
“Hey, at least it’s not my blood. And I’m fine, thanks for asking.” Elle went hands on hips. She managed this building for the owner, who happened to be Spence and she often mistook the job for world domination, trying to run his personal life as well.
But Spence had nixed his personal life a long time ago. It was the Baldwin curse. He could be successful in his business life or his personal life – pick one – but not both. Since he objected on a very base level to going back to abject poverty, he’d long ago decided business was a safer bet than love.
Although, to be honest, he’d made a few forays into attempting both and had failed spectacularly.
“Hey,” Joe said to Elle. “Did you hear that Spence here is probably one of the top ten nominatees for San Francisco’s most eligible bachelor?” He snorted as if this was hysterical.
Spence leaned forward and banged his head against the wall a few times.
“Don’t bother, your head’s harder than the concrete,” she told him. “And yes,” she told Joe. “I saw the news. Why do you think he just threw his phone out the window?”
“I could just scare everyone off your ass,” Joe said to Spence.
He was kidding. Probably. And actually, Spence was more than a little tempted. This mess was all his fault, trusting someone he shouldn’t have. As a result, the press had been having a field day with his success in a very large way, threatening his privacy and also his sanity.
Just thinking about the most eligible bachelor thing had him groaning.
“Listen,” Elle said more kindly now. “Go take a break, okay? Then you can come back and do what you do best, shut out the world and work.”
It was a well known fact that Spence’s ability to hyper focus and ignore everything around him was both a strength and a huge flaw. Great asset for an engineer/inventor, not so great for anything else, like, say, relationships. But actually, he was hungry, so a break sounded good. He headed toward the elevator only to be stopped by Elle.
“Uh,” she said, gesturing to his clothes. “You might want to . . .”
“What?” he asked, looking down at himself. So he hadn’t shaved in a few days, so what? And okay, maybe he lived out of his dryer, grabbing clean but wrinkled clothes from there in the mornings when he got dressed. Whatever. There were worse things. “Joe’s in his underwear.”
“Hey, at least I was wearing some today,” Joe said.
Elle took in the guy’s nearly naked form, clearly appreciating the view in spite of her being very taken in the relationship department by Joe’s boss Archer Hunt. She finally shook it off and turned back to Spence. “You know damn well when you walk across the courtyard talking to yourself, hair standing up thanks to your fingers, just the right amount of stubble in place and those black-rimmed glasses slipping down your annoyingly perfect nose, women come out of the woodworks.”
“They do?” Joe asked.
“It’s the hot geek look,” Elle said.
“Huh.” Joe rubbed his jaw, where he too had stubble. “Maybe I should try that sometime.”
“No,” Elle said. “You can’t pull off hot geek. Your looks say sexy badass, not geek, which apparently is like a siren call to crazy women everywhere.”
Joe looked pleased. “I’m okay with that.”
Elle ignored this and looked at Spence. “After your last romantic fiasco, you vowed to take a break, remember? So all I’m saying is that you might want to change up your look.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Slouch. Get a beer gut. Fart. Whatever it is that guys do to organically turn us off.”
“Wait,” Joe said. “You gave up sex after Clarissa dumped you?” Like, willingly?”
“Something
you should try sometime,” Elle said to him.
“Woman, bite your tongue.”
“No, really,” she said. “How do you even keep all their names straight?”
“Easy,” Joe said with a smile. “If I forget their name, I just take them to Starbucks in the morning.”
He was totally pulling Elle’s leg. Probably.
Elle rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”
“Hey, you know I run on caffeine, sarcasm, and inappropriate thoughts at all times.”
“I didn’t give up sex,” Spence said. Okay, yes, work had taken over his life. His latest project required his 24/7 attention, that’s all. He hadn’t had time to connect with anyone, and a quick hookup wasn’t really his thing. What was his thing at the moment was creating a system for getting meds to people via drones, in far-reaching areas where they were nearly non-existent. Meds and also medical care through a camera-equipped drones, allowing doctors to remotely diagnose and monitor patients.
He’d had problems. Accommodating for the atmosphere and varying weather patterns, for one. The security, for another, making sure pirates couldn’t intercept and steal the meds and equipment was a high stakes priority. But he was getting close, very close. All he needed was time, uninterrupted time. He moved toward the door. “I’m going after my phone.”
“You mean the one you just killed dead?” Elle asked.
“I’ll bring it back to life.”
“You’re a genius, Spence, not a miracle maker.”
When he kept going, he heard Elle mutter “great” to Joe. “Now I’ve issued some sort of challenge to his manhood and he has to prove me wrong.”
The truth was, Spence could fix a phone in his damn sleep. What he wished he could do in his sleep was get this project up and running. Maybe a part of his problem was that it happened to be for Clarissa’s One-World charity and he’d promised her.
And Spence no longer broke promises.
He took the stairs because he hated the elevator, and when he stepped out into the courtyard, he stilled for a beat. He’d grown up hard and fast and without a home. This building had changed all that for him, and normally the sight of the fountain, the cobblestones, the building itself with its amazing, old corbel brick architecture, all worked together to lighten his day.
But when he hadn’t been looking, Christmas had thrown up all over the place. There were garlands of evergreen entwined with twinkling white lights in every doorway and window frame, not to mention all the potted trees that lined the walkways had been done up like Christmas trees.
This being winter in San Francisco, specifically the district of Cow’s Hollow, the afternoon foggy air burned his lungs like ice. He grabbed his phone from the coin-filled fountain, dried it off on his pants and shoved it into one of his pockets to restore later.
“Spence!” Willa called out from the pet shop that opened into the courtyard. She ran a pet daycare out of her shop and somehow when Spence needed to think, he often did so while walking her clients for her.
She gestured to the large dog snoozing in the sun spot with two cats, one on either side of him. “Got time to help me out?” she asked.
“Sure.” The dog was a regular client named Daisy Duke, who came out of a dead sleep at Spence’s voice, leaping over the cats in sheer joy right for him. When she got there, she jumped up and down in place, attempting to lick his face. Spence got her hooked up to her leash and they hit the courtyard, heading towards the wrought iron gates so he could walk her to the park.
But Daisy Duke wasn’t a walker. She was a runner. More accurately, she was a hundred-and-twenty-five pound bunny, bounding with enthusiastic energy, tugging at the leash.
“Hold your horses, Daze,” he said. “Save it for the park.” He muscled her to his side, his mind miles away on his drone problems. Lost in thought, he wasn’t exactly on his game when a black cat appeared out of nowhere.
With an excited bark, Daisy Duke broke free to charge after it, heading back toward the fountain and the woman now standing there, suitcase at her side, arm primed to thrown a coin into the water.
The cat managed to dodge the woman, but Daisy Duke wasn’t nearly as dexterous. Barreling forward at warp speed, she saw the problem at the last minute, letting out a bark of surprise. She was probably mostly Irish Setter, but he was pretty sure she was also part wookie. She was huge and uncoordinated, and a few crayons short of a full box. She did drop her head and try to stop, but her forward momentum was too much. Her back-end slid out from beneath her and she flipped onto her back, skidding, plowing headlong into the woman, toppling her over.
Right into the water.
Jesus. “Stay,” Spence said to Daisy and lurched forward as the woman pushed up to her hands and knees in the water, coughing and sputtering. “Are you okay?”
Gesturing that she didn’t need his assistance, she swiped a hand down her face. “I should’ve gone to Toronto,” she muttered.
She was maybe late twenties, completely drenched thanks to him, and yet she wasn’t yelling. She got serious points for that, he thought. And because she was wearing one of those flowy dresses that gave a man thoughts about what might or might not be under said dress, along with a denim jacket and boots—all of which were now clinging to her and fighting her efforts – he stepped into the fountain to help her.
“The water’s . . . warm,” she said in surprise. “It’s freezing out. How is the water warm?”
He looked down at the water. Green. He could feel coins beneath the soles of his shoes. “That can’t be good.”
She choked and he did a mental grimace. He deserved the tears. Hell, he deserved fury. But when she lifted her face, he realized she was laughing?
She’d found humor in this shitty situation.
He felt something shift in his chest at that, a zing of attraction maybe, which he hadn’t seen coming. In fact, he actually wasn’t seeing too much at all since he was now nearly as wet as she, including his glasses. He took them off to wipe the lenses on his equally wet shirt and eye contact was made.
She had big green eyes. Big, green, smiling eyes. “I’m a mess,” she said.
That wasn’t what he was thinking. Her clothes were plastered to her body. Her very nice, curvy body. He forced his gaze back to her face as he stepped out of the fountain and turned back for her, offering a hand.
She took it, but still struggled because her dress had shrinkwrapped itself to her legs, making moving all but impossible. They struggled a moment, hands grappling for purchase on each other until finally he just wrapped an arm around her waist and lifted her out, setting her down on the cobblestone ground.
“Wuff!” Daisy had flopped around on her back for a few seconds, trying to right herself. Finally she’d given up and stayed on her back, tail wagging like crazy, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.
That is until she eyed something in one of the big potted trees lining the courtyard, now decorated to within an inch of their lives with lights and ornaments.
The black cat.
“Stay,” Spence warned the dog and turned back to the woman.
“Thanks,” she said, her voice matching her husky laugh. “Appreciate the help . . .” She paused, clearly waiting for him to fill in with his name.
“Spence,” he said, purposely skipping his surname. Anonymity was hard to come by lately, but he kept up the effort.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for the help, Spence.” And then she . . . turned to walk away.
“Wait—” He’d gotten her drenched and he felt terribly about that. He wanted to make sure she was okay, that he got her dry and warm. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
She looked back, seeming oddly reluctant. “Colbie,” she said. “My name is Colbie.”
“Colbie, I can’t let you just walk away. You’ve got to be freezing cold. At the very least I owe you dry clothes and a warm drink.”
“No, really. It’s okay.” She started to wring out her long, dark hair and paused. “You m
ight want to stand back, my hair needs it’s own zip code when it’s wet.”