Prints Charming

by Rebeca Seitz

Overview

Does Jane Sandburg's future lie between the pages of her scrapbook?

With the help of her scrapbooking girlfriends, Jane is putting the pieces of her life back together since her divorce from a cheating husband. Her non-profit publicity firm is doing well and her new neighbor, Jake, is causing all kinds of sparks.

But when the Ex returns with a sorrowful heart begging for one more chance, Jane pulls her wedding scrapbook out of the closet to decide if her future lies in the past. With her friends going through trials of their own--adoption, run-ins with the law, and marital trouble--Jane and the girls come together over the scrapping table to make sense of their crazy lives.

Through the diverse and connected lives of four women, Rebeca Seitz creates an engaging story that celebrates the power of friendship and the uncertain-but-exciting world of starting anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781418555627
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	03/11/2007
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	715 KB

About the Author

Rebeca Seitz lives with her husband and young son on a small farm in Kentucky. This is her first novel.

Read an Excerpt

Prints Charming

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By Rebeca Seitz

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2007 Rebeca Seitz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5955-4271-7

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Chapter One

ONE YEAR LATER

Jane's tires screeched as she flew around a curve on Bluff Road.

"Girl, where are you?" The excitement in Lydia's voice came through loud and clear, and Jane pushed her foot down a bit harder on the accelerator.

"I'm coming, I'm coming." She kept one hand on the steering wheel while frantically sifting through the things in the passenger seat of her Blazer. There was a brush somewhere, she just knew it, but finding anything at seven in the morning after pulling an all-nighter was difficult at best. Exhaustion picked at her brain, but she took it for the victory it was. Her all-nighter had resulted (finally!) in a completed logo for Sisters, Ink. Bleary eyes gave testament to the long hours she'd put into creating the official representation of their scrapbooking group. A box of stationery rested in the passenger floorboard amid granola bar wrappers, a beautiful Sisters, Ink logo centered at the top. Four smaller boxes held their new business cards, printed on her laser printer at three a.m. The skeleton of their web site was even up and running, though none of the Sisters knew about it or the business idea she'd been brewing for weeks.

"Do I need to grab anything for you? This stuff is going fast. There are barely any of the foam alphabet sets left."

"Shoot, Lydia, I barely even know what I need. I'll be therein about two minutes." Jane lunged again, still searching for the brush while trying not to drop the cell phone from her shoulder.

"Okay, but don't let the grass grow under your tires. I'll be over in the baby girl section. I need to find something for Olivia's first bath pages and get ribbon for Mac. What's this big secret you have anyway?"

"I told you I'm not saying a word until we all get to Mac's. Be there in a flash." Jane snapped the phone together and slammed to a stop at the red light. Turning her attention to her still-searching hand, she finally found the elusive hairbrush and grabbed it. A blaring horn sounded, and she realized the green arrow had finally appeared. This business idea had monopolized her mind for weeks. And she had Bill to thank for it, in a way. Without him, she'd never have learned the value of girlfriends.

Jane pushed thoughts of her ex-husband out of her mind. Tires squealing again, she tore into the parking lot of The Savvy Scrapper. Tossing the hairbrush back into the passenger seat, she threw the car into Park, grabbed her purse, and flung open the door.

"Ouch!"

Jane looked up just as her door collided with the mid- section of one very tall man.

"Omigosh. I am so, so sorry. I'm just in a rush. The sale is happening, and I'm late and-"

"It's okay." Mr. Tall held his hands up as if to ward off any other car doors she might be hiding somewhere, and she noticed the coffee cup in one hand and bagel bag in the other. Bagels would be so heavenly right now. "I'm fine, really." He set the bag down on the ground and brushed the dust off of his olive green sweater, then looked at her. "I know how women can be when there's a sale involved." He grinned as he knelt to pick the bag back up.

She tried hard to ignore his sexist statement and not remind him of how many guys camp out at golf stores before a sale or sleep in the parking lot to get tickets to a concert.

"Are you sure you're okay? I mean, I have insurance, and we can call somebody." Jane shoved her hair behind her ears, willing herself to focus on the problem at hand rather than the sale happening about ten yards away or the way her stomach was now grumbling for coffee and a bagel.

"Really, go ahead. I'm fine."

"Okay, thanks." She turned and made her way around the back of the car. "I appreciate this. It's just that this only happens once a year, and my friend is waiting ..." She stopped on the far side of the car and looked at him. He could sue if he was hurt, and her luck with men right now meant he would sue and she would lose to the tune of thousands of dollars. "You're certain you're fine?"

"Go." He made a shooing motion with the bag. "Happy shopping."

Her mother always said never to look a gift horse in the mouth, and this was one time Jane would be obeying Elizabeth rather than giving in to her own desire to argue. She practically sprinted to the front door of The Savvy Scrapper, yanked it open, and burst inside.

* * *

"Jane!" Lydia was in the front corner of the store, surrounded by pink, yellow, blue, lilac, and pale green. She waved a die-cut of a bathtub and bubbles above her head. "I found the perfect stuff for Olivia and Oliver's First Bath page."

"Great." Jane joined her, breathless. Her cheeks were tinged with pink.

"Okay, here's the deal." Lydia turned toward the back of the store and pointed. "All the Times letters are gone, the vellum is almost finito, and the dog section is getting riffled through as we speak. Where do you want to start?"

"Dog section." Jane stuffed her keys into her purse. "I took great pictures this morning of Mrs. Hannigan picking up poop while stepping in another pile."

"You are so gross. That poor woman, poop obsessed. To each his own, I guess."

Jane scanned the rest of the store, making a quick plan to get the most stuff. "What can you expect? She's lived there since before animals were allowed and tried to stop the changing of the rules. All she wants is a poop-free yard, and I can't say I blame her."

Lydia's eyebrows rose. "You're siding with Mrs. Hannigan?"

"I wouldn't say I was siding with her, just beginning to understand where she's coming from, that's all." Jane shrugged.

"Right. Go on over to the dog section. I'll come over there when I'm finished here. Can you grab me that new paper with the red stripes and dark brown bones? I've got some pictures of Otis with Olivia and Oliver from last week."

"Dale let that pug get near his precious twins? I thought you said the only thing he cared more about than SportsCenter was those babies."

"Dale hasn't seen the pictures yet. You know he never comes in my scrapbook studio. I think he gets hives when he thinks about how much money I spend on this stuff." Lydia waved her hand to encompass the store. "He's probably right."

"Oh, please. Men are never right." Jane turned toward the dog section. "Dogs, on the other hand, are wonderful companions who never cheat and can't even turn on a computer."

Lydia laughed and turned back to the wall of baby- themed paper in front of her, leaving Jane to take care of the dog paper. Stripes or flowers? She didn't want to make the scrapbook too babyish, but she also didn't want it to look too grownup. The papers were all on sale, so maybe she would just get both. Dale would never know, since he didn't come into her studio anyway, and she could give some of it to Mac for Kesa's baby book. She took two sheets of the pink and lime green-striped paper, then two of the blue rosebud ones.

"Men are never right," she muttered under her breath. Maybe Jane had a good point.

Chapter Two

"And then she pushed this woman out of the way and grabbed the last two sheets of the bone paper." Lydia laughed again as she and Jane settled into chairs at MacKenzie Allen's big oak kitchen table later that day and told her all about the sale.

"You pushed a woman?" Mac asked.

"Well, just a nudge," Jane admitted. "Anyway, let's not get hung up on this. I've got a surprise for you."

"Ah, finally, she spills the beans."

"Listen, girls, I've been thinking, and I'm pretty sure I've come up with a way for us to make some money at this scrap-booking thing while doing a very good deed at the same time."

"That's our Jane, always the entrepreneur," Lydia said.

"If it helps pay for my scrappin' habit, I'm all ears, chile."

Jane leaned into the table. Mac and Lydia followed suit. "Well, I was thinking about this past year and how I wouldn't have made it through without the two of you." She smiled at her old friend Lydia and her newly found girlfriend, Mac. "That's when I realized that I'd let my friendships slip when I got married. I'm not sure why, but it's like I let everything go but my relationship with Bill. And I think that made me less of the woman I wanted to be. I like my friendships with you, our conversations, our scrapping time, all of it. I don't know where I'd be without it."

"Okay, much as I'm loving the love fest, tell me how this helps other women," Lydia prodded.

"I'm getting there. I started thinking about why I had let my friendships go. And it occurred to me that, even if I had wanted to reach out to other scrappers in my area, I had no idea how to find them. Y'all know I don't like taking classes, and that seemed to be the only way to find other scrappers, which left me with no easy way to make other scrapping friends."

"You could go online," Lydia suggested.

Jane nodded. "I could, but then I'd be making friends that could be on the other side of the country just as easily as down the block. Having friends whose houses I can go to, or shop with, or just hug every now and then isn't something I could easily find online. So then it hit me." Her chair creaked as she leaned back in satisfaction.

"Um, what hit you?" Mac asked.

"A business idea-a way to connect scrappers with other scrappers in their area and across the country. To help women connect with other women rather than neglecting such an important part of being female."

"Okay, genius, I'll bite. How do we do that?"

Jane leaned forward again. "With a web site of our own." She grinned.

"But there are already a ton of scrapping web sites out there, Jane."

"I know, but they all exist to sell stuff-which is fine. Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to buy scrapping stuff all day long. But there needs to be a place that's all about building relation- ships first. So, I built us a web site and"-she reached into her tote bag resting on the floor-"incorporated us."

She set the boxes of letterhead and business cards on the table, pulling off the lids and watching her friends' faces. Would they balk?

Mac reached in and pulled out one of the business cards with her name on it. "MacKenzie Jones, Vice President of Class Development and Web Site Management. Now that sounds highfalutin for this country girl."

"Not really, Mac. It's just a title that puts you in charge of coordinating our online classes and maintaining the web site. Since you help teach at the Creating Keepsakes convention every year and you love classes so much, I thought you'd like to be in charge of that."

"Hmm, 'spose I might be able to do that."

Lydia pulled her own card from the box and read, "Lydia Whitehaven, Vice President of Creative Direction. What does that mean?"

"Since you're the one who loves to be creative and artsy, I thought you could be in charge of new products, techniques, and skills. You love the part of scrapping that is art form, and there's a large portion of scrappers out there who agree with you, so we need someone in charge of addressing their needs."

"So what's your title?"

"Since the relationship part of scrapping is the most important to me, I would be Vice President of Club Communications, helping our members connect with each other at the local and national level, making sure they get plugged in."

She watched as Jane and Mac looked at each other across the scarred table.

"You know, if my scrapping habit was helping to bring money in, Dale might take a little interest in it," Lydia said.

Mac looked at Jane, then nodded one time. "All right, chile, we're in. Tell us how to get this baby up and runnin'."

Jane squealed and pulled her business plan from the tote bag. "This is going to be so much fun!"

* * *

A few hours later, the leaders of Sisters, Ink sat around Mac's scrapping table. Paper and embellishments lay scattered about.

"You know, if we gonna be in business together, we gonna need to know each other's scrappin' history."

Jane looked up from her eyelet setter. "Scrapping history?"

"Mmm-hmm. Has Lydia told you about how she acquired her eyelet setter?"

Lydia looked up and rolled her eyes. "Oh, Mac, that's water under the bridge by now. I'm sure everybody's forgotten it, and, besides, that woman started it."

"Started what? A fight?" Jane asked. "Two years I don't talk to you and you go completely to pot. It's a good thing I'm back in your life."

"It wasn't a fight, really-" Lydia started.

"Oh, yes, it was." Mac's voice was laced with laughter but brooked no argument. "Anytime somebody's hair is left lying on the floor, it's a fight."

"Well, how was I to know she was wearing a wig?" Lydia got up and made her way to Mac's wall of rubber stamps. "It looked real enough to me."

"That woman had the audacity to get between Lydia and the last Clikit. Mind you, this was the year when the Clikit first came out on the market. I'm telling you, I've never seen a situation go from peaceful to painful that quick." Mac snapped her fingers and laughed again. "Our Lydia pushed right back in front of the woman and grabbed that Clikit like it was the hem of Jesus' robe itself."

"Mac! Don't be blasphemous." Lydia snagged a baby bottle stamp and sat back down at the table, her dimple showing as she grinned. "I just got caught up in the moment."

"'Caught up' is sayin' it right, sister." Mac's eyes twinkled. "That woman tried to grab the Clikit from Lydia's own hand. Well, she messed with the wrong sister. Lydia snatched it back, and next thing you know, they're on the floor, pullin' and slappin' like there was no tomorrow. When the wig hit the floor, though, it was all over."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Prints Charming by Rebeca Seitz Copyright © 2007 by Rebeca Seitz. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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