Love in All the Right Places (Chick Lit bundle) Read online

  Love in All the Right Places

  Contemporary romance. Filipino authors. 3 books in 1 bundle.

  Featuring

  Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano

  1) She has amnesia.

  2) She’s on the run from her father’s creditors.

  3) She’s enjoying her last days on earth.

  Ever since Jang Min Hee walked into Gio’s small museum, she’s given him one excuse after another about why she’s vacationing at scenic Boracay Island. Rarely has Gio’s neat and organized world been shaken like this. Soon he finds himself scrambling over rocks, hiding in dressing rooms, and dragging her out of bars. But how can Gio tell what's true from what isn't? Their worlds are getting unraveled -- one story at a time.

  Vintage Love by Agay Llanera

  26-year-old Crissy Lopez’s life is in dire need of a makeover. Her wardrobe revolves around ratty shirts and beat-up sneaks; her grueling schedule as a TV Executive leaves no room for a social life; and worst of all, she’s still hung up on the Evil Ex who left her five years ago.

  When her fashionable grand-aunt passes away and leaves behind a roomful of vintage stuff, the Shy Stylista inside Crissy gradually resurfaces. Soon, she feels like she's making progress -- with a budding lovelife to boot! But the grim ghost of her past catches up with her, threatening to push her back into depression. To finally move on, Crissy learns that walking away is not enough. This time, she needs to take a leap of faith.

  All’s Fair in Blog and War by Chrissie Peria

  Five Cuevas @5travels

  Three guesses to where I'm going next. Starts with an M. Ends with a U. Has a lechon named after it. #travel

  Travel blogger Five thinks she has hit the jackpot when the Macau Tourism Board invites her over for an all-expense-paid blogger tour in exchange for blogging about Macau. But while she happily signs up for the trip, she didn't sign up to be travel buddies with the infuriating Jesse. Will her dream vacation turn into a nightmare junket? Or will falling in love be on the itinerary?

  Introduction

  About #romanceclass and chick lit by Filipino authors

  Thank you for downloading Love in All the Right Places! Consider this a sampler of chick lit/contemporary romance books in English, written by Filipino authors. These books are generally light in tone, focus on relationships (romance, friendships, family), and feature Filipino characters. Some of them will not be exclusively set in Manila, or even the Philippines though! Traveling is a big part of our culture and these books will reflect that too.

  Cover (Story) Girl, Vintage Love, and All’s Fair in Blog and War were produced during a free romance-writing class that I facilitated. The class was held for six months in 2013, and more than a dozen novellas were completed in that period. Since then the class and the authors have been publishing and actively supporting English-language romance books by Filipino authors. Thank you for downloading this, and being part of our journey.

  If you enjoyed any or all of the books in this bundle, we hope you check out the other books from #romanceclass too. We have a list up on Amazon (“Chick Lit in English by Filipino authors”) that we’ll keep updating as more books are written and published.

  Mina V. Esguerra

  [email protected]

  www.minavesguerra.com

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Cover (Story) Girl

  About Chris Mariano

  Vintage Love

  About Agay Llanera

  All’s Fair In Blog And War

  About Chrissie Peria

  Copyright

  Cover (Story) Girl

  Chris Mariano

  For CJ, who wanted another,

  and for the loyal students of Pop Beat! High.

  Chapter One

  FORMER GOVERNOR Fernando ‘Anding’ Acevedo Torres was a statesman, orator, professor, golfer, and bottle cap collector. Gio could add packrat to that list, but he was sure no one would be interested in that. The heritage committee wanted a folk hero who was classy and dignified and had just the right amount of commonplace charm to make him more appealing. They also wanted a relative, but that was beside the point. They weren’t interested in learning that their hero had kept his bottle caps in cigar boxes with candy wrappers or half-finished love letters to a college sweetheart or moth-eaten pieces of pineapple cloth. To them, the sooner Gio got through wading through the remnants of Ex-Governor Torres’ life, the better.

  Gio was sure he could indulge them, but things weren’t always that easy. For one thing, he was doing the work of three people. The head curator of the Boracay Heritage Museum (also his father’s second cousin by marriage) wasn’t in the habit of telling Gio when he was coming in to work or where he could be reached for the rest of the day. Gio learned this quickly just a week into the job. Over a year later, things hadn’t improved much. So he kept the living history museum running and maintained enough to convince the committee he and his absentee boss were doing a good job. But things were getting to be more difficult by the minute. With the deadline for the Torres special exhibit demanding that folders be filed and captions be typed, Gio also had to be his own assistant.

  Someday, Gio knew, he was going to look back on this and laugh. Today wasn’t that day. Tomorrow wasn’t looking good either.

  The other thing that got in his way was that the museum remained open to the public. That meant he had to do both the research and the administrative tasks. He still had to log in the guests, show them around, answer their questions—all on top of the pile of work he had to finish.

  Some guests were quiet creatures. They rarely bothered him as they walked through the two-storey building, more grateful for the shade from Boracay’s unrelenting sun than for the heritage committee’s attempts to provide them some cultural enlightenment. Others liked having a guide around to answer questions on the tribes native to the island or give them permission to tinker with the broken-down transistors and gramophones on display.

  But still others were a class on their own. Case in point: the Korean photo shoot that was taking over his museum space.

  “Five minutes, okay?” one of the girls asked him. Her name sounded like Da Kyong. She was slightly older than him and looked to be in charge of the circus that brought in one local photographer (and an assistant, Gio noted with envy), an older Korean man who spoke Korean, Tagalog, and a smattering of Aklanon, and another Korean girl in a blue sundress who could not seem to stop talking.

  What else could he say? She had asked the same thing fifteen minutes ago. He simply nodded. “Sure.”

  He hadn’t expected things to turn out this way. When they had come in, he thought that they were just a normal group of tourists. In fact, they didn’t even protest when he began the short guided tour, although the girl in blue had an awful lot of questions. She’d point at random things around the room and chatter away, while her older friend would translate.

  “When did you say those clay pots were from?”

  “The pots were discovered in the late sixties, in the mountains of Malay but they are thought to be—”

  “Are there still local tribes on the island?”

  “Yes, good that you should ask that. The Aetas are—”

  “Oh, Min Hee wants to know what’s on the second floor?”

  Good grief. Every time Gio was ready with a smart and thoughtful answer, the girl in blue would be pointing at something new and asking away. She couldn’t seem to stay put in one place nor did she particularly care for the answers to her own questions. Gio grew exhausted just looking at her.

  “On the second floor, you can find a common mid-century Filipino house, patterned after the Torres’ own ancestral home on the mainland. If you will follow me…” he began, only to be interrupted by the Korean translator this time.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t suppose Frank mentioned why we’re here?” the man clarified.

  He could blame Sir Frank for all this chaos, of course. Sir Frank was the museum curator. Once upon a time, he had just been Uncle Frank, a distant relative, always heard of but never seen. But after being hired to work with him, Gio had decided that the more formal Sir Frank removed any traces of sentimentality from the relationship. Uncle Frank, he had to address politely; Sir Frank, he could use in a Twitter hashtag and rant about to his friends in Manila. The translator explained that Frank had agreed to let the museum be used for a location shoot in exchange for some international promotion. Gio had to call to make sure.

  The day progressed and the shoot was well underway. Gio had helped them pick some interesting spots for their shoot. Unfortunately, it was looking less and less about the museum and more about the girl in blue.

  “Face away,” the photographer was saying, all the time gesturing towards the large framed portrait on the other wall. His instructions were echoed by the older girl and their translator, but the girl in blue was already tilting her body away.

  “Look interested,” the photographer instructed and the girl said something that made her Korean companions smile.

  Gio couldn’t help but get a bit defensive, even if he hadn’t understood the exchange. True, the Boracay Heritage Museum was a small space, more a family museum than a cultural center despite Gio’s best efforts. It belonged to the branch of the family that Sir Frank had married into, a prominent clan in the region. The
ground floor was devoted to a paltry display of flora and fauna on the island, as well as some tribal jars and artifacts discovered by Sir Frank’s father-in-law, an amateur archaeologist. A corner had been arranged to display ceramic bowls that were supposedly found in nearby shipwrecks, pawned and sold to local families before it attracted the interest of conservation groups from Manila. Gio knew that the museum wasn’t as grand as the ones in larger cities like Manila or Seoul, but he still took an inordinate amount of pride in it. He knew every corner, every hollowed tile. He dusted the displays himself every night.

  The girl in blue was still talking in between shots. She was pretty, with a kind of luminosity that was evident once someone had a chance to really study her. It was the first thing Gio had noticed when they walked in. But she didn’t stay still long enough for that to happen. She was also much shorter than him, with a pixie-like face and a slender, graceful frame. Her light brown hair, colored in various shades of chocolate and honey, brushed her shoulders in loose waves. Most notable of all was that her skin was creamy.

  He used to hate that expression. Creamy was not a good thing in his book. His ex-girlfriend Arianne would slather on moisturizers that would make hand-holding and arm-linking a slippery endeavor. Seeing the girl in blue’s smooth shoulders and arms made him think of that word again, and this time he finally understood the compliment.

  Unfortunately, no other compliment came readily to him now. She may have been pretty, but it was rapidly overshadowed by the way she took over the whole shoot and made it difficult for anything to be finished. Gio felt like he was watching a puppy that had just discovered its first yard or the Energizer Bunny in a sundress. She was making it harder and harder for him to get back to his job, a job that he was in danger of losing if he didn’t get the exhibit finished on schedule. The sooner they packed up and left, the smoother things would go.

  “Min Hee wants to know if there’s a place for sitting down?” Da Kyong seemed to have a habit of ending her English sentences as if they were questions. Gio wasn’t sure if it was because of the musical intonation that their language seemed to have or because she was indirectly asking if she had been understood.

  Gio pointed to the desk near the entrance. Ever since the committee had ordered him to get the former governor’s things in order, it doubled as the reception and his own workspace. Though he usually kept things neat, the desk was now filled with boxes of bottle caps. On one side were the bottle caps that he had felt were worth displaying, carefully handled with latex gloves and wrapped to keep them from being damaged further. On the other side were duplicates and rusted labels that he couldn’t even read. In the middle were the caps he had yet to sort. Underneath all that was the visitor’s log, peeking tentatively at them. Gio felt slight embarrassment at the mess. He was usually much neater than this. “She can use that chair,” he offered instead.

  “No need?” the older girl replied.

  The girl named Min Hee was already walking towards it. When he brushed past her, he could smell vanilla instead of the usual coconut oil and suntan lotion that most tourists would use. He must have been too distracted by it because the time he had recovered, she was already piling his boxes on the floor.

  “No!” he protested belatedly.

  “You said it was okay to sit here,” someone accused him.

  He was surprised to see that it came from Min Hee. She had barely addressed him the whole time, much less in English. “You speak English?” he asked instead, a little startled at the turn of events.

  “Da Kyong wanted to practice,” she said, like it was perfectly normal for someone to let someone else do all the talking for her. She was holding a box in her hands and a frown on her face. “I didn’t want to bother. People say all kinds of things when they think I can’t understand. Like now. You said I could sit there.”

  Gio crossed the room and wrestled the box from her. He wanted to put it back on the desk but he wasn’t sure which pile she had gotten it from so he just held on to it. “Sit, yes,” he corrected. “But I didn’t say you could rearrange it.”

  “This is a photo shoot,” she countered. “Do you always keep bottle caps on your desk? It’s messy.”

  “I can see that,” he replied, resenting the way she emphasized her syllables at him. “Besides those bottle caps are for an exhibit so if you can please—”

  “You just said it was messy. So I’m cleaning it,” Min Hee reasoned. “Shouldn’t I be? You know, you could learn to smile a little. I bet you could be cute. You’re so stern behind those glasses. Think of it this way, I’m doing you a favor!”

  A number of sentences came to Gio’s mind: 1) The desk was off-limits. 2) They asked permission to sit—not shoot—at the desk. 3) He had spent the entire day yesterday going through those bottle caps and now he had to start over. And most importantly, 4) This was in no way a favor to him. But while he was thinking about the best way to phrase his response, she had gone on to grab another box.

  Thankfully, the Korean translator Ki Woo had stepped in. “Frank said we could use any part of the museum for the shoot,” he explained. He had his phone out, as if indicating that it would only take a minute to clear things up with his boss. “We told him we needed a place where Min Hee would be reading, you know, like a library, and he said you’d have space for us.”

  This was not Gio’s day. He could feel his jaw tensing up. “I’ll take care of the desk if you don’t touch anything else,” he told them. He didn’t even want to think about how much extra time he’d have to spend on getting things re-sorted. Then to Min Hee, he said, “Please put that down.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Of course,” she said, before placing the box down—on the floor. She smiled at him again when she straightened up, and this time, Gio knew she did it to spite him.

  He cleared his throat and tried to regain some of his professionalism. “Please wait in the middle of the room while I get things ready.”

  “And the chair?” she asked.

  “You can take it with you,” he said through gritted teeth.

  In less than five minutes, he had the boxes and files cleared, making sure this time he placed them in four separate piles: his three original classifications, and the fourth unnecessary one that Min Hee had made for him. He tucked the visitor’s log and pen into one of the drawers. “Here you go,” Gio managed to say with as much grace as he could. Which, unfortunately, was not a lot.

  Min Hee rested her chin against her knuckles and addressed the photographer. Gio half-expected her to bat her lashes at him. “Do you think that’s a good location? The background is quite plain.”

  “Maybe we could move the desk somewhere else?” the photographer suggested, smiling at her.

  They all looked at Gio expectantly. He sighed. At the very least, the new location might feature the rest of the museum prominently. So he swallowed his pride and asked, “Where do you want it?”

  Ten minutes later, he regretted his words. When Min Hee complained about the light in her eyes, he had to move the table again. When she protested about the dust that he was sure wasn’t there, he didn’t want to risk an asthmatic reaction so he moved the table a third time. But when they began shooting again, Min Hee stood up and started talking to her companions again and gesturing towards him. By this time, Gio was pretty sure that all her restlessness prior to this moment had been channeled into one goal, and one goal only: to see him jump through hoops.

  It was a good thing that her friend didn’t seem to care for her antics. “I think we are done here?” Da Kyong faced him, pointedly ignoring a still-talking Min Hee.

  “Oh?” Gio tried to downplay his relief. “Was there anything Her Highness was not satisfied with?” The second he said it, he immediately wished he hadn’t been so sarcastic.

  The older girl looked confused at his term. “Now she says the book she’s reading is not okay? But it’s all right… I think we are finished?”

  Evidently, Min Hee didn’t think so. She kept her arms crossed over her chest while the photographers put away their equipment. The way she glared at him made Gio think that she blamed him that the shoot was ending, despite being there for more than an hour already. But all he did was shrug at her.

  Ki Woo the translator spoke for the group when he thanked Gio. “We’re grateful that you accommodated us. We hope we didn’t bother you. Don’t worry, I’ve already arranged the payment with Frank.”