As a child, Ashley Adair would swipe romance novels from her grandmother’s shelves. Amused by the precocious reader, grandma started simply handing the books down, inspiring a lifelong interest in stories of love.
Today, Adair runs Seattle’s first mobile romance bookstore, Beguiled Books, delivering hopeful, heartfelt tales to neighborhoods around Seattle.
Adair’s personal romance story began in the theater department of Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, where she met a classmate she started referring to as “cute film-history boy.” They became friends, and once, Adair volunteered to drive him home to Shoreline after a rehearsal—not mentioning that the drive was out of the way from her own home in Queen Anne.
Ashley Adair and her husband, Zach Adair, match in pink aprons outside Beguiled Books.
In 2007, they began dating, and in 2011, Zach Adair and Ashley Marshall got married. They shared a passion for acting. Both performed at local theaters while working day jobs to support their artistic dreams.
But fate had other plans. One evening, when the Adairs were walking to a performance at Wallingford’s Stone Soup Theater they were struck by a car in a crosswalk. Both suffered brain trauma making it difficult to remember lines. Acting, once a calling, became a memory.
The pair adapted, pursuing less romantic career paths—Zach as an IT specialist and Ashley, a career in human resources. She launched her own consultancy and earned an MBA from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Seattle was in the throes of the COVID pandemic, so Adair’s graduation ceremony took place in, as she put it, “a nice parking lot.”
Then, in 2022, tragedy struck again. Her father, a cancer survivor who had previously lost an arm, died suddenly from a heart attack. His death had a profound effect on Adair, whose human resources career had grown less enjoyable. Yearning for spark and purpose, she returned to the world of romance that had enchanted her as a child.
On Halloween weekend of 2023, Adair purchased a small cargo trailer to turn into Seattle’s first mobile romance bookstore. Dubbed Beguiled Books, it opened the day after Valentine’s Day 2025 at the Columbia City Night Market.
Large crowds, mostly women, flocked to the tiny trailer for “Blind Date With a Book,” novels handpicked by Adair based on each customer’s preferences. It was a hit, literally hitched to the back of her white Chevy truck.
“The bulk of romance books are written and read by women and have a woman lead, and in the end, the woman wins every time. She gets the love she deserves, and I think that's so powerful. ”
Jenny Hartwell, romance author
“I remember seeing all the people walking around with their pink Beguiled bags,” says Adair’s friend, customer and former co-worker, Rita Patterson. “That was sort of a sweet moment as someone who was there to support her. You never know, when you do something like that, whether it’s going to be something people gravitate toward, and it immediately was.”
Adair’s timing was impeccable. In 2016, sisters Leah Koch and Bea Hodges-Koch opened the Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, the country’s first romance-only bookstore. By 2020, romance novel sales in the U.S. had hit 18 million print copies, according to Circana BookScan. By 2023, that number more than doubled to 39 million.
“I think people were looking for escapism,” says Jenny Henderson, a romance novelist who writes under the pen name of Jenny Hartwell. “It [the pandemic] was such a rough time. What’s so amazing with romance is every book has an HEA— happily ever after. I find them to be so feminist. The bulk of them are written and read by women and have a woman lead, and in the end, the woman wins every time. She gets the love she deserves, and I think that’s so powerful.
“When I go to Beguiled, there are always so many people there and they’re just excited to be there. The community of romance readers is a lovely place to be, and Ashley really reflects that and makes the experience of coming to her shop so genuine,” she adds. “It’s incredible to see how much people have embraced Beguiled.”
Today, romance bookstores are blossoming around the country, including Hardcovers in Mill Creek and Shelf Indulgence in Tacoma, which began as an Etsy shop. And while Adair’s trailer doors will continue to swing open at various community events around town, she has just opened a brick-and-mortar Beguiled Books location in Pioneer Square.
“Romance has probably been the top-selling genre since the ’80s, but the stigma has kind of gone away,” says local “bookstagrammer” Chelsea Chadurjian, who has featured Beguiled on her feed. “Especially in our unprecedented and, honestly, upsetting time, it’s wonderful to have an escape and a story that ends happily.”