Happily ever after Happily ever after Happily ever after

As a child, Ashley Adair’s primary vice was swiping her grandmother’s romance novels. Amused by her granddaughter’s naughtiness, grandma simply started handing the books down, negating the need for theft.

As a young adult, Adair’s personal romance novel began in the theater department of Cornish College of the Arts in downtown Seattle in the 2000s. It was there she met a student named Zach, whom she started referring to as “cute film-history boy.”

Cute film-history boy had a girlfriend at the time, however. Adair, ’21, whose last name then was Marshall, was respectful of his status but remained smitten. They found themselves working on the same production when he mentioned that he could use a ride home to Shoreline after rehearsal. Adair quickly volunteered, mentioning that Zach’s northerly abode was on her way home.

She didn’t tell him that she lived 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 and Ashley Adair became husband and wife. Acting was their passion, with each spouse landing parts at established local playhouses and working day jobs to finance their shared dream.

One Saturday night, the Adairs were walking to a performance at Wallingford’s Stone Soup Theater when both were struck by a car in a crosswalk. Each suffered brain trauma that made remembering lines difficult, so the couple abandoned acting and pursued less romantic career paths – Zach as an IT specialist, Ashley in human resources.

Ashley eventually launched her own H.R. consultancy and earned an MBA from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in 2021. Seattle was still in the throes of the COVID pandemic, so Adair’s graduation ceremony took place in, as she put it, “a nice parking lot.”

In 2022, her dad, having survived a bout with cancer and an arm amputation in earlier phases of his life, died suddenly from a heart attack. His death had a cataclysmic effect on Adair, whose human resources career had grown less enjoyable. Life was too short to be lived without passion. She decided to go back to grandma’s stacks.

On Halloween weekend of 2023, Adair purchased a small cargo trailer with the intent of turning it into Seattle’s first mobile romance bookstore. She dubbed it Beguiled Books and opened on 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 books,” which involves customers being sold books of Adair’s choosing based on certain characteristics they specify. Adair had a hit on her hands – or, more accurately, hitched to the back of her white Chevy truck.

“I remember seeing all the people walking around with their pink Beguiled bags,” said Adair’s friend, customer, and former H.R. 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 also impeccable. In 2016, sisters Leah Koch and Bea Hodges-Koch opened the Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, the first romance-specific bookstore in the United States. In 2020, when the pandemic hit, nationwide romance sales were at 18 million print copies, according to Circa BookScan. By 2023, that number more than doubled to 39 million copies.

“I think people were looking for escapism,” said Jenny Henderson, a romance novelist who writes under the nom de plume 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. It’s incredible to see how much people have embraced Beguiled.”

There are now a few dozen romance bookstores around the country, including the delectably named Hardcovers in Mill Creek and Shelf Indulgence in Tacoma, which got its start as an Etsy shop. And while Adair’s trailer doors will continue to swing open at various community events around town, she will be opening a brick-and-mortar location of Beguiled Books in Pioneer Square in November.

“Romance has probably been the top-selling genre since the ’80s, but the stigma has kind of gone away,” said local “bookstagrammer” Chelsea Chadurjian, who has featured Beguiled on her feed. “Especially in our unprecedented and, honestly, upsetting time in history, it’s so wonderful to have an escape and a story that ends happily.”  

Beguiled Books hosts their grand opening celebration on Nov. 15.