Jaded (10 page)

Really good. Dark and rough and at her disposal in a way she never would have expected. He was constantly in motion, assessing, thinking, analyzing. His gaze stopped moving only to take in details, then move on. The spur-of-the-moment suggestion to renovate the bathroom was a case in point. Lucas didn’t like to sit still. Grass didn’t grow under him. She didn’t think he’d have the patience to sit still as stone while she lost herself in his textures and tastes. Stubble against her lips. A trace of salt on his abdomen. The thin skin of his shaft on her tongue.

Looks like there was one area in his life where Lucas knew how to slow down.

Lucky her.

She didn’t feel that she could turn down his request to renovate the kitchen, though. Spending nights and weekends picking out wallpaper or paint and a new vanity with a big tough guy used to getting his way would be a good learning experience, maybe even better than spending nights in his bed.

She hauled open the door to the Heirloom Café with a little more force than necessary. A big, satisfying meal followed by an hour in bed with a big, satisfying male had combined to make her sleep like a baby. The bell over the door clanged rather than jingled, and heads swiveled to look at her. She smiled, then headed for the counter, mentally prioritizing her day. In addition to the library, Mrs. Battle wanted to talk strategy for the renovation proposal, and Freddie needed the position paper from the human-trafficking conference two years earlier—

“The usual?” Peggy asked.

“Yes, but would you add one of your skillet platters to the order? Also to-go.”

“You want home fries or hash browns?”

She remembered Cody’s cheekbones, the pale skin, his frame that bordered on skeletal. “Home fries, and toast, and a side of sausage, please. And juice.”

“Did you miss supper last night?” Peggy asked as she clipped the order to the wheel above the counter and spun it to face Eugene, the cook.

“I’m picking something up for a friend.”

“Your friend wouldn’t be Chief Ridgeway, would it?”

Alana felt her eyes widen. “No. Why would you think that?”

“Because Mrs. Denison across the street saw him go into your house around seven and not come out again until nine.” Peggy gave her a broad smile. “He was barefoot, she said. And he took Duke with him.”

She can’t tell you had sex last night. You showered and washed your hair and put on fresh clothes, and that possessive bite to your neck—that was a purely animal reminder that no matter if I was on top, he was still in charge—didn’t leave a mark.
“Chief Ridgeway wants to renovate the kitchen before I leave so he can rent it again as soon as possible,” she said, striving for a casual tone. “I’ve already been here months longer than we’d planned. He came over at suppertime, so we ate and talked about the project.”

“Oh,” Peggy said, deflated. “Not very exciting.”

“I’m a librarian. Nothing exciting happens to me.”
Except last night. Last night a tall, dangerous, remote man walked barefoot into your kitchen, then into your bed. Except it’s technically his bed.

Desire flashed low and white-hot in her abdomen.

“Take a seat,” Peggy said. “The skillet platter will be a minute.”

She sat down and picked up a copy of the local newspaper a previous customer had discarded in the rack by the door and skimmed the headlines. Peggy set a plastic bag containing a Styrofoam box, her bowl of oatmeal, and two shrink-wrapped packages of plastic utensils on the counter a few minutes later.

“Where is Gunther Jensen’s house?” she asked before Peggy could inquire into Alana’s breakfast companion.

“Out Route 46,” Peggy said.

The same road listed as Cody Burton’s address on his community-service paperwork. While she could find nearly any address in Chicago using the house numbers as her only reference, she was lost when it came to the numbering systems used on hundreds of miles of county roads. But if Cody lived anywhere in the vicinity of Gunther Jensen, that explained Lucas’s visit to the library, and the tension in his shoulders last night.

Alana paid Peggy, accepted her change and left a tip, then set off for the library. Cody was waiting for her, sitting with his back to the door at the top of the steps, forearms dangling over his knees. He wore jeans, worn sneakers, a gray hoodie and a jacket unzipped over the hoodie. His nose was red with cold, but more telling, the nail beds of his long, thin fingers were purple.

“Good morning,” she said pleasantly as she climbed the stairs.

He peered up at her when she reached the top stair. “You don’t know that,” he said.

“I’m an optimist,” she replied. “Scoot over.”

He did her one better, scrambling to his feet to loom beside her while she juggled her bags and unlocked the front door. Once inside, she went straight to the office and shed bags, coat, and scarf. Cody lifted the wooden return bin from the back of the door, stacked the books on the circulation desk, then stood outside the office door, silent and brooding. The boy could brood like nobody’s business, she thought. I’m not prepared to deal with a teenage boy. Teenage girls she understood. Grown men were mysterious enough. Adolescent boys might as well be from another planet.

While her laptop booted out of sleep mode, she pulled the Heirloom Café bag to her and removed her oatmeal, then the skillet platter. Cody’s shoulders straightened and a dull red heat suffused his cheekbones.

“I need to run antivirus updates on the computers,” she said, without looking at him. “Remember the boxes I showed you in the basement? I need those unpacked and stacked. Thank you.”

With that she slid past him and headed for the row of computers. For a long moment Cody didn’t move, something she knew only because all she could hear was her heart thumping in her ears and the whir of a computer’s hard drive coming to life. Then, a rustle of denim and the rasp of the leather and wool of his letter jacket. The squeak of Styrofoam. The sound of the basement door opening, and closing.

Good.

In between booting up the computers and running the antivirus software updates, she finished off her oatmeal. Just before the library opened, she walked down the stairs into the basement. Cody had five of the boxes unpacked.

“I didn’t know how you wanted the books organized, so I grouped them together like they were in the original boxes.”

She walked over to the table. “This is fine. I need to go through them and see which ones have any value in the resale market.”

“Resale value?”

“There are people who make a decent living going around to sales and auctions finding books that are rare or desirable,” she said. “There’s no reason why the library can’t do the same.”

He eyed the books stacked on the table, then the boxes in the room. “How do you know which ones are worth something?”

She showed him the app on her phone that allowed her to enter the ISBN and see what the prices were on various online sites. “Forty dollars,” she said after she scanned a book. “It’s not much when you need to repair the roof and add a sewer line, but it’s more than we had. The buyer pays for the shipping, too.”

Cody hefted a copy of a book containing Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing and sketchbooks. “How much is this one worth?”

His voice was too casual to be casual. She entered the ISBN and waited for the data network to crawl along the Interwebs and produce an answer. “Oh, not much,” she said. “Just a few dollars. Why?”

“Can I buy it?”

This from a boy who didn’t have the money to buy breakfast. “Just take it,” she said gently.

“Thanks,” he said, as if the word didn’t sit easily in his mouth.

“How about if I leave you my phone and you check them for me?”

He hefted the phone, then slid her a look. “How do you know I won’t download a bunch of porn and spend the day watching it?”

“Because my data network is so slow that you’d die of boredom,” she said with a smile. “And this conversation is inappropriate.”

Another flush. “Sorry, Miss Wentworth.”

She turned to leave.

“You don’t have to buy me breakfast. I eat before I leave home.”

Pride rather than truthfulness motivated the words. “Of course, but I don’t like to eat in front of someone who isn’t,” she said simply.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“But I do.”

Back upstairs she vacuumed and swept. The computer was up and running, so she checked in and reshelved returned DVDs and audiobooks, which were in high demand. Mrs. Battle was due to work today, so she would reshelve returned books while Alana helped the library’s visitors, worked on a blog post detailing upcoming releases and asking for the community’s input into which ones would be purchased, and checking the Facebook and e-mail accounts.

Mrs. Battle arrived just before noon. Alana went downstairs to find Cody working his way through the books. The edge of one table held a few books while a larger section was stacked back in the boxes.

“I’ve found a few worth some real money,” he said, without looking up from the phone. “Most of them are junk.”

She walked over to one box, crouched next to it, and picked through the selection. “It was worth a try,” she said.

“Your mother sent you an e-mail with the subject line DO NOT IGNORE THIS EMAIL and someone named Frederica e-mailed six times. Your battery’s almost dead.”

She’d forgotten about the notifications on her phone. Cody slapped the hot phone into her outstretched hand. Alana opened the e-mail app and saw the e-mails queued up.

“Do you always ignore your mother’s e-mails?”

“Not always,” Alana said as it opened.
Just when she’s e-mailing about her plans for the party she’ll throw when I return to Chicago, or asking when I want to start work again, if I need a vacation from my vacation, and how exactly do I feel about David dating Laurie?
Alana couldn’t think about that. She had a kitchen to renovate, the town’s police chief in her bed, Freddie’s wedding to plan, and a proposal due in less than a week.

And a sullen teenage boy talking to her. A boy who, other than answering direct questions, hadn’t said one word. She tapped back to the home screen. “I need you upstairs.”

He snagged the book of sketches and followed her up the stairs. Back on the first floor, she made sure he saw the half sandwich sitting on her desk, then she went back to circulation. A few moments later, he emerged from her office. “What now?”

“You can read
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day
to the preschool kids, or you can shelve magazines,” she said, half joking.

With a cocky grin, he said, “I don’t need the book.” Alana nearly gasped
Wait!
but bit back the word at the last minute. She should know better than to make jokes like that.

Some of the mothers looked a little taken aback at the idea of having a juvenile delinquent read to their children, but others took the opportunity to browse the popular-fiction rack themselves. Cody settled himself onto the low stool, his knees nearly in his armpits, gangly elbows perilously close to pigtails and cowlicks. One of the little kids giggled at this awkward stork impression. He drew the chalk easel to his side and started drawing. Within a couple of minutes, the kids were clustered around his feet, practically in his lap as he quickly drew, erased, and drew again, illustrating a story about a truck trying to deliver tomatoes to a store. He did voices for the truck, named Growler, and the tomatoes, who didn’t want to go to the store and be made into sandwiches. They wanted to throw themselves at things, people, trees, other trucks, which sent the kids into a fit of giggles.

Mrs. Battle set a stack of paperbacks on the circulation desk. She wore polyester slacks, a print blouse, and a cardigan. Her glasses were perched on her nose, and the chain got caught in her collar. “Well, that’s unexpected,” she said.

Alana watched him a moment longer, then turned to Mrs. Battle, who had her head cocked at an odd angle as she studied the Dewey decimal sticker on the book’s spine. “I get the same problem when I need a new prescription,” she offered.

“A new prescription won’t help,” Mrs. Battle said matter-of-factly. “My eyesight’s getting worse. I have an appointment tomorrow to see a specialist in Sioux Falls. I’m going to have to reschedule, though,” she said. “My neighbor fell yesterday and isn’t up to driving me.”

“What time is the appointment?”

“First thing in the morning.”

The older woman’s lips were firmly pressed together, holding in tears. In the story nook, Cody drew Growler convincing the tomatoes to throw themselves at the wall above a big vat to be made into pizza sauce.

“I’ve been meaning to run to Sioux Falls,” Alana said. “How about if we drive down together?”

“You don’t need to do that,” Mrs. Battle said firmly.

“I’d like to,” Alana replied. “It would be a big help for me. We’re so busy, we don’t have much time to talk about the proposal. We can talk on the way there and the way back.”

“All right,” Mrs. Battle said.

“I’ll pick you up early,” Alana said.

In the story nook, Cody dusted off his hands. The little kids whined and one lurched forward to tug the leg of Cody’s jeans. “More Growler!” he demanded imperiously.

“I can’t, buddy,” Cody said. “I’ve got to get back to work. But if you come back tomorrow, I’ll tell you another story about Growler. Next time he delivers pumpkins.”

He threw Alana a defiant look that made her smile. If Cody thought that reading to little kids was the best part of this job, he could have it.

Cody strolled over to the desk, the first real smile she’d seen on his face. “That was fun.”

“The kids loved you,” Alana said. “Nice job.”

He shrugged. “No big deal. Want me to sort some more books?”

“Yes, please.”

She scrolled through Freddie’s e-mail again, which was asking for a slightly different angle on the literacy issues. Her mind wandered between the conferences she’d attended, the conversations in the identical hotel ballrooms about global literacy efforts, and Cody’s take on story hour. Lights went on in little eyes when he told Growler’s story. It was a sweet moment, one that made her heart lift a little. Good for Cody, good for the kids, good for the moms watching. But she knew her place, and it wasn’t here.