She swallowed. “I wear it every day.”
His fingertip lingered over the locket, stroking a feather-light path along her engraved initials. Goose bumps rose on her skin and shivered through her bones.
His eyes stayed on hers, steady and bright, watching her reaction. And then his hand dropped, and he stepped further into the room. Further away from her.
“This is quite a place.” He turned toward the shelves on the back wall, so she couldn’t see his face anymore. “I’m surprised Angie didn’t consider the red brocade wallpaper overkill.”
Mary’s eyelids had grown heavy, and she blinked them all the way open. “She said she was going for something between a chic boudoir and a whoreh—” She stopped. “I mean, a house of ill-repute.”
He laughed briefly. “In that case, mission accomplished.”
She touched the cover of a new hardback, which Angie had recently purchased in honor of Penny’s brother Sam. He played amateur hockey at the local ice rink, and Angie had no doubt thought he’d be delighted by the library’s acquisition of Get It Deep and Work the D: An Erotic Hockey Anthology.
“Have you read that one?”
Miles’s voice startled her, and she immediately jerked away from the book. Embarrassment heated her cheeks as she folded her traitorous hands together.
“No,” she said a bit too loudly. “I haven’t.”
He’d turned back to her, but was leaning against the bookshelves across the room. His right hand fiddled with the hem of his tee. “Not a fan of hockey?”
“I am, actually. Just not as much a fan of”—she gestured toward the shelves—“all this.”
“So you haven’t looked at any of them?” He slanted her a dubious, amused look. “Not even as a dutiful employee, committed to knowing and recommending the books in her library?”
Her lips curved. “Well, maybe one or two.”
“Which ones?”
Angie’s loud voice came from outside the curtain. “Everything okay in there?”
Oh, thank goodness. Mary opened the barrier to answer her boss. “We’re fine. Just finishing our tour of the building.”
Angie gave her a surreptitious thumbs-up and a questioning look. When Mary nodded in response, Angie poked her head into the doorway.
“Hello again, Miles,” she said with a cheerful wave. “Mary, I’m about to head out for the evening. Were you two almost finished, or should I leave without you?”
“I think we’re just about done. I should be getting home and making dinner soon, I suppose.” Mary stepped out of the Adult Reading Room, relief and disappointment twined tight in her belly. “Unless you wanted to stay longer, Miles?”
Before he could answer, though, Angie spoke again. “I think you might be forgetting something, honey.”
Mary and Miles both stared at her.
“Dinner-wise?” Angie hinted.
Realization widened Mary’s eyes. “Oh! Oh, crap. What time is it?”
A frantic glance revealed that she’d stayed almost an hour past closing time. Which meant the earliest she could reach the restaurant for her date was…late. Way too late.
“Excuse me.” She ran for her purse and grabbed her phone.
I’m so sorry, she wrote in a quick e-mail to her date. I promise, I’m usually on time for dates. But I stayed late at work tonight and am running about an hour behind. Again, I sincerely apologize. Are you still interested in meeting for dinner?
The response arrived almost instantaneously. An hour? That’s not just late. That says you don’t care about me or my time at all. Forget it. And please lose my e-mail address.
I understand, she typed. Again, I’m sorry.
She sent the message and removed his e-mail address from her contacts list. Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit. She was never late. Ever.
Except tonight. Tonight, when Miles had arrived out of the blue, despite saying he could never visit the library. Only hours after she’d informed him of her upcoming date and her need to leave immediately after work.
Now that she considered the matter, it all seemed more than coincidental. Especially since Miles was standing a few feet away from her looking a tad pleased with himself, rather than confused or regretful.
Her arms akimbo, she glared at him. “Tell me, Miles Barrett O’Connor. Did you come here tonight specifically to disrupt my date?”
“This seems like an excellent time to return to the community room.” Angie was halfway across the building in a shot. “Call me if you need me, honey!”
Once her boss had disappeared, Mary turned back to Miles. “Well?”
He gazed somewhere over her left shoulder. “I spent the last month preparing to come see you. But it’s possible I finally chose tonight to visit because of your e-mail this afternoon.”
Torn between pleasure—he’d been planning to see her for the past month?—and irritation, she stared at him. “He canceled our date and told me to lose his e-mail address. I hurt and inconvenienced an innocent man, and I feel terrible about it.”
“Of course you do. That’s who you are.” His broad chest expanded as he inhaled deeply. “I apologize, Mary. I just thought…” He met her eyes. “I thought this might be my last chance to see if what we had online could translate to real life. Because if your date really was a nice, normal guy, he’d snap you up in a heartbeat. So ready or not, I had to come.”
Her tapping foot slowed to a halt. “It’s hard to stay angry when you say something like that.”
“I hope so. But I swear, I’m not lying to you.” His hazel eyes were serious. “Please forgive me.”
“It’s fine.” She sighed. “Although he was the lone normal guy I’d met on that dating site.”
“What were the others like?”
“Most of them were pretty horrifying.” She pursed her lips and thought back. “Please excuse me for being crass, but one of them compared his man parts to a can of Pringles and invited me to ‘get down there and pop.’ He informed me that once I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I had my doubts. Since I chose not to start, though, I guess I’ll never know for sure.”
Miles began laughing, which she spoke over.
“Another man’s introductory message asked me to kick him in the testicles. I declined.”
“Oh, my God, Mary,” Miles wheezed.
“One recent match told me my choice of clothing in the profile picture made me look old and dowdy.” She watched as Miles’s grin turned into a scowl. “Angie tells me that sort of comment is called ‘negging.’ Then he told me he couldn’t see a relationship with someone like me. He added, however, that he’d be happy to, um, have relations with me.”
Miles’s right hand formed a fist. “Jackass.”
“That’s not even the whole story. When I declined his offer, he called me a conceited witch and said no other man would want me.”
“I assume he actually called you a word that rhymes with witch.”
“Correct.”
He glowered at the phone in her hand as if it had personally offended him. “No wonder you almost shut down your account and acquired a crapload of cats. I’m only surprised you didn’t join a nunnery or decide to lop off all men’s private parts.”
She