Heavy Issues (4 page)

What the hell? “What tariffs are you talking about?”

“You’re asking me out in hopes of getting laid,” she said through clenched teeth.

“No, not just that.” If her murderous glare was anything to go by, that was a wrong answer. Yep, definitely not the smoothest guy around. But fuck it, he’d never been gun-shy when it came to talking sex. He was very up-front about his intentions, about what he had to offer and what he didn’t. That was not about to change now.

“The opportunistic pig heard me the other day, and now he thinks I’m easy. And desperate. Just perfect!”

“I don’t—”

“I hope you had the decency to keep quiet, or should I expect more propositions from other parties?”

“What? No. Of course not.” Easy and desperate? Propositions from other parties? “What are you talking about?”

“Or you thought first come, first served, huh? Or maybe it’s a bet.” She suddenly stopped as if something had dawned on her. “Oh, wait, this is a prank, right?” she asked, turning her head and looking around. “Where’s the camera?”

Camera? Fuck, this whole conversation was getting out of hand. He wasn’t sure what he’d done or what exactly they were talking about, but he was fucking it up. He’d missed a right turn somewhere, and now they were heading toward a wall.

“You’re making no sense, sweet thing.”

“Don’t ‘sweet thing’ me,” she retorted. “You heard all that stud-for-hire talk, and surprise, surprise, here you are, ready to do humanity a favor, sure I’ll open my legs for you at the word go.”

Cole’s jaw went slack. A stud for hire? What the hell?

“Listen, Christy…”

She wasn’t listening to him, and her voice was rising. “Let me tell you something, Mister… Mister…Hot Pants. Despite whatever conclusions you’ve drawn about me, I’m—”

“Let’s rewind here.” He cut off her rambling. Man, asking Christy out was so not going how he’d envisioned it. “Why don’t you tell me what you think I heard? So we’re sure we’re on the same wavelength.” Because at the moment, she was in short-range FM and he was in deep-space transmission for all the sense their conversation was making.

She blushed. “What? Do you get your kicks from hearing me say again that my sex life has sucked big-time up until now? That I don’t want to date, that what I want is to get properly laid? That I’ll hire an escort and be done with it?”

Wow. She was going to hire a professional escort to get laid? Sure, like that was going to happen anytime soon. Over his horny dead body.

He felt his anger rising even more. “So why the fuck are you giving me shit for asking you out? For suggesting we could have some fun together?” Women were so fucking contradictory.

“Why the fuck am I giving you shit?” she repeated, looking incredulously at him. “I can’t believe this!”

Neither could he.

He’d known giving in to his cock where this girl was concerned was nothing but trouble.

The atmosphere was quite loud in the diner, but some heads had begun to turn and direct their questioning glances toward them. He didn’t care a damn bit about being proper, but this was definitely not the place to have this conversation. He flagged Penny.

“I see. Thanks for cluing me in to your plans. Now let me clue you in on mine.” He turned to Penny. “Please make my lunch takeout. Hers too,” he added, handing her Christy’s plate before Christy could protest. “Or what, do you really want to continue this conversation here?” he asked pointedly, looking around at all the curious faces staring at them. Christy blanched. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Let’s sit in the park to eat.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said while standing up, her voice low and hard. “I’m going back to work.”

“As you wish. But this conversation isn’t finished. I just thought you’d prefer some privacy. If you insist, though, we can have it at work with all my men hovering. It’s entirely up to you.” Hopefully she wouldn’t call his bluff, because he’d have a riot on his hands if his men heard about this stud-for-hire nonsense.

She was furious now, her expression thunderous.

“Jeez, how magnanimous of you! I’m not having this conversation, you arrogant prick! Not here, not anywhere!”

Cole moved to stop her from bolting, but before he could grab her, he crashed into the waitress, sending a couple of plates falling to the floor. He could do nothing but watch Christy disappear through the door.

He’d butchered the whole thing. Total roadkill.

He was losing his touch. Months dreaming about losing himself in her and fucking that luscious body ten different ways until Sunday, and he’d blown it at the preliminary. Way to go. Maybe he should start getting pointers from Max. Wouldn’t that be a ball?

As he helped the waitress, a glint coming from the table caught his eye. He looked down.

Fantastic. He was stuck with the ring…again.

Cole couldn’t believe his eyes. What the hell was Christy doing teetering on top of that shaky, old ladder, alone in the library’s basement at frigging ten p.m.?

He hadn’t seen her the whole day after her stormy departure from the diner. He figured she was too pissed to come back to work, yet here the AWOL librarian was, pointing the feeble light of her cell at the tags on the boxes on the upper shelves and cursing like a sailor.

Cole clenched his teeth as she went on tiptoes on the rickety-ass ladder, opened the box on her far left, and, aided by the cell light, tried to take a peek inside. He shook his head. She should have brought a proper flashlight. Scratch that. Taking into consideration the shitty old lamps in here, a floodlight would have been better.

Christy took the pencil from between her teeth, and after viciously scratching out whatever was written on the box, retagged it and closed it. Then she climbed down, yanked the ladder to her left, and stomped up again, talking to herself all the time, pencil and cell in hand. Jesus, she was going to break her neck—at the very least—while alone in the basement in the middle of the night.
Very clever, Christy.

And speaking of clever, what the hell was
he
doing here? Itching for round two? Mental.

Looking at her, he wondered if she was still pissed at him. Her body language was jerky and she was grumbling, but maybe all that was due to whatever had her down here, head and arms deep in those boxes. As he considered that possibility, she suddenly muttered a profanity and something much resembling his name while repeatedly banging her head on the box in front of her. Yep, pissed still. At him. For whatever he might have done, which he wasn’t clear on yet.

Finished with the banging, Christy tried to reach the box on her far right. As she precariously perched on the top rung, the ancient ladder toppled. She dropped all the shit she was holding and tried to grab on to the shelf, but it was too late and, arms flailing, she went down.

Fuck.

He rushed toward her.

“This is starting to become a habit,” Cole said as she landed in his arms. Not that he was complaining. After the last month of having her within his reach but being unable to touch her, any chance he got to have his hands on her was welcome.

At his words, she stiffened and sucked in her breath.

“Shit!” she cursed, scrambling away from him as fast as she could.

“You shouldn’t be here all by yourself,” Cole told her. “Are you all right?”

She ignored his question and glared at him. “What the hell are you doing here? Haven’t you embarrassed me enough for one day?”

He couldn’t contain his snort. “What am I doing here? Saving your neck apparently…again.”

Christy clenched her cute little fists. She looked like she was going to slug him but decided against it. She’d better. She’d probably hurt herself more than him.

“I had everything under control,” she stated.

He tried very hard not to sound condescending but failed miserably. “Yeah, sure. When would that had been, before or after hitting the floor, sweetheart?”

She opened her mouth belligerently, and he sighed in surrender. Egging her on wasn’t a sound tactic.

“I saw you sneaking in here while I was in the diner getting some coffee, okay? I thought I’d come to sort things out.” Her glare didn’t relent. “To apologize?” he tried again with an appeasing tone. That he had no frigging clue what he should be apologizing for was probably written all over his face, because she looked even more belligerent. He so wasn’t in the mood for this.

Before she could begin sputtering God only knew what, he interrupted. “Please, can we bury the hatchet? Just temporarily? I brought some drinks as a peace offering,” he said, lifting two beers and a couple of cans of diet soda. “Please?”

She studied him for a long second, lips pursed as if ready to pick a fight, but then she threw her arms up. “Okay, why the hell not? I may as well go along and keep my mouth shut. Besides, this”—she waved between her and him and shook her head in dismay—“is just too humiliating for words.” And she sat down on the crate by her side. Good, because her legs were trembling—from the near miss with the concrete floor or from being pissed, he didn’t know. Whatever the reason, he was glad for the reprieve.

Cole sat near her and handed her a can. “Diet soda for you, right?”

She looked at him, surprised. “How do you—”

He chuckled softly. “How could I
not
know, baby? You drink huge amounts of diet soda.”

“I do,” she admitted, turning red, her lips tilting into a slow smile that he felt all over himself, like a soft, loving caress over his hard, needy, weary body.

“And you chew gum all the time. And eat cherry lollipops. Actually I have those too,” he added, reaching into his pocket and leaving two lollipops, her favorite brand, on the crate. Sugar-free lollipops. Who would have guessed such an oxymoron existed? “These were my backup plan in case I couldn’t tempt you with the soda.”

“I see you prepare for all contingencies.”

“Yep, winging it isn’t my style. So,” he continued, quickly glancing around, “what are you doing here?”

A sigh escaped her throat, blowing at her bangs. She looked…disheveled. Lovely disheveled, with her beautiful dark hair in disarray and smears of dust on her face.

“Penance, apparently, for whatever huge sins I’ve committed.”

“What?”

She waved her hand around at the basement. “I’m cataloging frigging boxes. This, let me tell you, is a screwed-up system to store books. Rows and rows of shelves full of boxes. No indexes anywhere. No order, no logic. All this is Mrs. Wilkinson’s doing. Of course she doesn’t need annoying, pesky little things like legible tags or indexes. That would be too damned easy. Besides, she probably knows where every single book is. She could probably pinpoint its location in the blink of an eye. By smell alone.”

Cole laughed. That pretty much described Mrs. Wilkinson.

His eyes focused on the boxes. “So the tags…”

“Decoy. Mrs. Wilkinson used a code I haven’t been able to crack yet. I’ll probably need the Enigma machine for that. It’s not stenography, not Morse code. Not Sanskrit. I frigging checked.”

He smiled. “Tough cookie, Mrs. Wilkinson.”

“Tell me about it. This is turning out to be a helluva lot more work than what I’d anticipated at the beginning,” she said, looking around desperately. “I can’t wait to be done with this low-tech part of the operation so I can concentrate on unpacking the computers we already got delivered and get them up and running. And I want to get cracking at installing the library’s new operating system and setting up the digital platform needed for the electronic collection.”

“We’re getting digital collections?” Mrs. Wilkinson hadn’t even liked computers. The only computer on the premises had been a first-generation, humongous specimen, the kind that worked with a lever.

“You are now. And e-readers too. I convinced the board of trustees this place needed more than a layer of paint and new furniture to enter the twenty-first century, so I got more funding. Anyhow, before I get to the fun part, first I have to deal with the basic nitty-gritty librarian task of managing the actual books…if I can find them, that is.

“I should forget the whole adventure. Ask the guys to bring all the boxes upstairs when the entire floor is clear, open them up, and have a free-for-all.”

“Or you could have asked my men to come to catalog the boxes.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t expect this mess when I came down here.”

Sure, that plus the fact that none of his men were around because it was the middle of the fucking night.

Which brought him to his next question, never mind how rhetorical it was. “Why are you working this late?”

She gave him the evil eye. “Your fault. And my prickly conscience’s, which wouldn’t allow me to stay at home.”

He sighed. Time for damage control.

“Listen, about this morning. I’m very sorry we got off on the wrong foot.” She opened her mouth, but he forestalled her. “No, wait, listen to me. You may not believe it, but I can assure you I didn’t factor any of that stud-for-hire shit into asking you out.”

She gave him a deadpan stare, and he pushed on. “Last Friday I only saw a beautiful woman getting rid of her engagement ring and vowing to the skies she was getting on with her life. Nothing else, I swear. I never meant to imply anything or insult you. Hell, I didn’t understand half the conversation we had at the diner. Cameras? Pranks? You didn’t make sense. Please, can we start over?”

She studied him for a long moment, mistrust still marring her expressive eyes. “Start over as in wipe the slate clean, draw a thick veil over it?” He said nothing, and she nodded. “I like that. We’ll just put that embarrassing episode behind us and act as if it never happened.”

He bet she’d like that. Very clean, very sterile.

“I assure you it wasn’t my intention to offend you in any way,” he said again. “That cleared out, I am curious, and I’d like to know why I don’t qualify.”

“Qualify for what?”

“For the man-whore position, of course.”

The breath she was taking froze in her throat.

Draw a thick veil? Going back to ignoring each other’s presence as before? Not happening if he could help it.