Molly couldn’t believe it when she opened her door and saw the sheriff standing down there in the courtyard holding what appeared to be an insulated bag of fried chicken.
Then she’d been even more disbelieving when she learned it was not fried chicken but pie—key lime pie, her favorite.
But the absolute kicker was when he’d climbed the stairs to her room and stood in front of her and said the three words she most loved hearing in all the world—the three words she was pretty certain every librarian, or at least lover of knowledge, adored more than any other in the human language:
You were right.
They were words she’d never, ever heard her ex utter. Even on trivia nights when Eric had given an answer that was incorrect, he would argue that he was not wrong, that instead there’d been some flaw in the way the question was worded.
This should have been her first sign that the two of them were not suited for each other, because a reasonable person should always be willing to admit when they’ve made a mistake.
But she’d been blinded by Eric’s good looks and—she might as well admit it—wealth. He’d not only had a truly incredible two-bedroom loft in LoDo, but a ski condo in Breckenridge, and time shares in both Tulum and Kauai.
It was a mistake she’d sworn she’d never make again.
So when the sheriff admitted he was wrong and she was right, what could Molly do but invite him inside?
“So I know it’s not much,” Molly said, rushing in ahead of him to switch off the TV so that he wouldn’t see what she’d been watching—a marathon of Forensic Files. “But it suits me perfectly fine for now.”
John took two steps inside, said, “Oh, I’m sure it’s—” then froze, looking around the hotel room with the same horrified expression Molly imagined he might have worn while viewing a particularly gruesome crime scene for the first time.
Confused, Molly swept her gaze over the room, trying to see what was so upsetting him. True, the room was small. But it was a hotel room! It wasn’t supposed to be huge.
And true, she had been forced to cram over thirty years’ worth of possessions and belongings into the tiny space, excluding the things she’d left at home with her mother and in storage until she could find a more permanent living situation, like all her furniture and most of her cooking utensils and of course all of her winter clothes.
In fact, the only things she’d brought with her to Little Bridge, besides her summer clothes, were—
“Books,” John said in a slightly stunned tone, looking around the tiny space in wonder. “You have so many . . . books.”
“Oh.” Molly followed his gaze and realized that if she looked at it from his point of view, the number of books she’d brought with her from Colorado might seem excessive. Because hotel rooms came with few bookshelves, her books were piled up all along the walls until they reached almost to the ceiling, stacked in every imaginable nook and cranny, including around the bed and—though John didn’t know this yet—in the bathroom.
Was this particularly odd, though? Molly didn’t think so.
“I know it might seem like a lot,” she said, taking the pie to the kitchenette—where she’d stacked her cookbooks and of course cooking-related mystery novels, though she’d left some room for food preparation. “But I couldn’t leave my books in storage until I found an apartment. What if I thought of something I’d read and needed to reread it?”
Behind her, John was wandering around, looking at the titles of all the books. “You have something against e-books?”
“Oh, no, they’re fine. Lots of people like them, I know. But I love the smell of real books, you know? And the feel of paper, turning the pages over in my hands. Drink?”
He looked up from her piles of science fiction, startled. “Excuse me?”
“I was wondering if you wanted something to drink with the pie. I’ve got everything here.” She opened her mini fridge to show him. “Beer, wine, soda, hard stuff—or I can make coffee, tea—”
“Oh, no, thanks.” He seemed fixated on the books. “Don’t you work in a library? Couldn’t you check out whatever you wanted whenever you needed to—for free?”
“Of course. But these are my books. I’ve had some of them since I was kid. They’re like friends, you know? I’ve never gone anywhere without them. Oh, watch the Miss Marples!”
He looked down just as his foot was about to hit a pile of books that seemed to be supporting another pile of books under one end of the coffee table. “The what?”
“Miss Marple.” Now that Molly had cut two large slices of key lime pie, she hurried over to give him one. “You must know Miss Marple. She’s one of Agatha Christie’s most famous amateur sleuths.”
John accepted the pie and sat down on the couch, which was thankfully devoid of books, although there were piles of them on either side. “I don’t really read mysteries.”
“Oh, I guess you wouldn’t.” Molly snuggled onto the couch cushion beside him. “Why would you? You live them. I bet you never watch Law and Order or CSI or anything like that, either, do you?”
He shook his head. “Those shows—they never get anything right. Do you know how long it takes in real life to get the results back on a DNA sample?”
Molly laughed. She couldn’t help it. He was so funny, but didn’t know it. “I can imagine reading mysteries would be a kind of busman’s holiday for you. What do you read, then?”
He took a bite of pie. “Biographies, mostly.”
Molly gave him a nonjudgmental smile. She didn’t care what people read, as long as they read something, anything—well, aside from books about how to make bombs or other weapons that hurt people.
“What kind of biographies?” She wondered what he looked like beneath that uniform and how long it was going to be before she got him out of it.
“Historical figures, mainly,” he said. He was really going to town on his piece of pie—which was no wonder, because it was delicious. But Molly wondered if his mindless eating was also partly due to nerves. “Athletes.”
“Which one is your favorite?”
“My favorite biography?”
“Yes.”
He gave his answer some thought. “Your boss—well, not really anymore, because she’s retired, but you said she kind of hired you as her replacement—Mrs. Robinette?”
Molly nodded. “Phyllis. Yes?”
“When I was a kid growing up here, I got into trouble a lot. Nothing serious, but I might have been headed down a wrong path if I hadn’t ended up in your library one day and run into your boss—Mrs. Robinette. It was raining, so it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go, and she handed me a book she said I might like.”
Molly continued to smile, thinking of Elijah. “What book was it?”
“An autobiography written by a man named Dick Gregory.”
Molly’s smile broadened. She’d have to remember to tell Phyllis later. She’d be so pleased. “Good choice, was it?”
“I loved that book. I had no idea there could be books like that. I don’t think I’d ever read a whole book before, except when required to for school. But that book—I finished it in a day. And then all I wanted to do after that was find more books like it. I even tried out for the school track team a week later because that’s the sport Dick Gregory played.”
Molly frowned. “But I thought you played baseball in high school?”
“I did. The baseball coach saw me running track and recruited me for the team. I guess I was pretty good, because our team made it to nationals.”
She smiled and took his empty plate from him and set it, along with hers, on the coffee table. “I love hearing stories like that. All it takes to get someone to love reading is finding them the right book—a book that could even change their life.”
“Is that why you’re a children’s librarian?” he asked her. “Did you have a book like that?”
“Of course. Only I’m sorry to say it was Nancy Drew—but an original copy, not any of those bland reprints. I found it in my great-grandmother’s attic, all crumbling and falling apart, and it was like finding a secret treasure. Original Nancy drove a yellow roadster and wore a cloche and went after real gangsters with guns. I have it here if you want to—”
She’d started to get up to go to her stack of mystery juvenilia, but he reached out and grabbed her hand, then gently pulled her back down onto the couch. When she turned her head to look at him questioningly, she saw that his blue-eyed gaze seemed more intense than ever.
“How did you know I played baseball in high school?” he asked.
Her heart stuttered. Oops. “It’s a small town. People talk.”
“Do they? Or have you been asking around about me?” His lips were tantalizingly close to hers.
“No.” She absolutely had been. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you like me.”
“Well, I don’t dislike you. I certainly respect you in a professional capacity.”
“I respect you in a more-than-professional capacity.”
The next thing she knew, he was kissing her, his lips tasting sweetly tart, like the pie. Not just kissing her, either, but embarking on a thorough exploration of the inside of her mouth with his tongue while his hands slipped up beneath her nightshirt. Fortunately, she wasn’t wearing a bra.
She had no idea what she’d said to cause this kind of reaction from him—something about respecting him, and Nancy Drew.
But if mentioning Nancy Drew was all it took to get him to respond this way, she was going to talk about that crime-solving minx all of the time. As his lips dipped below her mouth and slid down her throat, those hard hands of his began doing things to her beneath the nightshirt that made her toes curl. Then he was pulling the too-large shirt up and over her head, exposing her breasts to his roving lips. When his hot mouth closed over one of her nipples, teasing it with his tongue, Molly couldn’t help burying both her hands in his thick dark hair and arching her body against his, even as she tilted her own head back in ecstasy and . . . heard a stack of books fall over behind her. Damn! The sound of the cascading hardcovers caused him to look up in surprise, but she only pushed his head back where it belonged and said, “Don’t worry about that.” She’d sort the books out tomorrow.
The only problem was that his erection wasn’t the only hard thing she could feel against her soft, bare curves.
“Um, excuse me.” She plucked at his shirt as one of the points of his sheriff’s badge dug into her. “Would you mind?”
“Sorry,” he rasped, and fumbled at the buttons of his uniform.
“Let me help,” she said, and soon he was gloriously shirtless above her. It was everything she’d been hoping for and more. And yet it was not nearly enough.
“And this.” She pointed impatiently at his belt, on which he still wore his gun.
“Oh, damn.” He drew off the belt to place it high on her stack of gothic romances, which promptly tumbled to the floor. His look of dismay was comical. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Molly said, and sat up to work on undoing his fly, realizing they were never going to get to where she wanted them to be as quickly as she needed to get there if she did not take the initiative.
“No, I can—”
“I’ve got it.”
She did, too. What came spilling out when she successfully managed to undo his uniform trousers was everything Molly had been suspecting she’d find from that time she’d watched him play cornhole on the beach and had so admired his form, front and back. It was sheer perfection, and it was standing at full attention just for her.
“Oh, John,” she said, and sighed, as she wrapped herself around him, delighting in his heavy, masculine warmth.
“Molly,” he whispered into her hair. He sounded worried. “I don’t—I don’t have—I didn’t bring anything because I didn’t think we were going to—”
Molly leaned her head back to blink up at him. “Are you talking about condoms?”
“Yes.” He leaned up on his elbows, clearly frustrated. She could feel that frustration throbbing against her bare thigh. “I didn’t think I’d be having sex with you tonight. I only came to apologize and bring you a pie. I didn’t bring any . . . any . . .”
Molly laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Don’t worry. I’ve got some.” She leaned down and reached into her purse, which she’d thrown onto the floor along with her bra the moment she’d come home from work. From the depths of the bag she pulled something in a hot pink wrapper. “Leftover from my teens-only sex-ed talk last month.”
He sounded a little out of breath as she straddled him. “Are all librarians like you?”
“Oh, yes.” She ripped the wrapper open with her teeth, then skillfully unrolled the condom down the length of his penis, her breasts skimming the fine dark hair that coated his chest. “We try always to be prepared.”
“I think I—” His hands had gone to her hips, and almost as if he couldn’t help himself, he’d begun to push himself inside her—which was all right, because she was wetter than she could ever remember being. “I think I—”
But she never got to hear what he thought, because at that moment he entered her fully, and she cried out at the sheer physical joy of it.
But wasn’t that what made the best things in life so much more enjoyable, the sweet tinged with a little tart, so that your heartbeat sped up and all your senses came alive?
And, oh, he was moving beneath her, his hands slipping to cup her breasts, and she could hardly breathe. He felt so good, her skin seemed to be tingling all over, and stacks of books were collapsing all around them. Faster and faster, harder and harder, and this was a disaster, why hadn’t they moved to the bed, and oh! Books were tumbling around her, but they weren’t heavy at all. They felt like feathers, golden feathers, cascading around her body, and now all she wanted was for this feeling to never end, except all good things had to end sometime, and—
When she opened her eyes, she was lying collapsed on the sheriff’s damp chest. Both of them were breathing hard. And someone was banging on her door.
“Molly? Molly, is everything all right in there?”
“Oh, no.” Molly lifted her head. “It’s Mrs. Filmore,” she whispered. “She’s in the room downstairs. She must have heard the books fall.”
“I’ll handle her.” John started to get up.
“John, no—you don’t have to say a word to her.”
“I’m not going to say a word to her.” John was already reaching for his shirt. “I’m going to say a lot of words to her.”
“John.” Molly couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity of the situation. “Honestly, don’t.”
“As sheriff of this town, it’s my duty to keep the peace, even if that means shutting up noisy neighbors.”
“She’s not a noisy neighbor,” Molly insisted. “She’s a nosy tourist. She was supposed to check out this past weekend but she and her husband extended their stay because she’s so obsessed with the whole abandoned baby thing. She just wants to know what’s going on between us.”
As if on cue, Mrs. Filmore called through the door, “I heard something falling. Do you need help?”
“No, Mrs. Filmore,” Molly said, frantically looking around for her own shirt. “I’m sorry, that was just some books.”
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Filmore sounded unconvinced. “I thought I heard shouting.”
Meanwhile, John was tugging on his own shirt.
“No, no shouting, Mrs. Filmore,” Molly said, pulling her shirt on over her head, but John was faster. He already had his uniform trousers pulled up and zipped. “Everything’s fine in here. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Well, I’m not worried, exactly.” Mrs. Filmore’s voice was filled with false concern. “It’s just that Fluffy the Cat has been crying to be let in, and you’re usually so—”
John yanked open the door and stood there, his uniform completely buttoned, everything in place except his gun belt, and smiled down at Mrs. Filmore. “Is there something I can help you with, ma’am?”
John’s body was mostly blocking the doorway—purposefully, so that Mrs. Filmore couldn’t see that Molly was only half-dressed.
But Molly could hear the astonishment in the woman’s voice, even if she couldn’t see it on her face.
“Oh, um, no, Officer,” said Mrs. Filmore breathlessly. “I’m—I’m so sorry to have disturbed you. I was only checking on Molly. I heard, um, a thump, you see, and I thought—”
“Sheriff,” John said.
“I—I’m sorry?”
“You called me Officer. But it’s Sheriff. I’m Sheriff John Hartwell.” He pointed to his badge. “See? I told you that before, downstairs.”
Molly, by that time, had her boxers back on. She hurried to join John at the door.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Filmore,” Molly gushed. “See? Everything is fine. We were just having some pie.”
Mrs. Filmore looked past Molly and the sheriff at the coffee table, which was covered with the empty plates from which they’d had pie earlier. Of course, the floor was also strewn with books, around which Fluffy the Cat was now sauntering. He’d managed to sneak in between their legs when they weren’t looking.
“Oh,” the older woman said. “Well. All right, then. I’m glad everything is okay. I’ll just—”
John’s cell phone began to chime, shrilly. He dug it from his trouser pocket, glanced at the screen, glowered, and said, “I have to answer this. If you ladies could excuse me for a moment—”
Then, his phone pressed to his ear, he stepped out of the room and into the darkness of the hotel’s second-floor balcony to take the call.
But not, unfortunately, far enough away to prevent Molly from hearing every word he said.
