Читать книгу The Librarian's Passionate Knight - Cindy Gerard, Dianna Love, Шеррилин Кеньон - Страница 10

Daniel Barone wasn’t sure why the woman had captured his attention. In the overall scheme of things, she was little more than a small speck of beige, lost in the vibrant colors of Faneuil Hall Marketplace in the center of downtown Boston.

On this steamy August night, the open-air market was alive with colors and scents and sounds. She, quite literally, was not. Still, she’d drawn his undivided attention as he stood directly behind her at a pushcart outside the buildings of Quincy Market.

Like a dozen or so others, they were both waiting in line for ice cream. Unlike the others, who edged forward as placidly as milling cattle, she bounced with impatience. Like a child—which she absolutely wasn’t—she rose to the balls of her feet and…bounced. There wasn’t another word for it. She just sort of danced in place, as if she found irrepressible delight in the simple anticipation of getting her hands on an ice cream cone.

For some reason it made Daniel smile. Her guileless exuberance charmed him, he supposed. And it made him take time for a longer look.

She was average height, maybe a little on the short side. Her hair wasn’t quite blond, wasn’t quite brown, and there was nothing remotely sexy about the short, pixieish cut. Her drab tan shorts and top showed off a modest length of arm and leg and more than adequately covered what could possibly be a nice, tidy little body. Who could tell? Other than the wicked red polish splashed on her toenails, there truly wasn’t a bright spot on the woman—until she turned around with her much-awaited prize.

Behind owlish, black-rimmed glasses, a pair of honey-brown eyes danced with anticipation, intelligence and innate good humor. And when she took that first long, indulgent lick, a smile of pure, decadent delight lit her ordinary face and transitioned un-remarkable to breathtaking in a heartbeat. The wattage of that smile damn near blinded him.

“It was worth the wait,” she murmured on a blissful sigh before she shouldered out of line and went on about her business.

“And then some,” Daniel agreed and, with a side-long grin, watched the pleasant sway of her hips as she walked away.

Wondering why a woman possessed of so much vibrant and natural beauty would choose to hide it behind professorial glasses, an unimaginative haircut and brown-paper-bag-plain clothes, he tracked her progress as she moved through the crowd. He was still watching when the kid wielding the ice cream scoop nudged him back to the business at hand.

“Hey, bud. You want ice cream or what?”

Daniel slowly returned his attention to the counter. “Yeah. Sorry.” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and, still grinning, hitched his chin in the general direction she’d taken. “I’ll have what she had. Double dip.”

It wasn’t Baronessa gelato, he conceded after the first bite, but it was ice cream and he’d been craving it for almost a month now. He was pretty sure, though, that he wasn’t enjoying his half as much as a certain champagne-blonde was enjoying hers.

He glanced around, searched for her briefly. Not that he expected to spot her in this crush of people, not that he knew what he’d do if he did. Didn’t matter anyway. She was long gone, swallowed up by the milling crowd.

Telling himself that it was just as well, he headed in the general direction of his car. He needed sleep anyway, not a distraction. The thought of a real bed with clean sheets and a soft mattress made him groan. So did the memory of his apartment with its light-darkening shades, the cool hum of an air conditioner set on seventy degrees and about twelve solid hours of shut-eye.

Simple pleasures. Foreign pleasures, of late. A month deep in the red sands of the Kalahari could whet a man’s appetite for many simple pleasures.

Like sweet, rich ice cream.

Like a bed that you didn’t have to check for spiders and snakes and was softer than a patch of sun-parched earth.

Like the unaffected smile of a pretty, satisfied woman.

He grinned again—this time in self-reproach—when he couldn’t stop an image from forming.

Her head resting on his pillow…

Her body soft and warm and pliant beneath his…

Her incredible smile not only satisfied, but stunned, sated and spent…

Phoebe Richards wandered the marketplace among the throng of tourists and Bostonians who were out enjoying the hot August evening. She ate her plain vanilla ice cream—her reward for six days of ice cream abstinence and one lost pound—and refused to think about the calories. She window-shopped at the trendy boutiques that she couldn’t afford, applauded the lively antics of the street performers whose free acts she could afford. And she spared a thought—okay, maybe two—for the handsome stranger with the incredible blue eyes and interested smile.

She didn’t get many of either in her life—handsome strangers or interested smiles—and that was fine. It was fun, though, to entertain the fantasy that something might have happened between them if she’d invited it. But that would require an adventurous spirit that she could never in a million years claim. Besides, that kind of electrifying occurrence only happened in the romance novels she devoured to the tune of two to three a week. Her life to date was as far from romance-novel material as a life could get. In fact, lately, it had leaned a little closer to horror.

Determined not to think about the ugly situation with her ex-boyfriend, she walked on, opting, instead, to dwell on a lesser evil: the fact that she was too much of a coward to even encourage the spark of interest that had danced in those amazing blue eyes.

“Like anything would have actually happened, anyway,” she muttered as a statuesque blonde in designer clothes and flawless makeup accidentally bumped her shoulder.

“Sorry,” Phoebe murmured, even though she’d been the bumpee, not the bumper. Her reaction was automatic and had little to do with being polite. It was knee-jerk conciliation and it was an old habit she was supposed to be trying to break, just as she was supposed to be trying to learn to hold her ground on any number of issues.

As if on cue, a stockbroker type in pricey Italian shoes and a dark scowl barreled toward her.

“Excuse me,” she murmured and stepped aside before she could stop herself.

“Why do you always do that?” her friend Carol had asked her the last time they’d gone to lunch together and she’d apologized to the waiter because her soup was stone cold and the lettuce in her salad was as rusty as a junk car. “You do not owe the general population an apology for its screwups. You have rights, too.”

Yes. She had rights. She had the right to remain timid. She couldn’t help it. She was innately apologetic. Or pathetic. Or something equally as hopeless. It was simply easier to bend than to buck. Easier to yield than to stand. She’d learned that life lesson early on.

“Look,” she’d told Carol once in an uncharacteristic revelation about her childhood. “When you’re an ugly duckling twelve-year-old, twenty pounds overweight and constantly belittled by an alcoholic mother to whom you are an eternal disappointment, you learn to bend with the best of them.

“And I also learned to fade into the background until I got so good at it that no one hardly ever noticed me. Life was just easier that way.”

Life was still easier that way, she thought defensively. And old habits were hard to break. At the ripe old age of thirty-three she wasn’t really hopeful of changing them at this late date.

“Besides,” she’d further explained to Carol, sorry she’d opened her mouth when her friend’s expression had changed from disgusted to sympathetic. “Confrontation gives me heartburn. And sweaty palms. And a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach that rarely makes it worth the effort.”

Suddenly aware of a trickle of perspiration trailing down her temple, she dabbed it with a tissue. The lingering heat from the one-hundred-degree day rose from the sidewalk in arid waves and burned right through the bottom of her sandals.

“August,” she said aloud as she bit into the last of her ice cream. “Gotta love it.”

It was close to eleven o’clock and the city was still as steamy as a jungle. Since she had to get up and cover another shift at the library tomorrow, she decided it was past time to get home and go to bed. Alone. As usual.

“Just another exciting Friday night on the town for Phoebe Richards,” she murmured on a wistful sigh and made room for a pair of lovers to pass her on the sidewalk.

They were so engrossed in each other, so cute, and so in love, it made her smile. It also made her ache. The longing to fill that empty place in her chest seemed to have grown larger and more hollow as the years passed…as the world turned…as all around her, love bloomed and flourished.

She pushed out a snort that passed for a self-effacing laugh. “You are a pathetic lump,” she assured herself in disgust. “And you’re no poet, either.”

After checking the traffic, she jaywalked across the street to walk the three blocks to her car, shoring herself up along the way. One bad relationship did not make her a failure at love. Two might, though, she conceded, gnawing thoughtfully on her lower lip. Three or four took it past failure to disaster.

All right. Her love life was a disaster, or as Carol frequently said with a sad shake of her head, “Girl, you sure know how to pick ’em.”

Yeah, she thought with a resigned sigh as Jason Collins came to mind, she sure did. On the upside—and despite the lack of love and romance in her life, she was always determined to find an upside—she did know how to find parking spots.

“Maybe you ought to play on that talent if you ever get another date,” she told herself with a sarcastic little smile as the scene played out before her.

“Well, you’re not exactly calendar material, are you, Ms. Richards?” the man of her dreams stated bluntly as he squinted at the clipboard containing his detailed list of marriage requirements. “So what, exactly, would you consider your most stellar attribute? And don’t say intelligence, because frankly, I find that’s a real turnoff.”

“Well, I have an uncanny knack for finding fantastic parking spots,” she replied, dimpling hopefully.

His eyes widened. And then he smiled. Sunlight glinted off his perfect white teeth. Tossing his clipboard over his shoulder, he opened his arms as violins played in the background. “Darling, that’s perfect. Let’s get married.”

“That proves it. You’re definitely warped,” she muttered with a shake of her head. “But darn, girl, you do know how to find a parking spot.”

The one she’d found tonight was only three blocks from the marketplace. Closer to a streetlight would have been nice though, she thought on a sudden shift of mood. A sense of unease sent a quick and clammy shiver eddying along her nape and dampened her good humor.

“Okay, Pheebs,” she admonished herself and started rummaging around in her purse for her car keys. “Time to switch genres. You’ve been reading too much romantic suspense lately.”

She was not afraid to be out at night on her own. Well, not too afraid, she conceded, pulling out her keys. She’d lived in Boston all her life and was cautious, that was all. Generally though, she didn’t jump at shadows or look for bogeymen under her bed unless Carol and the gang roped her into going to a spooky movie. At least she hadn’t jumped at shadows until she’d broken up with Jason two months ago and he’d started calling her in the middle of the night and hassling her at work.

Just thinking of him sent another shiver slithering down her spine. Fighting what she knew was a false but growing sense of urgency, she told herself to let it go. Jason had been a mistake. She’d corrected it—or thought she had until she heard his voice.

“Out trying to scare up a little action, are ya, Mouse?”

She jumped and spun around so fast that she fumbled with her keys and dropped them.

“Jason.” His name rushed out on a high, thready breath as her coward’s heart threatened to beat its way out of her chest through her throat.

“‘Jason,’” he mimicked with a nasty smirk before he bent to snag her keys from the curb where they’d landed with a loud clatter. “That’s it? ‘Jason.’ You could at least pretend you’re glad to see me. After all, I spent half the night trying to catch up with you.”

Phoebe forced herself to look into his bloodshot brown eyes and hated it when she couldn’t hold his gaze. Hated it more when she realized she was shaking.

He needed a haircut; his shirt was dirty. He was also drunk—mean drunk. The alcohol stench of his breath fanned her face as he moved in on her, turning her stomach, triggering a hundred childhood moments and one very recent one of the first and only time he’d hit her. Her ears had rung for a day afterward. The bruise on her cheek had taken much longer to fade. The memory never would, even though she’d written him out of her life at that exact moment.

He glared at her through an ugly smile.

How had she ever thought his smile was beautiful?

More important, how was she going to get out of this?

“Give me my keys, Jason,” she said, shooting for reasonable and hoping he’d comply. Unfortunately, her demand sounded more like a plea.

He gave a pitying shake of his head and held them out of her reach. “You know, your problem always was that you didn’t know how to show a man proper respect. You should be thanking me, not giving me orders.”

She closed her eyes, swallowed. “Thank you…for picking up my keys,” she said meekly as he crowded her backward until she bumped into the driver’s-side door of her car. “Could…could I have them, please?”

Triumph turned his mouth into a sneer. “Better. Not good enough, though. Just like I was never good enough for you, was I? Was I?”

She willed herself not to panic as he pressed his face close to hers.

“How’s that happen? I wonder,” he demanded with the angry slur of a big man about to teach a small woman a lesson. “How’s it happen that a mousy, old-maid librarian thinks she’s better than me? Where do you get off dumping me? Huh?”

He wiped spittle from the side of his mouth with the back of his hand. “You think you’re some prize?” He snorted out an ugly laugh. “News flash! You’re not. What you are is leftovers. Leftovers!” He dug his fingers painfully into her upper arm, making her wince. “I was good to you. I was great to you! What’s your problem, anyway?”

Like an animal could sense a coming earthquake even before sensitive scientific equipment could pick it up, Phoebe anticipated the coming blow. With a hard jerk, she pulled free and whirled away before it landed.

His fist slammed into her car door with a loud crack. His vicious curse sliced through the night as she half walked, half ran, praying that he’d curl up to nurse his pain and forget about her.

The sound of heavy footsteps pounding the sidewalk behind her told her that wasn’t going to happen.

Her heart sank. Nausea rolled through her stomach as she stepped up her pace and, not for the first time in her life, wished she had the backbone and the skill to strike back.

The crowd had thinned to a handful of people when Daniel spotted his ice cream lady about a half a block ahead. Pleasure, unexpected and uncontested, had him forgetting about sleep and unnecessary distractions and heading in her direction.

He was within a few yards of her when he realized she wasn’t alone—whether by choice or by accident, he couldn’t tell. A big man, over six feet and roughly two hundred ten, two hundred twenty pounds, was dogging her like a jet trail.

Daniel sized him up with a practiced eye. He didn’t like what he saw. Bully came immediately to mind. A real bruiser with a nasty attitude. He could only hear snippets of their conversation as they stopped by an older-model gray compact car. He heard enough to grasp that the guy was obnoxious and ugly, though, and about as welcome as a wad of gum on the bottom of her shoe. He picked up on something else, too. She was afraid of him.

Daniel’s stomach bunched into tight knots when the creep grabbed her arm and squeezed hard enough to make her wince. That was as far as he was willing to let this go.