Page 131 of The Librarians
Conrad glances up at her.
“—hear about the restitution of your three million pounds?”
He keeps looking at her. Then he sets down the lucky stars on the coffee table. Hazel’s heart thuds.
“I would love to,” he says, “in forty-eight hours.”
“What are you planning to do for the next forty-eight hours?”
He looks her in the eye, his amber gaze unwavering. “You.”
She is hot all over.What are you waiting for?But he is waiting for something, just as she is.
“That night at the library—” she begins.
Memories of that night have rushed back to her many times since, hugging herself in simmering anxiety after he left to reinforce Jonathan, pushing open the emergency exit to the rapid-fire popping of a machine gun, her feet as heavy as fifty-pound weights, slugging it out with Alina Kadeev in a white-hot haze of fury and desperation, not realizing until much later that she’d scraped her arm and bled through her sleeve.
But what she recalled most of all was sitting in the dark with him in silence, the trace of light creeping in from the view window to the circulation area just enough to delineate his silhouette. The greasy, slightly overwarm air. The thrum of the HVAC. And then, his words.
After my father’s funeral, I changed my phone number. You finally became what you were running away from. It’s enough that you know.
“That night…” she begins again, trying hard not to clamp her fingers into a fist. “I wasn’t sure what you were telling me. At times it sounded as if you were listing the reasons we wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—be together.”
He reaches down and picks up the hem of her ankle-length green dress. For all that he’s declared that he would spend the next two days in the physical exploration of her person, his gesture isn’t flirtatious but pensive. “What do you think would have happened to us, if we’d kept in touch?”
A question for the ages.
“Realistically, and forgive me for saying so, it would have depended on how good you were in bed.”
He smiles slightly. “Let’s assume I was eager to learn and willing to listen to feedback. And let’s assume that I quickly achieved adequacy, if not virtuosity.”
Heat licks her like a summer day in Austin. She swallows. “I used to think that we’d have had a memorable affair, three, maybe even five years together, leaving me sadder but much wiser at the end. And I’d have a book like this”—she gestures to the volume on the coffee table, still open to the page of her irrepressible delight—“of our entire time together, but wouldn’t show it to anyone, not until I was really old.
“But that’s what I thought in a vacuum.” With him forever remaining the idealized version in her memories. “What doyouthink would have happened?”
He still has his fingers on the hem of her dress, as if the stitches on the reverse could convey a secret code if only he stroked them long enough. “I think we would have had a fantastic few months. We boarded only two guests at Charleston, instead of the scheduled three, so you could have bought a passage on the ship, for a reduced rate, possibly, and sailed with us around Cape Horn.”
Rounding Cape Horn is the sailing equivalent of climbing Mount Everest—the waves there can toss a yacht end over end.
“Did your yacht somersault?”
“Not quite, but our first mate was swept out to sea. Fortunately he had a tether, so we hauled him back in and he suffered nothing worse than a torn rotator cuff.”
She would have loved it, a real adventure. Until…
“San Diego was the end of my first contract and that was where I found out. We would have been okay until the funeral—I was in denial until then. But afterward I was a mess.” He lets go of her hem. “It wouldn’t have been a pretty breakup. I would have hurt you and you wouldn’t have wanted to tell anyone about me in your old age.”
She aches for him, for the boy for whom the sky was falling. “But that didn’t happen.Wedidn’t happen.”
“No, we became beautiful ideas to each other.” He reaches up and touches the ends of her hair. “And I didn’t want just the idea of you any longer. If you never came to Austin I’d have gone to Singapore at some point to see if the heiress version of you would have me—and that woman makes me worry for myself.”
“Why does she make you nervous?”
“Because—” He pulls her close—now they touch from shoulder to ankle—and kisses the corner of her lips. “She would have an affair with me and move on with the rest of her life.”
It is the lightest contact, his lips to her skin, yet she is singed. She wraps her hand behind his head—at last, the sensation of his bristly hair upon her inner wrist again—and kisses him below his ear.
He sucks in a breath.
