was very obvious that you know her, and you weren’t all that happy to see her.”
He sighed. “I made the mistake of telling her about you. Lana and I grew up together. You could say she’s a sister to me. Alena, the one I told you about that is such an amazing chef, grew up with me as well. They were excited when I said I met someone special. I didn’t realize I’ve never done that before, told them about a woman I met. Lana was curious. I wasn’t happy that she came in to spy on you.”
He could see that Scarlet was pleased. “I told her I was going to ask you out tonight but if you said no, I’d take her to dinner and give her a lecture about spying.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
He made a face. “Don’t encourage her bad behavior.”
“You’re taking her out to dinner,” she pointed out. “That might be considered encouraging bad behavior.”
He found himself smiling again. He’d been twisted up in knots because he wasn’t going to get to see her and he knew something was a little off with what she was telling him, but somehow, everything else she said was the truth. She was willing to go out with him the following day on a picnic and she wanted to meet Lana.
“That might be so,” he conceded. “I hadn’t thought of that. Lana and Alena always get their way. Too many brothers.” Shit. Another mistake. He immediately covered it. “I’ll be picking you up early tomorrow,” he warned.
She groaned. “I’m not a morning person. And it’s bound to be cool on a motorcycle in the morning. Come at eleven. If you’re coming from Fort Bragg or Sea Haven …”
“Caspar,” he reminded. He shouldn’t have. It was getting around that Torpedo Ink had bought quite a lot of property in Caspar and had started a few businesses there. Still, he didn’t want to lie to her. He’d already committed the sin of omission and that was as far as he was going to go. He should have told her he was in a club and that club was important to him.
“Caspar. Right. It’s still a long way and you’ll have to get up very early to make it over here by eleven.” She suddenly stopped sorting books and regarded him with mock suspicion. “You’re not a morning person, are you? Like get up at five-thirty, exercise and be all chipper?”
“Chipper?” he echoed. “The librarian uses a word like chipper?”
“It’s a perfectly good word.” She used her snippiest voice. “It means cheerful and lively.”
“I’m well aware what it means, I just thought it was a dated word.”
Her eyebrow shot up. “There aren’t any dated words. They’re all perfectly good if they’re used properly.”
Absinthe found himself wanting to laugh. He couldn’t remember a time when laughter was part of his life. This woman with her cute square glasses—they were purple today, he figured to match the swing skirt she wore. It flowed around her legs and showed them off to perfection. A different look from her tight pencil skirt. He wasn’t certain which one he preferred. This one was flirty and fun. The other was all business and sexy as hell.
The tight prim-and-proper skirt put all sorts of dirty thoughts in his head. He had too many fantasies of bending her over her desk and doing all sorts of wicked things to her. This skirt had him wanting to pick her up, sit her on that desk, scatter those books everywhere, and shove the skirt to her waist, yanking down her panties and devouring her right there. That made him wonder how she would taste.
“Stop.” She sent him a smoldering reprimand. “The library is a sacred place. You can’t think those thoughts in here.”
She was either reading his mind, in which case his fantasies weren’t scaring the crap out of her—and they should be because he had a lot of them—or she was adept at reading him, and no one had done that yet, not even his brothers.
“You think about those things in here,” he whispered, his tone deliberately wicked. He stepped closer to her. Crowding her right into that desk of hers. The one she thought she was so safe behind. The one he had used in very inventive ways in a great number of his fantasies.
She gave a little gasp. “Aleksei. You have to stop. Really.” She looked around the library, saw that no one was close to them and lowered her