You are literally wearing a French suit to cook dinner in,Belfry taunted. His wings rustled as he refolded them around his tiny little body. I could easily imagine the smug grin on his tiny snout accompanying the gesture.
I shut the refrigerator a little harder than necessary. “It’s Italian,” I lied, but I knew I wouldn’t get away with that kind of fib. I might have good taste, but Belfry was obsessed with fabrics and tailoring. Why I’d ended up with a familiar who fancied himself a clothing connoisseur… Before Belfry could correct me—he lived for correcting me—he went suddenly still on his tiny perch atop the kitchen light fixture. His leathery ears flared.Uh-oh. Suspicious activity at three o’clock.
I didn’t bother looking. “Unless it is the butcher raising his prices again, I do not care.” The butcher, being Kai—our local feral werewolf—did not consider himself one, but hunting was so deep in his blood that he supplied all of town with fresh venison. It was a good thing we were all creatures of large appetites and that our local deer population was healthy, robust, and carefully controlled.
No, no, this is much juicier. A woman is sneaking around the library yard.He paused and smacked his lips, as if he wereperhaps imagining a juicy bug to chew on.A very cute woman,he added, as if that would entice me to look. He might look twice at every bat passing by our windows, but I was centuries old; I had mastered such base instincts ages ago.
“I said,” I repeated, enunciating like a saint beseeching an obstinate choirboy, “that I do not care. Go investigate. Bother someone else.” I flung my hand toward the window to my left, it was opened a crack to let in the spring breeze and the scent of the blossoming Eastern Redbud trees in the yard behind my property. There was someone living there, but I had not seen the house’s inhabitant in so long I had forgotten what they looked like.
You’ll want to see this,Belfry singsonged in his most obnoxious tone. I sighed and stepped toward the window, mostly to silence him. The spring sunlight was bright—too bright for comfort—but my apartment had deep eaves and heavy curtains. I parted one just enough to glance into the overgrown library yard next door. And there she was, just like he said she’d be.
A slender figure, with brown hair escaping its clip in stubborn wisps, stood on tiptoe to peer into one of the boarded-up back windows. She cupped her hands around her face to block the glare, her posture determined, her expression tight with concentration. She had brown eyes, sharp with curiosity even from this distance. She wore professional clothing, though wrinkled from her sneaking, that clung to her body in all the right places: simple slacks, a pale ivory blouse, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a pair of suede heels very ill-suited for the rough yard behind the library.
She had her mouth tightly pursed, as if she were either biting back a curse or preparing to deliver one. Despite the neat clothes, her outfit demure and sleek, fire seemed to cling to her every move. Impatience, a hint of excited anxiety, flared beneath her surface. This woman was all passion contained in a tiny, well-clothed package.
She was also trespassing in my library.
The books within—valuable, fragile, some ancient—had survived for decades only because I had personally stored them when the place shuttered. No stranger with grabby hands and questionable intentions was going to lay their hands on them, no matter how long-fingered and elegant they appeared to be. “Belfry, watch the food,” I snapped, already moving for the stairs.
It is daytime,he retorted.I can’t fry anything in the day. I’m basically decorative right now.As if he were any good at frying things at night, he was a bat, not a dragon. And I hadn’t asked him to make the veal, just watch it. I was not about to trust a bat to cook my dinner.
“Then don’t burn the kitchen down,” I told him, instead of correcting him. I was above that sort of thing, especially when it was pointless. Belfry believed what he wanted to believe, and that was that. It was one of his less annoying quirks, and one that usually managed to make me smile. Not so when I thought the library next door was in imminent danger of being desecrated by a pretty but immoral human trespasser.
You say that like it’s ever off the table,Belfry called after me. I didn’t dignify that with a response as I raced down the stairs, butprivately I was relieved he had no thumbs with which to handle matches. I’d really be in trouble if that were the case.
By the time I stepped into the backyard, the sunlight grazed my suit in a way I disliked—UV exposure was hell on dark fabric dyes—but I stayed close to the wall, where the shade lingered. Her scent hit me before I reached her: warm, sweet, threaded with old paper and something electric beneath. She smelled like storms rolling across a library archive. She smelled… enticing. Which only irritated me more. A future thief that smelled good? Where was the world headed? I let my voice cut the air. “What do you think you are doing?”
She jolted so hard, she smacked her forehead on the window frame. “Ow! You...You scared me!” Damn it, even her voice was pretty, dulcet, well-modulated, with this pleasant hint of huskiness that reminded me of the turning of pages. The kind of voice that would fit perfectly inside a library, actually. All I needed to do was imagine gold-rimmed glasses on her dainty nose and her hair in a French twist.
I folded my hands behind my back, posture impeccable despite the rising urge to pace. I had far too strong a response to her; it wasn’t right. She was a potential burglar, a threat to the books, the town, and the peace I so valued. “Then perhaps you should refrain from skulking around buildings that do not belong to you.” My tone might have bordered on impolite, and that just wouldn’t do, I never lost my temper.
She whirled on me, cheeks flushed, temper sparking immediately. “I wasn’t skulking. I was...inspecting.” She, on the other hand, clearly had no compunctions when it came to her temper. Restraint was not her middle name, and that shouldabsolutely have put her firmly in the unattractive zone. It didn’t. She looked too much like she’d fit in with the British ton or the French aristocracy. Pale skin, delicate features, she rang all my bells, so to speak.
“That is simply a polite word for snooping,” I told her. Inspecting, yeah, right. There was nothing here to see except old books, not something the average thief would be after. Since she didn’t look like your standard property liberator, I had to assume she had enough knowledge to recognize the value of some of the tomes inside the library on sight. I already thought she looked like a librarian, a very tempting morsel of a librarian.
She bristled as if I’d insulted her, though that was not my intention. After all, one couldn’t be insulting when simply stating the truth, could one? “And yours is a pretentious word for minding someone else’s business,” she pointed out in a very sharp, waspish tone. All fire and passion, she drew herself up to seem bigger, though that still meant I towered over her. Not scared, not even a little, she wagged her finger in my face as if she’d just scored a big hit.
I arched a brow, intrigued now as much as angry that she was this bold in broad daylight. “This is my business. The library is closed. Locked. Off-limits. As its next-door guardian, I would appreciate not finding strangers trying to pry into the windows,” I said firmly. I took the task of guarding the library very seriously, the whole town, in fact. Vampires were often solitary creatures, and that was no different for me, but like a cat, I still needed a family, and this town was mine. Warts, empty houses, and all.
She took a step closer, chin lifting in challenge. “Well, as its soon-to-be restorer, I need to know what I’m getting into.” She pointed her hand back at the boarded-up window, indicating what she’d been looking at as if this weren’t evidence of her crime but proof of her innocence.
Restorer? My irritation paused, recalibrated, re-sharpened. I would know if something like that was happening, wouldn’t I? “Your name?” I asked, clipped, polite, dangerous. If she was who she said she was, the information had to be out there. Belfry probably knew, he was the king of gossip after all. Where he got it, I never knew, as I was the only one he could talk to. He probably sneakily hung in the rafters of other peoples homes to pick things up with his oversized ears.
She hesitated, just a flicker, but I caught it. “Jade Whitaker.” Her last name pricked at some half-formed memory, but her refusal to elaborate annoyed me enough to override my curiosity. Something was hinky—yes, I thought it—hinky. After the visitors for Gwen and Bianca had caused all sorts of mayhem last winter, I was not about to let another one walk into town, no matter who sanctioned it. If they even had; this could just be a well-rehearsed excuse.
“Why did no one inform me that the Mayor intended to hire someone for the library?” I asked out loud. That prickle of a memory was growing stronger, and, with a sense of doom, I realized that someone very well might have informed me. I vaguely recalled a conversation with Grandma Liz just as Gwen opened the B&B. I’d been distracted because Belfry had spilled a bottle of expensive calligraphy ink that morning over one of my favorite silk shirts.
“Maybe she knew you’d react like this,” this Jade Whitaker shot back. “Waltzing out here like some grumpy...grumpy…” She seemed to realize how incredibly rude it was to call a stranger grumpy, no, that was just wishful thinking on my part. She was struggling to find the right description to follow that word, her brow furrowed, her eyes flashing with righteous anger.
“Vampire?” I supplied dryly. I truly did not know why that was the word I offered her, but humor began to abruptly replace the foulness of my earlier temper. She was just a small, insignificant human; it would not take much to get her to leave, surely. She needed to leave, not only because she posed a threat to the town and the library books, but because the town was dangerous to her.
Her eyes widened, not in fear but in oh-great-another-eccentric-local exasperation. “I was going to say overbearing storekeeper, but sure—you can add that to the list.” She crossed her arms stubbornly over her chest, and I was struck by the very juvenile urge to let my eyes drop to the way her blouse clung to the soft swell of her breasts. Damn it, I was above these urges, wasn’t I?
I pinched the bridge of my nose and pinned my gaze, laser-focused, on hers. “Ms. Whitaker, I simply need you to vacate the premises. The ground is unstable, the structure worse, and I would prefer not to scrape you off the paving stones.” I did not think the library would collapse at any minute, but surely a little embellishment of the danger couldn’t hurt. It was all true, the ground was dry and cracked here, and nobody had bothered to inspect the building’s foundations in ages. We also did not have anything resembling a firehouse, so if a calamity struck, rescue would have to come from me or one of the other stick-to-themselves inhabitants of town.
“You don’t have to be rude,” she said, and there was almost a pout on her full bottom lip. It made something coil inside my belly that I did not want to investigate. She was bold and elegant at the same time, petite but fierce. She stepped closer until she was in the shade cast by the overgrown hedge with me, her scent trapped between us: sweetness combined with dusty old paper and electrifying heat.
“I am being exceptionally polite,” I assured her. “You have not seen me be rude.” We stood locked in a ridiculous standoff—her bristling like a wet cat, me trying very hard not to bare fangs in broad daylight—when footsteps crunched at the gate.
