Just One Taste Part 31

Alice tripped on an uneven concrete slab and stopped. "What?"

"Kismet. Fate. Maybe you're what I've needed all along."

"Huh?" She was feeling particularly inarticulate. How did he know what she was thinking? This was no way to impress a date. She knew she was supposed to be a good listener, but surely at some point she would be expected to talk and make sense.

"Don't worry about all that Rules, hard-to-get c.r.a.p. Just be yourself. You're very sweet, you know. Very."

Standing still, they were bathed in the glow of an old-fas.h.i.+oned lamppost. Daniel bent and brushed his lips to hers. Zing. Sparkle. Verve. Vim. Alice's mind whirled like a little thesaurus as Daniel held her upright in his arms, his hand stroking her back just as she had imagined. Of course, her back wasn't bare. She had her L.L. Bean three-in-one parka on. Suddenly she felt way too hot.

Pep. Zest. OmiG.o.d, he was delicious. Better than Swiss wine. Better than anything. Certainly better than her ex-fiance Brad. Brad Pitiful.

"Thank you," he murmured into her lips, nipping a corner.

She pushed him away. She didn't really want to, but she had to.

Questions. She had several. But all she was able to manage was "What, how, why-"

He put a finger on her mouth again, and the lightning bolt went right down to her toes with a brief stopover in the weeping center of her womanhood. Her precious pearl. Her silken folds.

G.o.d, she really had to read other stuff besides romance novels.

"Shh. You won't believe me if I tell you the truth."

"Okay." Alice looked up. "Lie to me then."

Chapter 3.

They had taken a booth in the front, right next to the door. Every time someone came in, the napkin Alice was shredding waved in her hands like a little ghost. It being Thirsty Thursday, they were lucky to find any place at all to sit. Two s.h.i.+pyard Ales sat untouched on the table in front of them on cardboard coasters that advised them to "Dig in at the Dugout." They both still wore their coats and hadn't ordered dinner yet.

Daniel was talking, she knew he was. She could see his lips moving, but with all the noise and a country song on the jukebox, Alice didn't have the faintest idea what he was saying.

She'd heard him loud and clear on the street though.

I'm from the past.

I've come to right a wrong.

I can read minds. No, it's not complete bulls.h.i.+t. See?

And I'm kind of telekinetic, too. I need to change a few things in the old town history book you have. Move some words around. It's worked everywhere else but here. You have no freakin' idea how many libraries there are in the state of Maine. Oh, I guess you do. Wow, that many?

Yeah, I know n.o.body reads them now. But Reverend Gosford didn't know that when he cursed me.

Yup, the ugly guy downstairs. My father-in-law. Actually, the ugly guy on the left. The ugly guy on the right is my father.

Married. He was married. She had kissed a married man. She would have slept with a married man. That made her just as bad as some Hollywood hooker. Or her hairdresser Janine Stanley right here in town. Janine slept with everybody as long as they had a d.i.c.k and a pulse.

And he was nuts. This beautiful man, crazy as Eddie Spencer at the traffic circle, waving to the cars all day, rain or s.h.i.+ne.

No, she was nuts. If he was from the past, then he couldn't still be married. Because his wife would be dead, right? Unless she was in another bar telling some poor stooge she was a cursed time-traveler, too.

Alice didn't really mind a good time-travel romance, especially if there was a braw kilted warrior-laird who kissed like a dream. Like Daniel. She'd been sucked right into Outlander on TV, too.

But fiction was one thing. This was very definitely non-fiction.

And they weren't in Scotland.

Alice held her head in her hands. Her napkin fluttered away. She flinched when he reached across the table and lifted her chin.

"Let's get out of here. I can't hear myself think."

Alice locked onto his hazel eyes. They were flecked with silver and gold spots, serious, searching. She glanced over to the bar. Matt McKinnon was working tonight, wiping up a spill with a rag. He laughed at something someone said. He was a cheerful guy. Alice had gone to high school with him and he'd been quite the cla.s.s clown. She pointed.

"What's he thinking?"

"His feet hurt. Darla is pregnant again, and he's a little worried about making the mortgage payment this month because she bought some new maternity clothes."

"She is?" Alice hadn't heard that. None of those things were immediately verifiable, however.

She tried again. "What's the name of his little boy?"

Daniel scrunched up his brow. "It can't be Scooter, can it? Tell me that's not the name on his birth certificate."

It was actually Matthew Keith McKinnon, Junior. But Daniel had been around town all week. It didn't take a rocket scientist to get Matt to talk about his kid. She scanned the room and found a buxom young brunette she knew very slightly from a disastrous yoga cla.s.s she'd taken when she'd had first moved back to town. Alice was a yoga-cla.s.s dropout, but she still wore the pants.

"What about that girl there? Where do I know her from?"

Daniel grinned, closed his eyes, then steepled his hands. "Ommmm."

This just wasn't possible. She stood up fast, tipping both beers on the table. Daniel looked down at his crotch with the most comical look of dismay. Misty Allen came right over with waitress radar and a roll of paper towels. In the mop-up, Alice slipped out the door.

He caught up to her in the library parking lot as she was frantically fis.h.i.+ng out her keys. She wasn't fast enough to get into the car and lock the doors.

"Alice. Please. Please listen to me. Give me a chance. I've learned never to tell anybody what I've told you tonight. And this is exactly why. You think I'm crazy, right? Some sort of deranged sicko! Come into the library. I'll prove everything I've said to you is true."

Oh, yeah. Like she was going into an empty dark building with Daniel Merrill, Insane Time Traveler.

"We'll turn on the lights."

Alice sagged against her car. Was crazy catching? Was she saying things out loud and she was simply too confused to know?

"You're not crazy or confused, Alice," he said, his voice gentle. "And I'm not married anymore. My wife died. A long time ago."

"Oh." Oh? Her comeback was oh? She definitely was off her game.

"I'll show you what I've been trying to do. I swear I won't touch you." He reached into his suede jacket.

Alice closed her eyes. She was going to die. In the library parking lot. He would shoot her and maybe mutilate her body. And here she had almost been willing to go skiing with him. He pulled out a cell phone. "Here, you can call 911 if you get scared. Or mutilated. Chief Osborne has a thing for you, you know. He was the guest speaker at the Rotary meeting and I couldn't help but read his mind while I stood around waiting for my order. He was pretty nervous."

Alice gaped at him. Charley Osborne liked her? He was old enough to be her father!

"I can't help that. He's been lonely since he and Ronnie...no, Connie got divorced."

"This is just too weird. I don't have to open my mouth, do I?"

"I wish you would."

And before she knew it, he was kissing her again, a hot, insistent kiss that wiped all the words from her head. He pressed her into the cold metal of her car and pressed something equally hard against the her. Not a gun. Something so much better. And bigger.

"How old are you?" she asked breathlessly, breaking away just when she thought they might be charged with public indecency very shortly. The selectmen would be seriously unhappy to have their librarian caught s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g in the parking lot.

And not in the library either. She was not going to- "Fine, we'll go back to your place after. If you still want to, that is," he said, a boyish look on his too-handsome face. "You read historicals." He placed a thumb on her cheek and Alice fought the urge to turn her face and suckle it. "The battle of Waterloo and I have a lot in common."

"1815? You're telling me you were born during the Regency?" Her all-time favorite romance genre. The dukes who were secretly spies, the marriages of convenience- He nodded and caught her just as she went into a very creditable Regency-miss swoon.

"d.a.m.n it." He didn't happen to have any hartshorn or a vinaigrette on him. Of course, he'd been a baby during the Regency, an American baby at that. There was nothing romantic about being born in the woods of Maine. No dukes here.

Carefully, he drew her gla.s.ses off her freckled little nose, slipped them into his jacket pocket and kind of threw her over his shoulder. He went to the closest door, the wheelchair accessible entry along the side of the building not far from her car. She must come in this way every day. She wasn't that heavy, really, but he didn't think he could have hauled her up the stone front steps.

The keys were still on the orange plastic bracelet she'd twisted and turned around her hand when she thought he was going to kill her. "One of these should do the trick, yes? Wake up, Alice. Sweetheart." She dangled over his shoulder like a rag doll.

It seemed Alice was a practical, organized girl. Well, she'd have to be; she was a librarian. Long live Melvil Dewey, who was a nutjob in his personal life but had a way with numbers.

Her keys had labels on them, plus there was a small penlight dangling from the bracelet. A whistle too. She could have blown it in the parking lot when he jogged up to catch her. Daniel wondered why she didn't.

The outside light bulb was pretty dim, but he saw "side" printed neatly and figured that it went nicely with old fas.h.i.+oned "front" key right next to it. He was inside the hallway without too much difficulty, but he had to find a place to dump Alice pretty quick. Maybe throw some water on her. Kiss her again.

Running his free hand along the wall, he flipped up as many switches as he encountered, lighting up the Sadie Ryder Library like a Christmas tree. He headed toward the Reading Room, which was still in darkness. But after spending four days there, he knew right where the light fixture was. He settled her gently on what he considered to be "his" chair, and took the one opposite, moving it across the rug so their knees touched.

Alice was very pale, her freckles tiny flakes of gold against the white of her skin. Her hairclip had fallen out somewhere, and her shoulder-length hair fuzzed up around her face like a rusty dandelion. He tucked it behind her ears. She had no piercings, which was a great relief. He could not accustom himself to the current trend in brutal body adornment. Barbed bars and hoops. Studs stuck everywhere like metal boogers. Tattoos were another story altogether. He could easily see Alice with a ladybug or a delicate daisy on her hip.

He took her hands in his and shook them. "Alice. Come back to me." He listened hard for her thoughts, but it was like getting static on an old radio. She was out.

And he had done it to her. Why had he risked telling her? He'd managed to keep his mouth shut for over a hundred years. Sure, he'd been lonely with his burden, but in a way it was his own d.a.m.n fault. If he'd let Rebecca go- No. No. Whatever he and his father had done had not merited Porter Gosford's wrath. His old man got off easy. Died in his own bed at the Merrill Mansion. Daniel was sent into the wilderness for forty years.

Forty years. He had two more days. If he failed, he'd be SOL once again. Due in town in the mid-twenty-first century.

This time, though, he wouldn't want to leave Merrills Mills. Maybe couldn't leave Merrills Mills. He'd tried like h.e.l.l to keep away from Alice. She was so vulnerable. Her thoughts had been like background music as he tried to concentrate all week. Not Muzak, that's for sure; there was nothing soothing or vapid about Alice. She craved romance and justice equally. But maybe instead of trying to tune her out, he should have enlisted her help.

If he could get rid of the book. Take it out of the library and burn it or something, that might be just as good as trying to tumble the letters around. Maybe old Porter would be satisfied.

Not that he hadn't tried that before. He was actually fairly adept at stealing this particular volume. It had been pretty easy to spirit the book out of the library, but times had changed.

When she woke up, he'd ask her to help him. He knew there was a magnetic strip in every book in the library now. Some kid had set the alarm off yesterday, trying to steal a copy of Eragon. Daniel had listened to Alice give the little snot a lecture, issue him a library card, and check the book out to him anyway. She had explained to the boy that her first year on the job, she'd written a grant to get the spy equipment. She didn't tell the kid, but Daniel knew that under old Mrs. Hussey's fading energy, thousands of dollars' worth of books had disappeared. That wasn't going to happen on her watch.

Alice knew how to demagnetize the books. He could cart his father's book away and no one would be the wiser. Then maybe he could live like a normal man with a normal wife- Whoa. He'd stolen the book before and he'd tried marriage once. Both had been disasters. Who knew exactly what the effects of the curse being lifted would be anyway? Maybe he'd turn into a pile of ash, or sprout wings. Get pruny and wrinkled. Lose his teeth and the ability to get it up. He'd had plenty of time to read about Heaven the past century and a half, and had pretty much decided that earth was just a replica of h.e.l.l, but he really wasn't anxious to see either place quite yet.

Alice's eyelashes fluttered. Daniel breathed a sigh of relief. But then he heard her chaotic thoughts, and his heart plummeted.

She opened her eyes. They were huge, unfocussed, her chocolate brown irises rimmed with navy. He'd kissed off her annoying lipstick and her lips were a plump, natural rose. But she did not plan to use them to kiss him again any time soon.

"I can't see!" she screamed, swatting at him. "What have you done to me?"

Hastily, Daniel grabbed her gla.s.ses from his pocket. "Here. Put them on. I wouldn't do anything to you, I swear!"

Alice shoved them on, scowled, then took them off. "Fingerprints." She wiped them on a napkin from her pocket, put them on and swore. His prim and proper librarian had read a dirty dictionary.

"I'll go find something to clean them with."

"Windex. In the office," she snapped.

Daniel strode across the library, trying to block Alice's silent rant. The office was barely big enough to turn around in, with two beat-up desks, shelves and a makes.h.i.+ft kitchen counter taking up most of the room. He found the cleaning products in the cupboard over the tiny sink. He paused to look at a reproduction of Klimt's The Kiss hanging beside Alice's desk. It sure beat having to look at his father all day. Daniel pulled two sheets of paper toweling off the wall and hurried back.

Alice bit her lip, scrubbing at her gla.s.ses with fervor. Her ideas were whacking around like demented ping pong b.a.l.l.s. He could barely keep up. He put his hands on her knees and she jumped.

"Don't touch me. Not yet."

Yet. Well, that sounded somewhat hopeful. Daniel took a deep breath. "Let me start again. I'll try to explain better. Are you okay to listen?"

"Can't you tell?" she asked, her voice filled with sarcasm.

"I'm trying to tune you out. I can do that. I have to do that otherwise if I read peoples' minds all day I'd be a raging lunatic." He saw her raise a bronze-y eyebrow. "I'm really not. A raging lunatic, that is. Although maybe it would be easier if I were."

Alice folded her hands in her lap. "I'm ready."

Daniel sat back in his chair. He wasn't quite sure where to start.

The beginning was as good a place as any.

"I was born in here in Merrills Mills in 1815, only it wasn't called that then. It was-"