by Chant, Zoe
That was okay. There was more than enough to appreciate from the waist up. She had the most amazing upper arms. She looked, Matthew thought dreamily, like she could bench-press a pickup truck. She had an incredible jawline. Her lips were full and kissable, which was a presumptuous thought to have about a woman he'd just met. She looked—
Like home, his bear announced with satisfaction, and Matthew's daydreams screeched to a halt.
In almost twenty years of moving from job to job, traveling to different places, meeting new people, never once had the beast within him had an opinion like that. Matthew, who suspected his smile had gotten increasingly idiotic the longer he'd been looking at Sarah, felt it go weak. Virtue isn't home. I've got a job in the city starting next month!
His bear, contentedly, said, And yet here we are.
We are not here! Matt felt his inside voice get almost panicky. I mean, we are, but we're not! Not to stay! It's a job at the National Archives in the city! It's my dream job! We are not here!
The bear gave a surprisingly delicate sniff for such a large animal. Jobs are jobs. She is a dream.
That, Matt admitted, was hard to argue with.
Unfortunately, the dream in question was looking at him like he was some kind of nightmare. Honestly, Matthew had expected a more positive reaction. The phone interview for the job had gone well, and he'd shown up early for his first day at work, which usually went over well. Granted, he'd startled her into throwing her pen halfway across the checkout desk, which wasn't a terrific first impression, but it was probably okay, unless she was the type to hold a grudge.
Her expression, at the moment, suggested she really held a grudge.
"I'm sorry," Matt said, unsure of where he'd gone wrong, but very much wanting to put it right. He would have wanted to anyway, but it also felt like his bear was pressing itself against the inside of his forehead, as if it could see Sarah more clearly through Matt's eyes that way. It didn't work like that, not even a little. That didn't stop the over-eager bear. "I'm sorry," Matt said again, gathering his thoughts away from his intrusive animal self. "I like to come early on my first day. Usually someone asks me to shelve books, and I get to be useful for a little while. But I've obviously come at a bad time."
He glanced at her half-written sign, which supported her statement about the library closing early. "Should I come back tomorrow?"
"No!"
Matt startled at her vehemence. "This is Virtue, New York, right? You got an archivist's grant for the summer to help sort out the town's historical record?"
Sarah passed a hand over her eyes. "Yes, this is Virtue, and yes, we got the grant, and yes, I suppose you'd better come back tomorrow. I'm sorry. I forgot you were supposed to be here today."
That had never happened before. Matthew's eyebrows rose in astonishment, and Sarah the librarian sighed again. "Which is to say, obviously I know you were supposed to arrive today. I just got distracted because there's an emergency I have to attend to."
"A library emergency?" Matt asked, both mystified and intrigued.
"No, don't be silly." She smiled, though, which Matt thought was quite wonderful. If he could just keep her smiling, he'd be content with his entire life. Her smile even got a little bigger as she added, "The only library emergency around here is the archives. I have an entire room set up for you, and I was going to show you around tonight, but I don't know how long this is going to last. I guess I could leave you here in the archival room. You'd probably figure out my system fast enough."
Matt glanced around the library. Most of the lights were off, letting only natural light flood the carpeted floors and well-worn stacks that held innumerable books. If there were any patrons lingering, they were well-hidden.
There were certainly worse fates than being locked along in a library, but he could think of better ones, too. "Could I come with you?"
It sounded ridiculous as soon as he said it. Surely emergencies didn't require tagalongs. Still, his bear said, Excellent thinking, and Matthew's mother had always taught him that no one could say yes, if you didn't ask.
A thoughtful light came into Sarah's dark eyes. "We could use more people..."
"Have I just offered myself as a new member of the volunteer fire brigade?"
"No." Sarah got her pen and finished her poster, then looked up with a fierce smile. "Although that can be arranged, if you want. We always need more firefighters."
Matt, awed, said, "Are you one?"
"Only in a real emergency. All right, let's go." She marched out from behind the checkout counter and Matthew almost bit his knuckles. Her 1950s vibe didn't end with the shirt. She wore high-waisted, high-water blue jeans with big cuffs and a double row of buttons on the flat panel face of them. The only thing missing from her pinup ensemble was a pair of red heels that matched the shirt. Instead she wore sturdy brown leather boots.
Actually, Matt thought, the boots still worked with the pinup vibe. It just made her a bit more Rosie the Riveter instead of Rita Hayworth.
It didn't matter what kind of emergency she was taking him to. Any woman who made him think dreamily of pinups should be followed to the ends of the earth, if necessary.
His bear said, Yes, contentedly, and urged Matt to fall in behind Sarah as she left the library. He didn't know if the jeans were custom made—he'd never seen anything like them in a department store, for sure—but they fit her hips and butt and thighs magnificently. He was so busy admiring her that he nearly tripped on the library steps when she stopped and turned to lock the door, and he was certain he was blushing when she looked back at him to ask, "Did you drive?"
"Yes?" Matthew wasn't sure where the question had come from. Virtue was a small town without a local airport, and flying a summer's worth of stuff into Syracuse seemed like more trouble than driving it up from Florida, where he'd been most recently working. "Should I not have? Are there hard limits on how many people get to own cars in Virtue?"
Sarah paused with a perplexed, amused look curving her mouth. "No, although I'm trying to get a more robust public transportation system in place. I was trying to ask if you had a car or if you wanted to ride with me."
"Oh, I'll ride with you!" Matthew cleared his throat, and, trying to sound less like an over-eager puppy, said, "If that's all right. You can tell me something about Virtue, and the archival project?"
Over-eager cub. His bear sniffed disdainfully. Bears aren't puppies.
Oso, Matthew asked, trying not to sound annoyed, would you know what I meant if I said 'bear puppy'?
His bear sniffed again, as if insulted. It clearly didn't want to answer, which meant it would, in fact, understand. Okay then, Matthew said. Don't quibble over the details. Especially when I'm trying to talk to a beautiful woman!
The bear, with a long put-upon sigh, settled down, leaving Matt with the distinct impression that it thought he would do much worse talking to Sarah without its guidance.
Sarah had walked him over to a vintage pickup truck, as red as her shirt, while he'd been arguing with his bear. Matthew almost wanted to call it 'rattletrap', but it was in perfect, well-maintained condition. It was just from the 1950s. "I can talk your ear off," she promised, "but the danger is you might get stuck out on the edge of nowhere with me and a bunch of other rabble-rousers until who-knows-when tonight, if you don't drive yourself. If you're okay with that, climb on in."
Matthew could think of nothing in the world he'd be more okay with. "Sign me up."
CHAPTER THREE
Matthew Rojas clearly didn't have the sense God gave a goose, and Sarah had never been more grateful for anything in her life. Why on earth he would want to come with her, in her truck, to a comparatively remote location for an unknown amount of time, was beyond her. She could, however, take it as a positive sign that he didn't think she was a serial killer, which boded well for a passionate summer fling.
Sarah couldn't remember the last time she'd even contemplated a summer fling, much less been prepared to throw herself
into one five minutes after meeting a guy. She put the thought firmly out of mind as she buckled in and told Matthew to do the same. He already was, though, which made her smile. "Safety first," she said, and immediately decided that had been stupid.
Matthew smiled, too, though. That smile could melt steel. Sarah was not made of steel. She also couldn't afford to melt, if she was driving. It would be hard to see out the windshield, if she melted. She swallowed instead, and Matthew's smile broadened. Probably unrelatedly, but she couldn't be sure. "So where are we going?" he asked, once buckled in. Then he paled as Sarah peeled out of the library parking lot like a vintage bat out of hell. "Jeez. No wonder you said buckle in."
"My friend Jake says I drive like I'm in a road rally," Sarah said cheerfully. "So Virtue's on desirable land, it turns out. We've had developers sniffing around here for years. They always come up dry, but they keep trying, and right now there's a group trying to move on my friend Jenny's land. We're going up to protest." She glanced over at him, then pulled her gaze back to the road so she wouldn't just stare drippily and drive them into a ditch. "There may be some lying around in the mud. You don't have to do that part."
"You're not going to, are you?" Matthew sounded horrified. "In that amazing outfit?"
"Oh." Heat rushed up Sarah's face and made her ears burn. "I mean, it washes. But, uh, thanks. I made it."
"You made it?" Matthew's very faint Spanish accent grew a little stronger. "I thought I'd never seen jeans like those, but what a wonderful talent!"
"It's more of a skill," Sarah mumbled. "It just takes practice. Like cooking. If you know how to read the recipe—the pattern—it's not hard, just slow at first. But thanks. I like to sew. What, uh, what are your hobbies?" She could not have sounded any more obvious if she'd tried. If there was a Clunky Lines For Beginning Daters book, she would be its best-selling author.
Magically, however, Matthew Rojas didn't seem to notice that she had the grace of a dancing bear with her small talk. "I like to draw, I suppose. Terrible habit for an archivist. Once I got to work on a project in the Colombian General Archive—the national archives—and I looked down and I'd doodled a jaguar god into the margins of a two hundred year old copy of a De Bastidas map. In pen."
Sarah barked a shocked laugh. "Rodrigo de Bastidas? The guy who mapped the South American coast?"
"It wasn't an original," Matthew said desperately. "But...yeah."
"What did you do?" Sarah, stricken with appalled curiosity, slid a glance at her new archivist, whose gorgeous face was crinkled in remembered despair.
"I hid it deep in the pile of maps and never told anyone," he confessed. "You could now ruin me with a word."
"Well, then my archives would never get sorted out," Sarah said pragmatically, then laughed again. "I can't believe you told me that story five minutes after meeting me. What if I was the type to turn you in?"
"It would have been worth it," Matthew proclaimed rather grandiosely, then shook his head with a smile. "The truth is people accidentally wreck stuff in archives and museums all the time. There are whole pages of personal horror stories. Most of them end with the equivalent of 'I stuffed the map at the bottom of the pile and ran'."
Sarah cackled and pulled down a side road that ran along the river as it led toward Jenny Minor's place. "I guess it's good to know even the professionals really mess up sometimes. What else do you do, besides draw on ancient maps? You have—sorry, I'm probably being weird and invasive and nosy." There was no 'probably' about it. She was definitely being weird, invasive and nosy.
"You're not," Matthew said. "I have what?"
"A Spanish accent? Am I hearing that right?"
"Oh." Matthew smiled. "Sí, yes, I was born in Argentina and lived there until I was eight. See, that wasn't so nosy. Although if I'm giving you a quick biography and list of hobbies, I do kind of feel like I should perhaps say I enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach, and puppies."
A disconcerting combination of delight and alarm spilled through Sarah. "Do you? I mean, of course you do, who doesn't, but—oh, stink, I didn't mean to...I'm putting you on the spot and I didn't mean to. And I wasn't grilling you for...never mind, I guess I was. I'm sorry."
Matthew's eyes sparkled more and more through her fumbled apology. "Sí, yes, I do like all of those things, but as you say, I think most people do. Did you really just say 'stink'?"
Sarah wilted, embarrassed. "I've been trying to clean up my language because I've got the day care running in the library. 'Stink' and 'puckernuts' have replaced at least seventy percent of my swears."
"'Puckernuts?'" Now he sounded purely delighted, although he shifted like he was trying not to cross his legs protectively. "That sounds like a genuinely awful situation."
"It's from a fantasy comic book called Elfquest," Sarah said, reasonably certain she was losing all hope of seeming cool and suave to this big-city archivist. "Part of their diet is a sour tree nut that they call a puckernut, not..." She made a vague gesture, hoping it covered the idea of what 'puckernuts' sounded like it meant.
He stopped trying to cross his legs, so she thought she'd gotten the idea across. "I like it," he announced. "It has a satisfying sound. So you read comics?"
Sarah shot him a quick look, then slowed the truck as they approached the long drive that led to Jenny Minor's ranch. "I try to read some of everything, so I can suggest books people will like to them, but...yeah, I've read comics since I was a kid. You?"
"Will you think less of me if I admit I mostly only know comic book characters from all the movies they do now? This is beautiful," Matthew added, leaning forward in the seat to look more carefully out the front window. The mountains rose up, quite a distance away, but hazy with summer heat and providing a gorgeous backdrop to the tree-lined fence that ran along one side of the road. The river rushed along the other, blocked from the road with low stone banks, built by hand over decades as vehicles put more pressure on the road. Sarah knew a culvert ran up ahead, supplying river water to the horse fields on the far side of the fence. "Who would want to develop this?"
"Heh. People who think natural beauty should be quantified, codified, and profited from. Ah, all right, look, there they are." She gestured ahead of them, at a gentle bend in the road, where the back end of somebody's truck stuck out.
A couple dozen other vehicles were pulled up alongside the road as Sarah slowed and drove her truck by until she found a parking place far enough up to not block traffic. She jumped out of the truck, waving hello at some of the gathered townsfolk, and said, "And no, I wouldn't," to Matthew as he climbed out of his side of the truck. He looked quizzical, and she clarified, "I wouldn't think less of you for not knowing much about comic book characters except from all the movies. I'd say welcome to the club."
Matthew's smile lit up, and Sarah considered the possibility that she really should have just left him locked in the archives, so nobody else could fall madly in love with him.
Not that she was falling madly in love with him. She'd known him about twenty-two minutes, after all, and one didn't just go around falling in love with people in twenty-two minutes. Even extraordinarily attractive people with incredible smiles who admired one's sewing abilities.
"Sarah!" Mabs yelled, and Sarah, distracted from what could have been a long, appealing list of Matthew Rojas's obviously excellent qualities, waved him over with her as she went to greet Mabs.
"Hey, you've got a good turnout here. This is my new archivist, Matthew Rojas. Matthew, this is my friend Mabs. What's going on?"
Mabs and Matthew exchanged greetings before Mabs said, "They've got a bulldozer up around the bend there—"
"On this road?" Sarah asked in dismay. "It'll crush the road right into the river."
"Well, a bunch of people drove up and surrounded it with their cars, so right now it's up against the fence with nowhere to go. Noah wants to lead a band of intrepid children in, oh, what's the pirate word...swarming its decks...?"
"Boarding?" Matthew
suggested.
"Boarding, is that it? Isn't there a fancy word for when you do it illegally? Well, all right, boarding, then. He wants to board the bulldozer and...I don't know, scuttle it, or something. He's five," she added to Matthew, whose eyebrows rose in astonishment.
"And he's proposing to lead a band of children in protest?"
"He does seem to be," Mabs said wryly. "You'd think Robin Owens, who is seventeen, would be the ringleader, but nope, it appears to be my five year old."
"I love that kid," Sarah said happily. "Should we go admire him, and see what kind of official developer presence is over there stuck between a river and a...car place? That doesn't really work, does it."
"Works well enough for me. You go, though, I'll hold down the fort here and wait to see if anybody else shows up. Just don't let Noah take on the bulldozer single-handedly, okay? Or drown."
Sarah grinned. "Ah, a good parenting day, then? You don't want to drown him?"
"After all the work I've put into him? No. Not today."
"She seems nice," Matthew said as they headed away from Mabs.
"She's incredible, and her kid is a force of nature. She only moved here a year ago, but she's become a fixture. And she's getting married this fall and I'm her maid of honor!" That had come out too strongly. She might as well have yelled don't look at Mabs, she's taken, notice me instead!!! Sarah, sheepishly, added, "I've never been a maid of honor before. I'm pretty excited. Sorry, that was weird."
"Not at all. I was a ring bearer when I was four and I still remember the excitement."
"Oh my God," Sarah said ill-advisedly, "you must have been adorable."
Matthew laughed. "Suggesting I'm not anymore?"
"No! No, that's not what I meant at all, you're very attractive! Which is not...an appropriate thing to say to my new employee. Oh, gosh. I'm sorry."
The archivist's grin spread. "I'm more of a contractor."
"I'm not sure that helps! Just pretend I haven't said anything for the last thirty seconds, all right?"
Matthew, his eyes sparkling, said, "As you wish," and Sarah tried not to kick herself the rest of the walk up the road toward the protesters.