by Sarah Title
So she threw herself at him.
He caught her, his arms going tight around her waist as she flung hers around his neck. He recovered fast, that Liam, and before she could tell him to shut up, his mouth was on hers again, hot and insistent, and she battled his tongue as it snaked into her mouth. His hands at her waist tightened and she shifted her pelvis up and into his. He moaned, or she moaned, somebody made some kind of noise.
And then the porch lights came on.
And Starr started barking.
Joanna stepped back, grateful that Liam kept his hands on her hips because she was pretty sure that was the only thing holding her up right now. She wanted to melt into a puddle of desire, and she guessed by the dark look in Liam’s eyes that he was totally willing to take a dive in.
She was about to suggest that she walk him home, for safety, when the front door opened and there was Gran, balancing on her crutches and squinting out into the night.
“Jo Jo?” she asked, confused and rumpled. Joanna marveled at how fast burning desire could cool to molten shame. She still wanted to melt into a puddle, but this was more a disappearing puddle. Anything so her grandmother, disheveled and confused by sleep, wasn’t standing at the door in her nightgown watching her grope the librarian.
“Gran, you should be in bed.” Joanna opened the screen door, edging around Liam to get hold of her grandmother before she noticed.
“Starr was barking.”
“Starr barks at everything,” Joanna said with more levity than she felt. Since she felt no levity at all. Just melting.
“Is there someone else out there?” Gran asked, leaning around Joanna’s shoulder. Joanna caught her before she tipped herself over.
“Hi, Peggy,” Liam said and Joanna wanted to kick him. Instead, she shot him a dirty look. He just shrugged. And he looked cute doing it, damn him.
“Liam? What are you doing here! Come in for a cup of tea, won’t you?”
“No, Liam was just leaving.”
“But what is he doing here?” Gran asked Joanna. “Why are you blushing?”
This was definitely not a conversation Joanna ever wanted to have with her grandmother, the one where she explained that she was in fact a sexual being and she was being a sexual being with the librarian on the front porch. She especially didn’t want to have the conversation on said front porch, with the door open and the lights on for all the neighbors to see, with said partner sexual being standing awkwardly by with a pretty visible erection.
There had been plenty of times in Joanna’s life when she was wrongfully ungrateful for Gran’s hospitality. Glancing down at the crotch she was just shamelessly grinding against, she realized this was another one of those times.
She shot Liam an apologetic look and closed the door gently in his bemused face. Hopefully, Gran would just forget all about this by the time it was actually morning.
Ha.
Chapter Fifteen
“You’re up early,” Gran said to Joanna as she stumbled into the kitchen. Gran, Joanna noticed through bleary eyes, was neatly dressed and had clearly been up long enough to brew a pot of coffee. Joanna knew for a fact she was not up early.
She also knew, based on Gran’s smirking tone, that the woman had not forgotten last night. Which meant that this time, the kiss was not just a dream and that Liam was, potentially, an actual sex machine. It also meant that Granny was going to give her so much shit about it.
Also, Joanna felt like she had a hangover.
It wasn’t like she’d had that much to drink last night. A few beers with dinner, which was nothing for her, even in her new nunlike existence in Halikarnassus. And she’d drunk a big glass of water after she’d put Gran back to bed. Then she’d let the dog out again. Then she’d drunk more water. Then she ate some toast. Then she flipped through channels on TV. Then she peeked in on Granny, who was snoring like a champ. So was Starr.
Then she wiped up the nonexistent crumbs on the kitchen counter. She straightened a pile of books in the living room. She fluffed the throw pillows. She came back to the kitchen and thought about organizing the junk drawer. She realized that she was not the sort of person who took pleasure in organization, so she took herself to bed where she did what she had been avoiding all night, which was staring at the ceiling, thinking about how good Liam’s hands felt on her waist and how good they would probably feel all over the rest of her.
She was just hard up, that was all. She got tons of booty in LA. That was one of the benefits of being in a band. Guys thought it was cool to bang a chick who could play guitar, and she got her rocks off without anyone getting too mushy about it.
That was all she was doing with Liam. She was trying to relive a little of that rock-star cool she used to have, back when she was in a cool band and not a total failure who was so concerned with not selling out that she was now living in her childhood bedroom in a town she hated. Liam was into music, and he clearly liked the idea that she played.
The only thing missing was her actually getting her rocks off. Nothing like a little Grandmother Interruptus to spoil the mood.
Spoiled it in her brain. Her body needed some convincing. Even this morning, faced with a bright-eyed, clearly curious Gran, Joanna’s body couldn’t quite forget that she had some unfinished business with Liam and his hands.
Whoever said you can’t go home again was wrong. You can go home again. It’s just always a terrible idea.
Not that being home didn’t have its benefits. Gran, for example. And if no one was around to hear her say it, Starr, who was watching Joanna from atop the pile of newly fluffed throw pillows.
Joanna took the mug of coffee Gran pushed across the island to her.
“You shouldn’t be doing this stuff,” Joanna scolded. It didn’t carry much weight, though, tinged as it was with her gratitude for the ready-made coffee.
Gran waved off Joanna’s halfhearted scolding and hobbled to her crutches, leaning against the counter. “I am capable of making coffee, you know.”
Joanna took a sip of the coffee. It was too hot, just the way she liked it. It burned on the way down her throat, waking up her internal organs.
Fortified enough to be helpful, she picked Starr’s leash up off the island. “I’m taking her for a w-a-l-k.”
Starr looked up from her cushion on the living room floor, ready to bolt. Starr hated her morning walk. It was bad enough that her warm Gran-body pillow woke her up by moving, and she was only happy again when she could retire to her living room cushion that caught the morning sun. The fact that she had to bear the indignity of taking several extra steps—attached to a leash, no less—was an interruption to her morning routine that she did not suffer easily. Left to her own devices, she would hide under the bed. Joanna had learned that you had to sneak up on her, and you could not say the word “walk” or she’d dart into the bedroom and not come out.
The dog must have a bladder of steel, Joanna thought. Or just a will of iron that let her quest for sunny comfort outweigh her need to go to the bathroom. Or she went in the house in a place neither of them had discovered yet.
Joanna was really starting to love this crafty, cranky dog.
“I took her out already,” Gran said as she made her way to the couch while Starr kept a watchful eye on her in case the possibility of a lap to sit in appeared. It did, and Starr abandoned her sunny spot for Gran’s lap.
“Gran! How?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t take her on a marathon. I just let her out the back door.”
“What if you got tangled in her leash? What if she tripped you?” Starr had a hilarious habit of bolting to or away from any potential stimulant, which usually resulted in the walker being tangled in tiny dog leash. It was a safety hazard, clearly. And Joanna wasn’t on crutches.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s a perfect lady, aren’t you, Miss Starr?”
Starr lifted her head to receive her lady-ear scratches.
Joanna shook her head.
“You’re going to hurt yourself—again.”
“Drink your coffee, crabby pants,” Gran told her.
“I’m not crabby,” Joanna mumbled, crabbily. But she did as she was told, then went to refill her mug. “How about some breakfast?”
Gran didn’t say anything. Joanna looked at the empty plate in the sink and the dirty pan on the stove.
“Gran.”
“Hmm?”
“Were you cooking?”
“No!”
“You’re supposed to be resting!”
“I am! Look! I’m even elevating my leg!” She shifted around to lean against the arm of the couch, her leg perched on a pile of pillows. Starr held onto her lap for dear life, and was not displaced.
Joanna watched the dance, amused until she saw Gran wince. “Here, let me,” she said, moving into the living room to fluff Gran’s pillows. Since she was Halikarnassus’s premier pillow fluffer.
“Thank you, sweetheart.”
Joanna sat on the coffee table and faced her grandmother. This was her third official week as Gran’s nurse. So far, Gran had allowed her to help with precisely nothing. She needed to have a talk with the woman if she was ever going to recover.
But Gran was pale and a slight sheen of sweat was forming on her brow, so Joanna had mercy.
A little bit of mercy.
“Gran,” she started.
“I know, I know, I overdid it.”
“Yes. You need to rest so you can recover; then you can go back to your superhuman feats of strength.”
“I hate just sitting here. I’m fine!”
“You are not fine.”
“It’s just my leg. Everything else is fine.”
“Gran—”
“You know I can’t sit still. Am I supposed to—”
“Because sometimes life isn’t fair, buttercup,” Joanna told her, just like Gran had told her so many times when she was a kid, railing against the rules and common sense that meant she couldn’t do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted to.
That got Gran to smile. She reached over and squeezed Joanna’s hand. “You’re a good girl, you know that?”
“Your pain is making you delirious.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me, too,” Joanna said, squeezing Gran’s hand back. In that moment, she almost meant it. “Now let me give you something for the pain.”
“You just want me to stop complaining.”
“I’m not going to lie,” Joanna said, getting up to grab the pills from Gran’s bedroom. “That is a pleasant side effect.”
When she got back to the couch, Gran took the pills and the glass of water without complaint, which was how Joanna knew Gran was really hurting. She took the empty glass back and fluffed her pillows again, which was her duty as the reigning expert. “Better?”
“Thank you.”
“Good. Now can I leave you to take a shower, or are you going to start moving furniture as soon as I leave the room?”
“I did have some ideas . . . no. I promise. I’ll be good.”
“Good.”
“And when you’ve showered, you can come down and tell me all about what you were doing on the porch with Liam last night.”
Damn. She almost got away with it.
“Rest,” Joanna ordered her grandmother, and she escaped to take a shower.
* * *
Liam fumbled twice with his keys before he got the door to the library unlocked.
“’Morning, boss.”
He turned to find Marcel, the night janitor, on the other side of the door.
“Hi, Marcel.”
“Something wrong with your key?”
“No, just my head. You’re still here?”
“Mimi had a night off, so I came in early instead of overnight. That’s okay, right?”
Marcel’s wife worked as an overnight home health care nurse, relieving the dinner shift for clients who required round-the-clock care. They also both had day jobs, and Liam knew that a precious night off meant the rare dinner and a movie date for the couple. And more, which Marcel often hinted at with wiggling eyebrows. Liam didn’t need to know the details of the sex life of his night janitor, or any of his employees, really, but he certainly didn’t begrudge the guy a little spontaneous schedule adjustment. Especially since he knew Marcel would never leave a job half-done. This wasn’t the first morning he’d come in to find Marcel on his way out the door, but it had been a while. It was good to see the old man smiling.
“It’s no problem. Whatever you need to do—”
“So long as the job gets done. Got it, boss.”
It was Liam’s management mantra, one that had taken the staff a little while to get used to. Mrs. Pratt had been more of a benevolent-ish dictator. Liam didn’t have it in him to look over people’s shoulders every second of the day.
Besides, who was Liam to begrudge anyone a little smooching? Especially since he himself was here a little late, and a little worse for wear?
He’d tried to go to bed as soon as he got home last night. But no matter how many times he brushed his teeth, he just couldn’t get the taste of Joanna out of his mouth.
That sounded a little gross, now that he thought about it. It didn’t feel gross last night. It felt hot. And a little frustrating.
And to be honest, a little embarrassing. When was the last time he got caught making out? High school, at least. And on Peggy’s front porch? God. He’d never live this down.
Maybe she’d forget. Maybe she was high on painkillers and didn’t notice who Joanna was making out with.
Ha. Or maybe he could deal with the reality of Halikarnassus and get used to the idea that, by the time the library was open to the public, everyone would know that he and the town badass were caught making out like teenagers by her ailing grandmother.
“I got another supply order ready for you,” Marcel told him, waking Liam from his shame reverie.
“Great, I’ll do that today.”
“Goin’ through a lot of toilet paper.”
Liam sighed. He was well aware that spare rolls of toilet paper left out in the bathrooms often went missing before they could be put to good public use. But he just couldn’t bring himself to keep it behind the service desk, as Mrs. Pratt had. That felt . . . well, that didn’t feel like good public service.
Besides, he’d rather people stole rolls of cheap, institutional toilet paper than DVDs. And since DVD theft had gone down since he’d started hiring the after-school kids to shelve instead of making them pretend to do homework while they generally caused adolescent mayhem, he’d happily spend a little extra on supplies.
Who said being the boss wasn’t glamorous?
“Thanks, Marcel.”
“Okay, boss. See you later.”
“Any chance you’ll call me Liam?”
Marcel clapped Liam on the shoulder. “Naw, man. You’re the boss.”
“Say hi to Mimi for me.”
Marcel waved and then Liam was alone in the library.
He knew it wouldn’t be for long. The summer reading program kickoff party was today, and Toni was always a mess of nerves that something terrible would go wrong. It never did—Toni could plan the hell out of an event, with backup plans for backup plans. All Liam had to do was await instructions, follow said instructions, and everything would be great. He barely had to use his brain, which was good because his brain was having a hell of a time focusing on anything other than the feel of Joanna’s mouth on his, her hips pressed into his . . .
“Morning, Liam.”
Liam practically jumped out of his skin.
“Sorry,” Toni said. “I thought you heard me honk when I pulled in.”
He took a box overflowing with streamers and balloons from her. “Just a little out of it this morning.”
“Well, get back into it—it’s gonna be nuts today.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He followed her back to the children’s area and awaited further instruction.
Chapter Sixteen
Everywhere she looked, there were . . . children.
Were there even this many children in Halikarnassus? Were they being bussed in for some secret library-destroying project? Had Hal sicced them on poor Liam?
This was a terrible day to bring Gran back to the library. Not that Joanna had brought her. It was more like Joanna was being held hostage and forced to drive Gran’s boat while Gran complained that if she didn’t leave the house, she was either going to die of cabin fever or kill Joanna. So, really, this was a lifesaving mission. For both of them.
Except who were all these children?
Joanna hovered near Gran, even though Gran hated hovering. The woman had refused a wheelchair and was hobbling around on a walking cast with a cane. At least she had a weapon she could use to defend herself, should the mini-hordes become too unruly.
“Aren’t they just precious?” Gran asked Joanna. Joanna assumed it was rhetorical. They were not precious. They were loud. Ear-piercing. And Joanna used to be a rock star. She should know from ear-piercing.
“Why’re there so many of them?”
“Peggy!”
As if this day couldn’t get any worse, there was the literal man of her dreams, standing in front of them in jeans and a T-shirt that said SPLISH SPLASH READ.
He looked good in blue.
Not that she cared.
Although there was a big part of her that wanted to jump in his arms so they could pick up where they’d left off last night. Probably not appropriate in front of all these children.
Joanna stepped back as Liam leaned in to give Peggy a hug, which seemed very unprofessional to her. Because Joanna Green was definitely the arbiter of professional behavior.
“I’m so glad you’re up and moving,” he told Gran.
“I’m glad you’re wearing pants,” Joanna muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Hi, Liam.”
“Hey, Joanna. Peggy, can I get you a chair or something? It’s a little chaotic here today.”
“Oh, pish, I’m fine. I just came to browse the new books.”
“Oh! Great! I thought of the perfect book for you this morning when I was shelving. Let me grab it for you. Atticus! Walk, please!” Liam’s excellent customer service was interrupted by a moppet torpedo who threatened Gran’s stability.