“You look—” Perfect. Sexy as hell. He bit his jaws closed on the words. Ireland, roughneck soldier that he was, could say something like that, but Ames, sophisticated businessman, sure as hell couldn’t. Even if it was God’s own truth. “Fine. You look just fine. You could go to dinner at the White House dressed like that.”
It made her smile, which was what he wanted. Her smile was like a secret weapon. She sighed. “Okay. I’ll just need to lock up here.”
Locking up entailed pulling the library door closed and turning a key once in the lock.
Nick waited. Charity looked up at him, a tiny frown between her brows when she saw his scowl. “Is something wrong?”
“That’s it? That’s locking up? Turning the key once in the lock?”
She smiled gently. “This isn’t the big bad city, Mr. Ames.”
“My friends call me Nick.”
“Okay, Nick. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to walk around town. This isn’t New York or even Burlington. The library, in case you haven’t noticed, is full of books and not much else besides some scuffed tables. What would there be to steal? And anyway, I don’t remember the last time a crime was committed in Parker’s Ridge.”
The elation Nick felt at the thought of an evening with Charity Prewitt dissipated.
Parker’s Ridge housed one of the world’s most dangerous criminals. An evil man. A man directly responsible for hundreds of lives lost, for untold misery and suffering.
And he was Charity Prewitt’s best friend.
Two
A date. She, Charity Prewitt, was actually going out on a date! Charity hadn’t been out on a date in…God, she couldn’t even remember the last date she’d been on.
There were ten bachelors in Parker’s Ridge, not counting Vassily, of course, who was fifty-four years old and horribly scarred from his time in a Soviet prison camp. Each and every bachelor within a radius of forty miles had asked her out, repeatedly. Each and every bachelor was lacking in something important—teeth, a faculty, a job. Certainly all of them were lacking in a sense of humor.
And the surrounding towns weren’t too much better. Most of the bachelors there were bachelors for a good reason. And one date was more or less enough to figure out what that something was.
Charity might even have gone further afield, but ever since Mary Conway had gone on maternity leave and then quit when her child was a preemie with problems, Charity had been more or less on her own in the library. The retired chief librarian, old Mrs. Lambert, would come in for an emergency, but she was seventy-four and almost deaf. And the town council kept putting off budgeting for another librarian. So Charity was more or less it.
Plus, of course, Uncle Franklin and her ailing aunt Vera required her constant presence and help. Charity had a range of about forty miles and desirable bachelors—even only bachelors that weren’t repugnant—were not exactly thick on the ground in that radius.
So being asked out by Mr. Nicholas call-me-Nick Ames, who was the most handsome man she’d ever seen—and who clearly had all his own teeth, all his own limbs, and seemed to be independently wealthy—well, it was like Christmas a month early.
He’d come in that morning to do some research on the area, saying he was thinking of making some investments. Charity had been impressed by how much he knew about the area already, but she supposed that businessmen had to be well informed. He’d let discreetly slip that he’d retired early after some very good years with a brokerage firm and was looking to open an investment firm of his own.
He was so outrageously handsome. Charity kept sneaking glances at him while he wasn’t looking. Tall, with midnight black hair, deep-blue eyes surrounded by ridiculously long lashes, a straight narrow nose, and a firm mouth.
Hard body.
Wow.
In Charity’s experience, businessmen were soft and pale. All that time spent behind a desk, making money. Or losing it, depending. Nick Ames didn’t look like he had wasted much time losing money.
He had all the visible accoutrements of prosperous businessman-dom. The elegant blue suit—Armani was her guess—the glossy shoes, the expensive leather briefcase, the manicured nails, the flat, expensive watch.
But that was where the resemblance to a typical businessman stopped. Underneath the elegant suit was clearly a very strong, very fit body, with amazingly broad shoulders. So at odds with the amount of time he must spend analyzing data, clipping articles, and peering into his crystal ball—or whatever it was stockbrokers did.
It was a lovely evening. Very cold—but that was a given for November in Vermont. The snowstorm all the weather forecasters had been talking about was still holding off and the night sky was bright with brilliant cold stars. Charity loved these clear frozen nights, and it was a good thing, too, she often thought, since moving somewhere warm was out of the question. Even a long weekend in Aruba was out of the question. Certainly as long as Aunt Vera was so sick.
To her surprise, Mr. Ames—Nick—took her elbow, as if she could have problems navigating the broad, even sidewalk stretching out before her or needed guidance in the small town she’d grown up in. Still, it was really nice. Men rarely took one’s elbow anymore.
Uncle Franklin often took her arm when she accompanied him somewhere, but it was for balance. Nick Ames certainly didn’t need to hold her arm for balance.
Up close, he seemed even taller. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder, even with heels. He seemed broader, too, the shoulders incredibly wide beneath the rich dark-blue overcoat with the hand stitches. Cashmere. Uncle Franklin had one just like it.
For a fraction of a second, Charity wondered what she was doing—going out for dinner with a man she didn’t know.
She’d surprised herself. He’d asked and she knew she should say no to dinner, perhaps yes to a drink in town, and then…her mouth opened and yes simply plopped out.
Of course, that he was handsome as sin and had a killer smile might have something to do with it.
Manners, too. He’d positioned himself on the outside, next to the curb. It had been years since she’d seen a man deliberately place himself between a woman and the street. The last man besides Uncle Franklin that she’d seen doing that had been her father, always instinctively courteous with her mother. That had been over fifteen years ago, when they were still alive.
She and Nick walked down the block and he turned her right, onto Sparrow Road, with a gentle nudge of his hand. Halfway down the block, he stopped right outside a big black luxurious car. A Lexus, she thought, though she wasn’t sure. The only thing she was sure of was that it probably cost the equivalent of a year’s salary of a librarian.
He walked her around to the passenger door, unlocking it electronically with the key fob, and helped her into the passenger seat as if she were the queen of Parker’s Ridge.
A second later he was in the driver’s seat and helping her pull the seat belt over and down. To her astonishment, once the latch clicked, he didn’t pull back but leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on her mouth.
Charity stared at him. “What—”
He’d already put the big car in gear. He looked over at her and grinned, teeth white in the darkness of the car, as he slowly pulled out of the parking space. “I figure we’re going to spend the entire evening wondering whether we’ll have a good-night kiss, so I thought I’d just cut right through that. We’ve already kissed, so we’re not going to obsess about it. It’s already done.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “I wasn’t going to obsess about a kiss.”
That was a lie. She’d been obsessing about it since she’d accepted the dinner invitation. If she was perfectly honest with herself, which she usually was, she’d been obsessing about kissing him since she’d laid eyes on him this morning.