Page 112 of The Shop on Hidden Lane

“I’ll do a better job of ravishing you once I’ve had some protein and a couple of cups of coffee.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Okay, then.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and gave him an expectant look. “Tell me when you first knew that you were falling in love with me.”

He smiled. “I told you. The night you opened the door of the shop and informed me that I was late and that you were going to bill me triple the usual rate for a reading.”

She frowned. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“That’s very sweet but it’s hard to believe.”

“Yeah, I had a hard time believing it, too. I figured my brain was a little scrambled because of the long drive and the fact that I was worried about Deke. So I put the issue aside. I was planning to deal with it in the morning. But then I had an unscheduled dream.”

She brightened. “About me?”

“No, about Bruce.”

“Oh.”

“I dreamed about the night I found him bleeding in the middle of the road. It was as if he’d been waiting for me. That was my imagination, of course. He was in shock and would have died. It was sheer coincidence that I came along. It could have been anyone.”

“But it was you and now the two of you are a team.”

“I think Bruce would say we’re a pack, but yes. Anyhow, whenI woke up I knew I was in the same situation as Bruce had been when I found him—standing in the middle of the road, waiting for you to come along.”

“Hmm.” She considered that briefly. “You were on the doorstep, not in the middle of the road.”

“Details.”

“And you weren’t bleeding from a gunshot wound.”

“No, but I was in crisis mode. I had to find Deke and I had to decide if I wanted to take control of the company. On top of that my intuition was telling me that things were about to get a lot more complicated, which turned out to be true.”

“Still, you hadn’t been shot.”

“I’ve explained that my dreams need to be interpreted.”

“I get that, but I don’t see how you can interpret that particular dream as anything other than a straight-up dream about the night you found Bruce.”

“Are all librarians as unromantic as you are?”

“We prefer to deal in hard facts.”

“You want hard facts? I’ll give you hard facts.”

He pulled her down onto the bed and lowered himself along the length of her body. She reached down and took his erection into her hand.

“That is a very interesting hard fact,” she said.

“It certainly struck me that way.”

He bent his head to kiss her. A series of sharp raps on the door made him pause.