“Knowing you’re in there today looking like that would mess with my head really, really bad.” Her librarian role-play that morning had been one of the hottest things he’d ever experienced. “You don’t have your glasses with you, do you?”
He loved the sound of her laughter, so carefree, so pretty. But then, her smile turned to uncertainty. “Jake, would you come inside with me today?” When he didn’t immediately reply, she said, “I loved spending time with you at the pub. It’s nice to be able to picture you at your desk going over spreadsheets or bossing around your employees like a tyrant.” She looked up at him with impossibly big, beautiful eyes. “I thought maybe you’d like to know about where I spend my days.”
Jake knew it was long past time to stop being such a wimp. Libraries weren’t his thing, but he couldn’t avoid them forever.
“Well,” he said slowly, “if you’ll agree to put your hair back up and have your way with me in a dark corner...”
Sophie smacked his arm and exclaimed, “Jake!” but the grin she couldn’t quite contain along with the sensuous way she ran her hand down his arm before threading her fingers through his as they headed up the steps to the front door told him the truth about how much she liked his teasing.
He held the door for her, but she stopped and sucked in a breath, squeezing his hand tight.
“Sophie? What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, taking a couple of breaths before saying. “Nothing. Just took the stairs a little quick, I think.” She tugged him into the building, her color back, thank God. “Isn’t it incredible?”
Jake had to admit the building was impressive. The domed ceiling in the main room had to be at least three stories tall. At some point someone had painted murals on it and even a nonreader like him could easily guess that they must be scenes from classic literature.
“Sophie, hi!”
A woman he assumed was a co-worker practically ran up to greet them. Sophie’s hand stiffened in his for a split second and he pulled her closer to him.
The woman’s eyes darted between them. “Is this your...friend?”
The urge to claim public possession of Sophie was nearly impossible to hold at bay. But their week wasn’t up yet. And this would be a good chance for him to see where she was in making her decision about letting him stay in her life. The way she’d made love to him this morning had given him a piece of the answer.
It wasn’t until Sophie squeezed his hand and turned to him with a radiant smile, that he realized he’d been holding his breath. “This is Jake.” She never looked away from him for even a second as she said, “My boyfriend.”
There was no point in trying to stop himself from kissing her. After keeping the kiss way shorter than he wanted to out of respect for her job, he held out his hand to her co-worker. “Great to meet you.”
“Wow, it’s really nice to meet you, too. I can’t believe Sophie has been keeping you a secret all this time. Aren’t you the owner of the McCann’s Pubs?”
He was sure Sophie didn’t realize she’d put her free hand over her stomach just then. Two more secrets would—soon—be revealed, whether she wanted anyone to know or not.
Sensing that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with this woman, he said, “Yup, that’s me. Come in for a beer on the house sometime,” before turning to Sophie and saying, “Why don’t you show me around before I have to get going to my meeting?”
The woman’s eyes remained on them as he steered her in the opposite direction. “Thanks for getting us away from her,” Sophie whispered.
He’d felt the same way when she was bailing him out of the mess at his pub earlier in the week. Was this how it would feel to parent two kids together?
He liked being a team with her.
Hell, he liked doing anything at all with Sophie.
At her desk, she locked her bag into the bottom drawer, then offered, “You take the chair for a minute. There’s something I want you to see.” Standing behind him, her hands on his shoulders, she said, “Isn’t it the best view in the whole world? There isn’t anything you couldn’t learn, nothing you couldn’t be in here.”
He was looking at thousands of books, at people reading and learning. He’d been to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looked out over the grid of Parisian streets, had explored the pyramids of Egypt, had been blown away by the blue-green water that seemingly stretched on forever from the beaches of Thailand. He hadn’t thought any view could top those.
But that morning in Sophie’s bed, he’d known just how wrong he was when she’d smiled at him.
He would never love being in a library, given his problems with reading...but that didn’t mean he didn’t comprehend, or appreciate, just how important this world was to Sophie.
“I’ve got to get story time going in a few minutes,” she told him, pointing over to a group of young children and their mothers who were gathering on a colorful rug. “I’d love it if you’d stay a little while longer.”
Jake knew he was already taking up too much of her time, on top of the way he’d monopolized her the past few days. Plus, his phone had been continually jumping in his pocket for the past half hour with calls from his assistant, who worked out of the McCann’s headquarters downtown, about all the meetings he’d been flat-out ignoring. He wanted to chuck his phone across the room and watch it shatter, but he could only ignore the demands of his business for so long. Especially now that he had more than himself to think of.