Page 53 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

He could only be grateful that the dark lights of the movie theater made it impossible for her to see his blush.

“I just wanted to know what the fuss was about, that’s all,” he explained.

Instead of teasing him further, Catherine sighed and settled into her seat, allowing no more touch than the light brush of her forearm againsthis. She was good at that—at knowing when to push and how hard, at pulling back before he got too overwhelmed by the scent and feel of her. He sometimes thought it was her restraint rather than her forwardness that intrigued him the most.

It was as if she knew, on an instinctive level, that the empty spaces were where people like him thrived. The lull in a conversation that neither one of them felt compelled to fill, the electric space where their thighs didn’t touch, the lines of a page where she sometimes scrawled a single word—those things meant more to him than all the rest. It was quiet there, and he could be alone in his thoughts without feeling lonely.

“And what, in your estimation, is ‘the fuss’?” she asked.

Jasper didn’t have to answer her. The question had been uttered in rhetorical spirit, and she wouldn’t think it strange if he sat back and watched the movie for a few minutes while he regained his bearings.

But he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know.

“I know I’m supposed to read those books for the scandal of it,” he said as he settled more comfortably in his seat. The side of his oversized work boot brushed the curve of her red patent leather pump. “I hear some of the other guys snickering over stuff like that sometimes, like a few words strung together on a page is supposed to be the same as feeling a woman come undone in your arms.”

She sucked in sharp breath, her foot still pressing up against his. “It’s not the same to you?” she asked.

He almost laughed out loud. There was no combination of letters inanylanguage that could match the way it felt to have Catherine’s body next to him—her heart beating against his, her mouth open to let him in, her very spirit escaping and wrapping around his insides until he could no longer tell where one of them ended and the other began. He could read every book in existence and never come even close to that.

“No,” he said.

She held her breath in anticipation of more, but Jasper didn’t attemptan explanation. There was no point. He wasn’t a writer or a poet, and he had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said in a thousand different, better ways.

He was just a shy, awkward, overly sensitive man who could never seem to make the world inside his heart and the world he was forced to live in fit together. That Catherine was some sort of bridge, he knew. He’d known it from almost the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, yelling at him from underneath her broken bike, so full of fire that simply being in the same room with her brought him to life.

Her fingers slipped into his. “Okay,” she said.

As she rested her head comfortably on his shoulder, her attention fixed on the movie screen, he found himself once again crossing that bridge—however temporarily.

“What if someone comes in and sees us?” he asked.

“Then I get grounded for life,” she said as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Or sent back east to live with my grandparents. Or married off to the first handsome officer to cross the threshold.”

That last one caused Jasper to slide his hand out of hers—or at least, totry. Catherine’s hold on him was too firm for him to slip easily away.

“Don’t,” she said. “It was a joke.”

He was well aware of that, but there was no part of him that felt compelled to laugh. “He likes you,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “William McBride.”

“I know. His kind always does.”

“He approached me in front of the library the other day.”

“He did?” That got her to pull her hand away. She cast an anxious glance at him, her brow furrowed and her nose wrinkled. “What did he want? What did he say to you?”

Jasper tried not to let her tone get to him, but her worry cut through him like the slice of a freshly sharpened sword. It had been on the tip of his tongue to divulge everything—the threats and the mockery, the fearthat they weren’t being as discreet as they should—but he didn’t want to add to her troubles.

“He wanted me to give him a reading list,” Jasper said, since it was no more than the truth.

Her peal of laughter came at an opportune time, matching that of the silver-screen goddess. “That’s cute. Did you do it?”

“I had to. He wanted to know what you liked to read. So he could…woo you. Over literature.”

“You didn’t tell him about our books, did you? Because if he finds them—”

“No, of course not,” he said roughly. “Those are for us.”

“And for anyone else who checks them out and finds the notes,” Catherine pointed out.