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He never imagined it might end up here, in Boston.
For how long? Who had it belonged to?
More to the point, who would want it badly enough to kill for it?
The need to find answers to those questions lit his veins up with fire. He had to know more.
And as Gideon watched the pretty coed on the television screen, he knew exactly where to start looking.
Chapter 6
"That's the last of today's returns, Mrs. Kennefick." Savannah replaced the checkout card in the back of a popular new horror novel about a social misfit named Carrie. She eyed the book, sympathetic to the fictional high school girl from Maine who possessed some kind of frightening power. She was half-tempted to sign the novel out herself. Maybe she would have, if her day hadn't already been horrific enough.
Her supervisor, old Mrs. Kennefick, had offered to let Savannah take the night off, but the sad fact was, the last thing Savannah wanted to do was spend any more hours than necessary back home at her apartment alone. Her evening shift at the library was a welcome distraction from what happened at the university.
Rachel was dead. God, Savannah could hardly believe it. Her stomach clenched at the thought of her friend and Professor Keaton being attacked by an unknown assailant. Her eyes prickled with welling tears, but she held them back. She couldn't allow herself to cave in to her grief and shock. She'd had to excuse herself from the book return desk twice already tonight, barely making it to the ladies' room before the sobs had torn out of her throat.
If she could get through the remaining forty minutes of her shift without losing it again, it would be a miracle.
"All set then, dear?" Mrs. Kennefick patted her neat gray bun, then smoothed her similarly colored cardigan as she ambled around from her desk in the processing room.
"All set," Savannah said, adding the worn-out copy of Carrie to the wheeled book cart with the rest of the returns she'd handled that evening.
"Very well." The old woman took the cart and began rolling it away before Savannah could stop her. "No sense in you waiting around any longer tonight, dear. I'll go shelve these returns. Will you lock up behind you on your way out?"
"But, Mrs. Kennefick, I really don't mind--"
The woman dismissed her with a little wave and kept going, hunched over the cart, her drab-skirted behind and soft-soled shoes retreating into the quiet labyrinth of the library corridor.
Savannah glanced at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand tick slowly. She looked for something more to do there, knowing it was just an excuse to keep from returning to the reality that awaited her outside the library. She took advantage of the opportunity to organize Mrs. Kennefick's pencil cup and paperclip dispenser, even going so far as to use the edge of her long sleeved turtleneck sweater to sweep away the nonexistent dust from the pristine surface of her supervisor's desk.
Savannah was busy straightening the patron files when she felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise with a odd sense of awareness. A warmth prickled over her skin, strange and unsettling.
Someone was in the library's delivery room outside.
Although the adjacent room was silent, she closed the file drawer and walked out to investigate.
Someone was there, all right.
The man stood in the center of the room, facing away from her, dressed in a long black trench coat, black pants and black, heavy-soled boots. A punk, from the look of him. A very large punk.
Geez, the guy had to be six-and-a-half-feet tall and built of solid muscle. Which made it all the more incongruous to find him standing there in silent meditation, his head full of thick, spiky cropped blond hair tipped back on his broad shoulders while he perused the mural of paintings that circled a full 360 degrees around the ornately paneled, medieval-styled room.
Savannah strode toward him, cautious yet intrigued. "The library is about to close soon. Can I help you find something?"
He slowly pivoted around to face her, and, oh, wow....
The punk description might have fit his clothing style, but that's where it ended. He was handsome--devastatingly so. Under the crown of his golden hair, a broad brow and angular cheekbones combined with a square-cut jaw that would have seemed more in place on a movie screen than standing in the middle of the Abbey Room in the Boston Public Library.
"Just looking," he said after a long moment, a tinge of Britain in his deep voice.
And so he was looking, though no longer at the art. His piercing blue eyes met her gaze and held fast, so sharp and cool they seemed to read and process everything about her in an instant.
Savannah's skin felt tighter under his attention, making the soft knit of her ivory-colored turtleneck feel like sandpaper against her throat and breasts. She felt too warm, too noticed, and too aware of the sheer size and masculinity of this stranger before her.
She tried to project an air of calm and professionalism, despite the weird chaos going on with her central nervous system in reaction to this man. Striding up beside him, if only to escape his scrutiny, she glanced up at the series of fifteen original works depicting King Arthur and his Round Table Knights, painted for the library at the turn of the century by the artist Edwin Austin Abbey. "So, which are you more interested in: Abbey's work, or Arthurian legends?"
He followed her gaze up now. "I'm interested in everything. The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
