Just One Taste (25 page)

T
his is
for all the wonderful librarians out there. I wrote this when I was a library clerk in a high school, but sadly, no hot time traveler of legal age ever asked to borrow a book. Maine has a bunch of wonderful local libraries, and I based Alice’s on a combination of Dover-Foxcroft’s and Dexter’s.

D
aniel’s good news
: He’s psychic.

D
aniel’s bad news
: He’s cursed.

D
aniel Merrill has
a job to do, and plenty of time to do it, since he’s perpetually thirty-two. Unless he can rewrite his hometown’s history book, he’ll be doomed like Moses to wander, popping up in Merrills Mills every forty years to try to get it right.

A
lice’s good news
: There’s a hot guy in the library.

A
lice’s bad news
: There’s a hot guy in the library.

L
ibrarian Alice Roy
doesn’t quite know what to do about the man who’s not reading in the Reading Room. Is he homeless? Unemployed? Just her luck that the handsomest man outside of a romance novel seems crazy, too. Alice has read every plot imaginable, and a cursed, time-traveling psychic with telekinetic powers seems a bit far-fetched. But one night with Daniel changes her mind. Now Alice is prepared to do anything to help him—even if it means destroying a book.

A
lice Roy took
her traditional giddy morning spin in the swivel chair, straightened up and entered the password to open up the library’s database. She checked the clock. 8:57 already. She felt a little dizzy, and it wasn’t because of her vestibular system’s encounter with revolving office furniture. If this Thursday was like Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Daniel Merrill would be the first person to cross the threshold, give her that shy smile of his and disappear into a wing chair in the Reading Room. And he’d be the last to leave at 5 P.M., too.

No, wait. Tonight the library was open until nine. Could the man possibly stay still for twelve hours? She’d find out. Alice had volunteered to pull a twelve hour shift today since it was her assistant Jamie’s anniversary.

She was tired already just thinking about the long day ahead. She never knew exactly how busy she’d be, but at least Daniel Merrill had boosted their patron visits this week, whose informal tally she kept in pencil on a sticky note by the computer.

It wasn’t like he was coming in to do research. No bulging briefcase or stacks of notebooks for him. Alice and Jamie had taken a peek at him on their rounds, and there he sat, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes closed, not even
reading
in the Reading Room. The only reason Alice even knew his name was because his wallet had fallen out of his pants pocket on Tuesday. Jamie had found it wedged between the cushion and the back of the chair. There wasn’t a thing in it besides his driver’s license, whose picture really didn’t do justice to the hunk that was Daniel.

He was exceptionally good-looking, if you liked a thirty-two-year-old apparently unemployed organ donor who was 6’3” and 180 pounds, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. Who happened to look fine in his threadbare jeans. The license didn’t say that, of course, but Jamie had.

Alice had slapped Jamie’s arm and reminded her that she was about to celebrate her thirtieth anniversary, so Jamie let Alice take the wallet home with her Tuesday night. Alice tried to call him, but either Mr. Merrill was unlisted or didn’t have a phone. She was relieved when he turned up again Wednesday morning so she wouldn’t be tempted to stare at his DMV photo another day and night. She had work to do after all, even if seemed like he didn’t.

Sure enough, the man walked through the beveled glass door from the street entrance at the stroke of nine and gave Alice that smile. He headed straight to the oak-paneled Reading Room, with its forbidden-to-fire fireplace and a donated painting of a clipper ship—even if the library was entirely inland—over the mantel.

She was a little nervous to be completely alone in the building with Daniel Merrill, who so far hadn’t said anything but “Thank you very much” when she handed him his wallet. She’d wanted to ask him if he was related to
the
Merrills, the family that had founded the town, but her tongue had stuck to the roof of her mouth like there was leftover peanut butter up there.

She also wondered if he were homeless as well as jobless and phoneless, although he didn’t appear to be sleeping in the chair, just thinking. His license
did
have an address on it. He seemed clean. He smelled good. And his jeans were fresh every day, no baggy knees and saggy ass.

Alice had looked.

The library had no policy as to what to do with patrons who came in off the street and sat in a chair all day. Alice knew big city libraries had issues with vagrants who came in for shelter and warmth, but she wasn’t quite ready to call Chief Osborne to complain that the handsomest man she’d ever seen was hanging out in the next room.

So she tried to put Daniel Merrill out of her mind, ignoring the virtual waves of testosterone that emanated from the Reading Room. She spent the morning processing and covering some books that had been donated and rounding up toddlers from the children’s section who’d escaped their mothers, shrieking in glee.

By noontime, the library was quiet and empty, so it seemed like a good time to break for lunch, if you could call peanut butter crackers and a diet Dr. Pepper such a thing. Alice was saving the big guns, the peanut butter and fluff sandwich, for dinner later. She stepped into the tiny room she and Jamie used for their office, then stepped out again.

Jamie worked part-time some afternoons and the one evening a week, and was usually there to cover for Alice when she ate lunch. What if Mr. Merrill wanted something? It wouldn’t hurt for Alice to tell him she was in the office just in case he varied from his previous routine and developed an urge to use the one nearly-obsolete patron computer. Or look at sixty-odd years of
National Geographic
in the basement.

Or talk.

Alice moved quietly across the fake Oriental carpeting and stood in the archway of the Reading Room. Daniel Merrill sat in his usual chair, eyes shut, his chiseled lips pursed as if he were lost in a confounding conundrum.

Good grief.
Chiseled lips
. Alice was obviously reading way too many romance novels, but she had to keep abreast of trends in fiction. At least that’s what she told herself. It had nothing to do with the fact she hadn’t had a date in seven months. Or her broken engagement two years ago. Or that she was a bespectacled spinster librarian with an actual cat in her bed every night instead of a hot guy like Daniel Merrill, who probably wouldn’t look twice at her if his eyes ever opened, because all he’d see was a jilted, underpaid thirty year old woman who ate way too many peanut butter products and needed a good haircut and less comfortable shoes.

The chiseled lips twitched. If Alice didn’t know better she’d think Daniel Merrill was laughing at her. With his eyes still closed, he said, “How may I help you, Ms. Roy?”

Alice was stupefied that he knew her name, until she realized she had been wearing her little plastic badge pinned somewhere conspicuously on herself for the past four days. It was the selectmen’s edict for all town employees, supposedly a way to combat terrorism in the very static and unstrategic Merrills Mills, Maine, population 3,880 according to the last census.

In Alice’s opinion, it was ridiculous to spend precious tax dollars on useless nametags in a town where everyone knew everybody’s names and far too much about them and their grandparents besides.

Alice had tried to escape. She’d moved away after college but came back when her lovelife turned to crap and her mother sent her the
Wanted: Library Director
clipping. She and her new MLS had been hired for a pittance, and now she was right back where she’d spent afternoons and summer vacations immersed in Sweet Valley High books and helping old Mrs. Hussey put books away. Old Mrs. Hussey had finally died, and now Alice was on her way to being old Ms. Roy.

At least she wasn’t still living at home. Not exactly. Her mother had fixed up the garage apartment for her and pretty much left Alice and Felicity—the cat—alone, even if Alice knew her mother longed to leave her nutritious casseroles and extra rolls of toilet paper.

Her mother always called first to see if it was convenient for her to “drop in,” too, as though she was afraid she’d find Alice naked in bed with some guy. Like Daniel Merrill.

Actually, her mother dated more than she did. It was lowering to realize one’s own fifty-three year-old mother had more sex than one did, if one didn’t count the battery-operated kind.

Alice pulled herself together. So, Daniel Merrill knew her name. But how did he know she was standing there? Her ugly rubber-soled shoes made no noise on the rug, the better to catch middle-school boys drawing pornographic pictures in the margins of the Harry Potter collection. What they had done to poor Dobby was a disgrace. Alice had felt justified cutting Dylan Coleman’s library card neatly in half and suspending his borrowing privileges for a year.

She swallowed nervously.

“You
are
standing right there, aren’t you?”

His voice was a velvet burr. It made her think of brandy and Regency rakes. Mentally she removed the moth-eaten plaid scarf he still had around his neck and pictured him in a pristine white cravat. Tight breeches, even tighter than his jeans.

Yum. She willed her goose pimples to subside and swore again she was not going to be tempted by that Amazon one-click again. She could save her money and reread the old Victoria Holts that were right here on the library shelves. Just because there were no explicit sex scenes in them didn’t make them bad.

“Um, yes.” Why wouldn’t he open his eyes? Was he in some kind of trance or something? Surely she wasn’t
that
hard to look at. Sure, her hair was stuck up in a tortoise shell clip that matched her glasses, but she was wearing her best peach-colored twin set and had on matching lipstick. Not that she had gotten dressed this morning to impress him or anything.

D
aniel frowned
. So much noise was coming from the direction of the doorway. The words bounced randomly through his head, not making a bit of sense. Stuff about peaches and turtles. Geese. Tall women. Neckties, for chrissakes. He never wore one unless he had to.

She wanted to tell him something. He sighed, disengaged. It was pointless to go further with her staring at him as if he were a bug under a microscope, and he looked directly at her pretty blushing face.

There were some freckles that went quite nicely with her unruly reddish-brown hair. She should lay off all the peanut butter though. Yogurt was good for equivalent protein; he should tell her so. But she probably knew. She had a masters’ degree from a reputable school after all, even if she was stuck in this little backwater. But this little backwater was where he had to be.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I—I thought I should tell you I’m going to take my lunch break now.”

“Uh huh.” Was this her clumsy way of inviting him to dine on disgusting crackers and sugarless soda? Did she even read the ingredients printed on the packaging?
Thanks very much, but no.

“I’m just going into my office. If you need anything, I’ll leave the door open.”

Daniel smiled and felt her knees go weak. It wouldn’t do to have her faint on the floor. He’d have to pick her up. True, she was short and not exactly fat, but she didn’t look light as a feather, either. Pleasingly plump, in the terminology of his youth. He quickly adjusted the smile-wattage and nodded. “Thank you. I’m just fine.” He closed his eyes again.

Damn it.
She was still there, like a knot on an Old English sheepdog that might have to be cut out instead of brushed out. He opened one eye and glared. It was enough to make the cute little librarian vanish into her cubby with her high fructose corn syrup-infested snack. He shuddered.

He’d have to be awfully hungry to follow Alice Roy’s diet. Last night she’d fixed some tuna- noodle abomination, which had pleased her cat—Felix ? Felicia? No, Felicity—enormously. Then she’d eaten an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream. This morning she’d had two cups of tea with three sugars apiece and a Pop Tart, the frosted kind. He knew those cheapskates she worked for didn’t supply dental insurance. She’d better watch out.

Daniel eased back in the chair. It was ancient and had been reupholstered from the last time he sat in it, when it was a hideous orange and lime flame-stitch in the seventies. He’d hoped then never to return to Merrills Mills again, but fate had played another cruel joke upon him. Here he was, older, wiser but no luckier than he had been all those years ago. When he really
was
thirty-two.

Damn it. Alice Roy with her sweet, suffocating concern had ruined his concentration, and now he was in a funk. The last librarian, Mrs. Hussey, had never paid a lick of attention to him. She was too busy cheating at solitaire in her office and doing crossword puzzles.

He looked around the Reading Room, chock-full of crumbling leather-bound histories of Merrills Mills and other Maine towns, some of them wrong when they were printed and wrong until just yesterday. And if he couldn’t fix the very last one of them, he was destined to continue to live this diabolical
It’s a Wonderful Life
in vivid color with no happy ending.

His father in all his vanity had one hundred hand-tooled leather-bound copies of
The History of Merrill’s Mills
published. He claimed to have written the book himself, but Daniel knew full well he’d conned the poor one-room schoolhouse teacher, a doppelganger for Ichabod Crane if there ever was one, to do most of the writing.

All except the entire chapter devoted to the illustrious Merrill family.
That
his father had written entirely in his own hand, using what could only be termed creative license. Others might claim that his father was a lying bastard, which was in fact true. Daniel’s grandparents had never seen the need to get married.

When the printer delivered the boxes, Daniel’s father had been euphoric. He spent a day inscribing copies, and sent one to every town nearby that had a public library or school. There had been plenty left over. It was the first half of the nineteenth century, and most villages in this rugged corner of Maine were more interested in survival and supper than scholarship.

He might have given the extra books to his friends, but they were in short supply. The friends, not the books. Daniel had been the euphoric one when he discovered an entire unopened case in his father’s bedroom after he died.

They’d made a ripping good fire.

Daniel made it his business to find or fiddle with every book he could, some moldering in town offices, others at yard sales. He was pretty sure either he or the ravages of time had gotten to them all—all except the one original in the Reading Room. For some reason, the book on the shelf in front of him seemed impervious to his special skill.

It had been harder for him to locate and take care of other books that repeated the mistakes in his father’s book, but, Lord knows, he’d had plenty of time. Thank goodness he’d been successful before they could be uploaded onto Google Books.

Maybe he should have some lunch, too, walk down Main Street to the Dugout, have a beer and a burger. It was clear that in more than three days of toying mentally with typesetting, he’d not managed to alter the course of the town’s history or his own. Instead, he’d been distracted by the hopes and dreams of Alice Roy, who if she ever realized exactly who he was, would no longer picture him wrapped up in her girlish pink and white gingham sheets.