Monster Among the Roses

Back in the library, paper and a pencil in hand, I began to draft.

I was scribbling my idea for the third wall when I heard her.

“Let me guess. You’ve never built a bookshelf in your life, have you?”

My heart gave a crazy, massive ka-pow before I could even lift my head. Then my breath caught in my throat. She wore her hair down, one half covering her scars, as well as long sleeves and thin black gloves. It was impossible to tell she’d ever been wounded. But not being able to see her scars wasn’t why she looked so beautiful to me.

The fire was back inside her. She was ready to spar again. It made her sizzle with a sparkling vitality.

Sending her a crazy grin, because holy shit, there she was, in person, I chuckled. “What gave me away?”

She sighed heavily and wandered closer. “What exactly have you done to inspire my father to hire you as our handyman?”

“I have mastered the art of begging,” I answered, lifting my nose as if supremely proud of my ability.

Isobel quirked an eyebrow and slowed to a stop about five feet from the study table where I sat. “Pray tell, what does that mean?”

I stopped preening and sent her a rueful grin. “It means my mom owed him a debt…a very large debt. So I begged and pleaded until he agreed to let me try to work it off for her.”

Rolling her eyes as if finding that news typical of her father, she sighed. “I always knew his kind, generous heart would get him into trouble.”

Refusing to take her insult personally, I merely kept grinning. “Bet you won’t be saying that once I make you the most amazing bookshelves ever.”

She lifted an eyebrow, letting me know she highly doubted my abilities, but all she murmured was, “Hmm.”

I laughed and waved her forward. “Take a seat. Listen to my ideas. Then tell me what you really want.”

After a confused blink, she said, “What?”

“Let me know what you think about my ideas for your bookshelves.” I swiveled the piece of paper upside down so it’d be right-side up for her. “I already have a few plans.”

Successfully drawn in by the lure of bookshelves, she eased closer. Five feet became three. Then one. When she saw I really did have a ton of ideas, she silently pulled out the chair across from me and sat.

“Why are these shaded and these aren’t?”

“The shaded ones are the shelves already there,” I explained, growing eager to tell her the ideas stirring in my head. “The non-shaded ones are the ones I’d like to add.”

Her finger slid over the three rows of shelves positioned above the shaded ones. “But…”

“The walls in here are so tall,” I explained before she could ask. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if the shelves went all the way to the ceiling, and we installed one of those rolling library ladders to reach them?”

Lips parting in awe, she turned toward the wall where I wanted to do just that. “That would be so cool,” she breathed more to herself than to me, in a voice I’d never heard her use before, a voice I had a feeling was her real one, not some haughty tone she put on just to speak to me.

Then, suddenly, as if remembering herself, she cleared her throat and spun back to me, her cheeks tinged with pink.

A smile exploded across my face. “I know, right?” I tugged the sheet of paper closer to me so I could point out a few more ideas. “And the shelves you have now are fixed and permanent. But I’d like to install adjustable ones. You don’t organize your books in alphabetical order, so it would be easy to economize space by grouping similar-sized books on each row to fit in more rows.”

Her face shot up. “How do you know I don’t organize alphabetically?”

The look I sent her was sly and knowing. Ignoring the question, I tapped my finger against the design. “I’ll figure out what wood and styles the current shelves are and try to imitate them, unless you want something different.”

Isobel stared at me a moment, obviously still stuck on the fact that I knew her library so well, before she shook her head and blinked. “I…the same style would be fine.”

“Okay, then.” I nodded. “I’ll look for a matching stain finish while I’m at it. Did you want doors on any of the shelves to house some of your favorite or rarer books?”

“I…” She turned to study the wall. Then she nodded. “Yes, I think that would be lovely to have maybe one bookcase with doors. Thank you.”

I’m absolutely positive her thank you came out completely by accident, maybe without her being aware she’d said it. It took everything inside me not to react in fear she’d realize what she’d just said and try to retract it.

I liked this side of her, this softer, human side. I liked it a lot. Maybe even more than her bitchy side.

“Great,” I said, jotting down a note that she needed some doors as I tried to control the racing of my heart. “Is there anything in my plans you want to alter?”

She blinked at the scribbles I’d made, and I took a second to clear my throat. “Sorry, I’m not much of an artist. Hopefully you can still understand what I was trying to convey though.”

“Yeah,” she murmured vaguely, “I mean…” She looked up into my face. “Actually, this looks fine. If you can do it.”

I gazed into her unnaturally blue eyes and felt something inside my chest unfurl. Why did she have to seem so soft, almost vulnerable, today? It tugged at something protective inside me.

“I’ll figure it out,” I assured her.

Her lips parted and she dragged her gaze away. “Well…we should probably…we should probably figure out some calculations.” Popping out of her chair as if it had bitten her, she began to back away. “I’m going to go find a tape measure.”

As she hurried from the room, I watched her go. What I wouldn’t give to see what was going on in her head. Neither of us had mentioned the notes, or books, or seeds we’d been exchanging on the couch, and yet it seemed natural to pretend they had never happened.

When she returned, I was standing in front of the longest stretch of wall that would hold the most shelves, jotting down notes on a fresh piece of paper. “Looks like this wall can hold maybe seven shelves across and ten up,” I said as she approached. “So that’ll make a total of seventy shelves. And since we already have four across and seven on each bookcase, that would mean there are already…”

“Twenty-eight,” Isobel informed me when it took me too long to calculate in my head.

I pointed my pen at her and winked. “Thank you. Twenty-eight. So we can add…forty-two more shelves for this wall alone. Wow. That’ll give you over twice the space you already have.”

A look of awe entered her expression as she stared at her shelves. In that moment, her thoughts were loud and beautiful. She was already thinking about how she’d rearrange her books with that much more room.

“Did you find a tape measure?” I asked.

She held one up.

“Sweet. Do you think you could measure the distance from here to here for me?” I stepped past her, brushing so close her rose scent clogged my nostrils. My body went into extreme focus, becoming all too aware of how near she lingered as she leaned forward to place the tape measure where I asked.

God, she smelled so good, I couldn’t help myself. I tipped closer and—

No, I shouldn’t be doing that, especially when her father was home and would probably walk in at any moment to assess our progress.

That thought helped kill the reaction I was having. I cleared my throat and wrote width of each shelf on the paper to distract myself. But the moment I glanced up, all I saw was her…from the back, lifting her arms to carefully measure. It brought up the back of her shirt, showing off a small slit of skin between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her pants. Pants which covered the most luscious, tightly rounded, perfectly curved ass ever.

“Thirty-five and three-eighths inches,” she reported, making me jump and dart my attention back to the sheet of paper and clear my throat before writing down the information.

“Great. Thanks. And how thick is the wood?”

Oh, hell. I hadn’t really just asked that, had I? If she asked which wood, I was a dead man. I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

“Looks like five-eighths of an inch,” Isobel said, and I almost lost it.

Five-eighths of an inch? Um, no. It was definitely thicker than that, especially at the moment.

When I didn’t respond soon enough, Isobel turned, blinking at me. “What’s wrong?”

“What?” My eyes flashed open wide. Bookshelves! We were talking about bookshelves, here. Nothing else. Get your damn mind back in the game, Hollander, you fucking fifth-grade pervert.

Isobel tipped her head, studying me. “Are you okay?”

“What?” I asked again. I was acting completely unhinged. “I mean, yes. Yes,” I nearly hollered. “I’m good. Great. How the hell do you stay in such good shape?”

And oh my God, what? Had I really just asked her that? Why, why, why did some things just tumble out of my mouth?

I wanted to smack my hand to my forehead, then sink through the floor and die.

“Excuse me?” she asked, and for once she totally lacked any bitter, insulting, or haughty attitude when I actually deserved it most. She merely sounded utterly confused.

“I just…” My face on fire, I cleared my throat and motioned to her. “Sorry, I just noticed you seem to be really fit, and I wondered…” Damn, I didn’t think I was making anything better. More awkward, but probably not better. “I just wondered what your secret was.”

Because that ass. Holy damn, a guy could bounce a dime off that perfect, tight ass.

Not that I’d noticed. Of course not. That would be shameless, unbecoming behavior. And I was a decent guy.

“I run,” she finally said.

“Really?” Holy shit, she wasn’t going to ream me up one wall and down another for checking her out. Thank you, God. Clearing my throat again—man, I needed a drink of water or something, for all this throat clearing—I forced myself back to the conversation. “When do you run? I’ve never seen you—”

“Early in the morning,” she cut in, thankfully stopping me from more uncontrollable jabbering. “Before you get here. There’s a trail around the lake. When the sun comes up, it reflects off the surface of the water. Sometimes there are ducks or geese swimming in it.”

“It sounds beautiful.” And she looked beautiful while she described it.

Isobel shrugged and turned away. “It’s peaceful.”

I nodded. “I don’t run, like ever…unless something’s chasing me.”

Grinning at the joke, I cleared my throat when she didn’t laugh back.

God, I was such a dork.

“It’s a good cardiovascular workout,” she said, opening the tape measure to measure the height of the bookcases.

Again, I stupidly bobbed my head up and down. “I should try it then. You think I could run with you some morning?”

She whirled around to stare at me as if I’d lost my mind, the tape measure snapping back into its shell as if equally shocked by my question.

I flushed, feeling like a moron. “Sorry. That was a stupid question. Ignore me.”

After a couple blinks, she returned to measuring. But every time she bent down to tuck the end of the tape measure into the very bottom of the bookcase, her hair would fall into her face. She’d try to spit it out, then wipe it away so she could see what she was doing, only for the tape measure to pull free of wherever she was securing it to.

“Here,” I offered, stepping forward to assist, but she hissed, “Blast it,” and yanked a hair tie from her pocket before pulling her long, silken dark locks back and securing everything out of her face.

I pulled to a stop, shocked she’d done that. Then a ball of warmth grew in me, realizing she felt comfortable enough around me to expose her scars. As if hearing my thoughts, she shot me a hard glance and narrowed her eyes, her expression daring me to say a single word.

With her glare, she let me see the skin that had been marred and distorted, but she also reopened her defiant, I-will-crush-you, snooty attitude. It was amazing, really. She hated people seeing her scars so much that she cloaked this self-protective anger around her as if bubble-wrapping her vulnerabilities. The only problem with that method was instead of hiding her tender spots, she actually brought more attention to them.

It was sad, and made me want to hug her until all the pain inside her went away.

“What?” she demanded, narrowing her eyes.

Smiling, I offered a thumbs-up. “Much better. Now that you’re done fiddle-farting around with your hair, let’s get some shit measured.”