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caught Cilla’s eye and held it. “It’s nothing dangerous .”
    “Only, um, maybe…offbeat.” The blonde smiled again. “He’s actually a writer.”
    A writer? That wasn’t so strange. “Oh, well—”
    “Of horror novels,” Alexa slipped in, then took a breath. “For children .”

Chapter Three
     
    Some people went for a walk on the beach to clear their heads or calm their minds. Other people went hiking in the mountains to find their mental oasis. Still others took to the city streets for a punishing run.
    Reed had been known to do all of the above on occasion, but his go-to place for a brain break was the public library—which was where he went this afternoon.
    There was an excellent one in his neighborhood, two stories with lots of natural light and comfortable seating. A whole section was devoted to computers available for public use. He avoided that area—keyboards were not his friend at the moment—and instead wandered the stacks of both fiction and non-fiction.
    Invariably, interesting volumes caught his eye. Today, he read the opening pages of a spy novel set at the beginning of the Cold War. A few aisles away, he perused a how-to book on masonry. As always, he immersed immediately into the world of words, taken away by the descriptions of a damp and dark London and by the intricacies of a herring-bone walkway design.
    It was at Oceanview Army-Navy that he’d found the quiet library and the escape it provided from cadet life. There, he could forget for short periods at a time the pervading sense of oppression the school fostered. It had been a terrible adjustment for a kid raised in the free-wheeling, anything-goes atmosphere of the Laurel Canyon compound. He’d been unhappy as hell, but at least he’d been big enough and mean enough not to suffer as some others had.
    Thinking of that, Reed yanked another book at random from the shelves and strode to a pillowy armchair, determined to lose himself in its paragraphs. Too late, he realized the volume was none other than a biography of an Egyptian ruler…Cleopatra.
    Cleo.
    Reed rested his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. The woman had been plaguing him for far too long. Even though he’d changed his work hours and returned her baking pans, she continued to haunt his life. He remembered the gilt brightness of her short blond hair, the pink lips of her kissable mouth, the inches of smooth skin from her thighs to her ankles. Cilla and Alexa hadn’t helped matters when they came home with a full report from their visit. Even as he pretended not to listen, he absorbed every word.
    She was unattached, except, of course, for her two sons.
    And she’d asked if he was involved with someone.
    Cilla said she didn’t get an exact departure date, but that Cleo and those boys of hers would only be around until the owners of the property behind his returned home.
    Which meant he had a short period of time that he needed to banish her from his head—after that, her physical absence would certainly do the work for him.
    “Reed?”
    He started at the sound of his name. Opening his eyes, he saw one of the librarians, Tammy Earle, standing in front of him. He pushed back the ball cap he’d pulled over his head so he could meet her gaze. “Hey.”
    Tammy was in her late twenties and nailed the sexy librarian thing…which, forgive him, was exactly why he’d nailed her. What man could resist a woman in pencil skirt, sensible heels, pearl-buttoned blouse, and tortoise-shell glasses? She wore a version of that get-up today, her dress crisp, the belt around the waist buckled precisely. As was her habit, a pen was tucked behind her small ear.
    A Sharpie pen. Always a Sharpie, with its permanent ink. Reed wondered now, if that wasn’t part of the reason their liaison had been so short-lived. The bedlam that had been life at the Laurel Canyon compound hadn’t prepared him to trust in permanence.
    Smiling, her gaze roamed over him. “Looking