“All right, but you should at least give me an idea of what's going on and what you want. A lot of this material isn't digitized, and there's no way to find it without hand-searching. So …?”
“I'm looking for post addressed to The Millbrook, a London magazine published in the late 1700s. The letters in question would have been dated between 1789 and 1792. That should be simple enough.”
Norah gave him a long look, and Val was starting to get a little unnerved.
“What's the matter? Was I wrong? I was told that you had been bequeathed The Millbrook archives by Wesley Millbrook, the last surviving –”
“Oh, we have it,” Norah said, and now he could tell that her expression was one of pity. “Come on.”
She led him from the carefully neat, if crowded, files in the main room of the ECEE collection towards a door in the back. This led to a larger room that was somewhat darker and cooler, though very dry.
“This is the sorting and repair room,” Norah said, leading him towards the back. “And that is the bequeathed collection from Wesley Millbrook.”
Val looked around with growing unease.
“How much is –“
Norah gestured at the corner where there were perhaps as many thirty bankers boxes piled up level to his shoulder.
“All of it,” she said, and Val groaned out loud.
CHAPTER THREE
∞∞∞
Norah did her best not to laugh at Val Rychek's despair. It was only that he looked so very distressed, even shocked, at the collection of paper boxes stacked up in front of him. She had to admit, though, if only in the privacy of her own thoughts, how very adorable he looked when he was that nonplussed and lost. As a matter of fact, it suited him much better than that look of arrogant command he had worn when assuming he could simply buy her library, but to be honest, most expressions probably would.
Still, it was a big job, and she cleared a space for him at the large work table where she usually undertook simple repair projects and general sorting.
“No food back here,” she said briskly. “No water either, unless it's in a secure water bottle. Some of these documents are really, really fragile.”
Val currently seemed a little too daunted by the size of the project to jump right in, and instead he turned to her.
“These old papers are really important to you, aren't they?”
“Of course they are,” she retorted. “They should be important to everyone, if they only knew what was in them.”
“Treasure maps, the lost secrets of the city of gold?”
She scowled at him.
“I'm not very fond of people teasing me for my life's work,” she said. “I'm not going to tell you anything if you're making fun.”
Val looked slightly chagrined, and then to her surprise, he nodded.
“I'm sorry. Please tell me what you can find in these dusty old piles of paper.”
Norah looked at him suspiciously, but he appeared sincere.
“Because we can be found here in all these dusty old piles of paper,” she said, startling herself a little with the honesty of it. “Because archives like this, they paint a picture of who we were, the good and the bad. It shows us the parts of ourselves that have changed, and the parts of ourselves that haven't. It shows us where we have improved, and it tells us how we could really do better.”
Val glanced back a the pile of papers behind him.
“You don't think that there are some things that should be properly lost to time?” he asked, and she gave him a sharp look.
“No, not at all. I know that you are going to be negotiating to buy whatever it is that you are looking for from the library, but please don't think that you going to sneak anything by me. I am absolutely not above searching your pockets before you leave here in the evenings if that's what it takes.”
Instead of being annoyed, Val grinned. The smile transformed him, relieving some of the harsh lines of his face. She had known he was a handsome man before, but with the addition of that smile, it was almost hard to look away from him. She looked, and she wanted to keep on looking, and God help her, she wanted to touch as well.
“I promise on my honor that I will not do anything underhanded. I just need to find those letters.”
She needed to put a little space between them and fast, so she spun around to heft one of the bankers boxes from its place on the pile and set it with a thump on the table next to Val.
“Here you go,” she said. “It won't take you that long if you really know what you're looking for, but these letters arrived completely unsorted and most don't have envelopes. You may have to do a lot of digging.”
“I'm ready to suffer,” he said with a sigh, and Norah managed to stifle a giggle before she went back into the front room.
***
All day, she worked in the front, helping the two researchers who came in, sorting out some pieces for the upcoming Love Our Library display on the main floor, and doing the thousand and one little tasks that kept her corner of the world from descending into chaos.
However, the whole time she was aware of the man in the back room, Mr. Val Rychek. She couldn't keep her mind off of him, and even when she was doing something utterly normal and utterly boring, she kept thinking of his hair, of his black eyes. Of his hands.
Really, it has not been that long since you got laid, she thought with growing dismay. This is not natural. He's not even that good looking.
That was a dirty lie. It was absolutely a lie, and when she flipped the closed sign over on the door
