Heavy Issues Read Online Free PDF Page B

you doing here? Haven’t you embarrassed me enough for one day?”
    He couldn’t contain his snort. “What am I doing here? Saving your neck apparently…again.”
    Christy clenched her cute little fists. She looked like she was going to slug him but decided against it. She’d better. She’d probably hurt herself more than him.
    “I had everything under control,” she stated.
    He tried very hard not to sound condescending but failed miserably. “Yeah, sure. When would that had been, before or after hitting the floor, sweetheart?”
    She opened her mouth belligerently, and he sighed in surrender. Egging her on wasn’t a sound tactic.
    “I saw you sneaking in here while I was in the diner getting some coffee, okay? I thought I’d come to sort things out.” Her glare didn’t relent. “To apologize?” he tried again with an appeasing tone. That he had no frigging clue what he should be apologizing for was probably written all over his face, because she looked even more belligerent. He so wasn’t in the mood for this.
    Before she could begin sputtering God only knew what, he interrupted. “Please, can we bury the hatchet? Just temporarily? I brought some drinks as a peace offering,” he said, lifting two beers and a couple of cans of diet soda. “Please?”
    She studied him for a long second, lips pursed as if ready to pick a fight, but then she threw her arms up. “Okay, why the hell not? I may as well go along and keep my mouth shut. Besides, this”—she waved between her and him and shook her head in dismay—“is just too humiliating for words.” And she sat down on the crate by her side. Good, because her legs were trembling—from the near miss with the concrete floor or from being pissed, he didn’t know. Whatever the reason, he was glad for the reprieve.
    Cole sat near her and handed her a can. “Diet soda for you, right?”
    She looked at him, surprised. “How do you—”
    He chuckled softly. “How could I not know, baby? You drink huge amounts of diet soda.”
    “I do,” she admitted, turning red, her lips tilting into a slow smile that he felt all over himself, like a soft, loving caress over his hard, needy, weary body.
    “And you chew gum all the time. And eat cherry lollipops. Actually I have those too,” he added, reaching into his pocket and leaving two lollipops, her favorite brand, on the crate. Sugar-free lollipops. Who would have guessed such an oxymoron existed? “These were my backup plan in case I couldn’t tempt you with the soda.”
    “I see you prepare for all contingencies.”
    “Yep, winging it isn’t my style. So,” he continued, quickly glancing around, “what are you doing here?”
    A sigh escaped her throat, blowing at her bangs. She looked…disheveled. Lovely disheveled, with her beautiful dark hair in disarray and smears of dust on her face.
    “Penance, apparently, for whatever huge sins I’ve committed.”
    “What?”
    She waved her hand around at the basement. “I’m cataloging frigging boxes. This, let me tell you, is a screwed-up system to store books. Rows and rows of shelves full of boxes. No indexes anywhere. No order, no logic. All this is Mrs. Wilkinson’s doing. Of course she doesn’t need annoying, pesky little things like legible tags or indexes. That would be too damned easy. Besides, she probably knows where every single book is. She could probably pinpoint its location in the blink of an eye. By smell alone.”
    Cole laughed. That pretty much described Mrs. Wilkinson.
    His eyes focused on the boxes. “So the tags…”
    “Decoy. Mrs. Wilkinson used a code I haven’t been able to crack yet. I’ll probably need the Enigma machine for that. It’s not stenography, not Morse code. Not Sanskrit. I frigging checked.”
    He smiled. “Tough cookie, Mrs. Wilkinson.”
    “Tell me about it. This is turning out to be a helluva lot more work than what I’d anticipated at the beginning,” she said, looking around desperately. “I can’t