Sorcery and the Single Girl Read Online Free PDF

friends.”
    “Actually, the bakery isn’t mine.”
    “Oh?”
    “It belongs to my best friend. I just cover for her sometimes. I work at the Peabridge Library, just a few blocks away. I’m a librarian.” I heard the unwanted note of defensiveness creep into my voice. I’d learned to judge a lot about people from the way they responded to my job title. About fifty percent made “Marian the Librarian” jokes, apparently deluded into believing that they were the first people in the entire history of librarianship to make The Music Man connection. Another twenty-five percent immediately asked how long it had taken me to learn the Dewey Decimal System. I no longer had a civil answer for either group.
    “Ah…‘My library was dukedom enough.’”
    “Prospero!” I shouted. “The Tempest.”
    “Quite,” he said, and now his amusement seemed warm, friendly, including me in a select club—the cognoscenti, the literati, the something else extravagant that ended with-ti.
    I started to make an excuse. “It’s just that—”
    He was already providing his own explanation, verbally waving off the quotation. “You know. The tedium of a classical education.”
    “I specialize in that tedium,” I said, and then I grimaced. Tedium was not a word I wanted him to associate with me, in any way, shape, or form.
    “So,” he said, when the silence had stretched out just a little too long. “Is there a place where we could meet to exchange quips about the Bard? I can find out more about why a librarian offers up biscuits to the public during her spare time, and we could share a cup of coffee?”
    I thought rapidly. “How about Bistro Francais? It’s on M Street, in the center of Georgetown.”
    “Excellent.” I could imagine him writing down the restaurant name in impeccable British penmanship. He didn’t strike me as a BlackBerry sort of guy. He’d use a fountain pen, write on rich, creamy calendar pages. “There’s one small hitch, though. My office is demanding beastly hours just now. Could we make this dessert coffee? Say on Wednesday night?”
    Alarms went off inside my head. Office. Beastly hours. I’d heard excuses like that before. Excuses from a married pig of a man.
    But, a little voice protested, struggling to be heard over the blaring alarms. Late hours are fine. Late hours are when a married man goes home to his wife and family. Beware the man who keeps you from his evenings and weekends and holidays.
    “Wednesday night?” I said, and tried to sound as if I was paging through my very busy social calendar.
    “Would half past nine be too late?”
    Nine-thirty. We could chat for an hour or so, and I’d still be able to get home, get to bed, wake up on time for work. “That would be perfect,” I said, fighting to balance my enthusiasm against my jaded disillusionment. Damn the I.B.! I refused to let the Incontinent Bogeyman interfere with my current plans.
    I’m not quite sure what Graeme and I said to each other then, but I must have made perfectly normal “signing off” noises, because I was suddenly staring at a dead phone and a silver-lined card.
    A dead phone, a silver-lined card, and the prospect of my first date since the Ill-bred Bête-Noire had poisoned my love life. I clutched my pillow to my face and squealed, trying to release some of the thrumming, paralyzing energy that rolled over me.
    I had done it! I had made the phone call! I pounded my heels against my bed, inordinately pleased with my social bravery.
    “Jane? Are you all right in there?”
    Neko.
    I sat up and placed the phone back on my nightstand, taking care to slip Graeme’s card between my mattress and box spring. “I’m fine,” I said. “Come in.”
    My door opened, and Neko poked his head around the corner. His gaze automatically darted toward my closet, to the small metal table that had hosted an aquarium until last October. The glance was so rapid that I would have missed it, if I hadn’t been waiting. When Neko