A Touch of Midnight (Midnight Breed 0.5)

"All set then, dear?" Mrs. Kennefick patted her neat gray bun, then smoothed her similarly colored cardigan as she ambled around from her desk in the processing room.

"All set," Savannah said, adding the worn-out copy of Carrie to the wheeled book cart with the rest of the returns she'd handled that evening.

"Very well." The old woman took the cart and began rolling it away before Savannah could stop her. "No sense in you waiting around any longer tonight, dear. I'll go shelve these returns. Will you lock up behind you on your way out?"

"But, Mrs. Kennefick, I really don't mind--"

The woman dismissed her with a little wave and kept going, hunched over the cart, her drab-skirted behind and soft-soled shoes retreating into the quiet labyrinth of the library corridor.

Savannah glanced at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand tick slowly. She looked for something more to do there, knowing it was just an excuse to keep from returning to the reality that awaited her outside the library. She took advantage of the opportunity to organize Mrs. Kennefick's pencil cup and paperclip dispenser, even going so far as to use the edge of her long sleeved turtleneck sweater to sweep away the nonexistent dust from the pristine surface of her supervisor's desk.

Savannah was busy straightening the patron files when she felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise with a odd sense of awareness. A warmth prickled over her skin, strange and unsettling.

Someone was in the library's delivery room outside.

Although the adjacent room was silent, she closed the file drawer and walked out to investigate.

Someone was there, all right.

The man stood in the center of the room, facing away from her, dressed in a long black trench coat, black pants and black, heavy-soled boots. A punk, from the look of him. A very large punk.

Geez, the guy had to be six-and-a-half-feet tall and built of solid muscle. Which made it all the more incongruous to find him standing there in silent meditation, his head full of thick, spiky cropped blond hair tipped back on his broad shoulders while he perused the mural of paintings that circled a full 360 degrees around the ornately paneled, medieval-styled room.

Savannah strode toward him, cautious yet intrigued. "The library is about to close soon. Can I help you find something?"

He slowly pivoted around to face her, and, oh, wow....

The punk description might have fit his clothing style, but that's where it ended. He was handsome--devastatingly so. Under the crown of his golden hair, a broad brow and angular cheekbones combined with a square-cut jaw that would have seemed more in place on a movie screen than standing in the middle of the Abbey Room in the Boston Public Library.

"Just looking," he said after a long moment, a tinge of Britain in his deep voice.

And so he was looking, though no longer at the art. His piercing blue eyes met her gaze and held fast, so sharp and cool they seemed to read and process everything about her in an instant.

Savannah's skin felt tighter under his attention, making the soft knit of her ivory-colored turtleneck feel like sandpaper against her throat and breasts. She felt too warm, too noticed, and too aware of the sheer size and masculinity of this stranger before her.

She tried to project an air of calm and professionalism, despite the weird chaos going on with her central nervous system in reaction to this man. Striding up beside him, if only to escape his scrutiny, she glanced up at the series of fifteen original works depicting King Arthur and his Round Table Knights, painted for the library at the turn of the century by the artist Edwin Austin Abbey. "So, which are you more interested in: Abbey's work, or Arthurian legends?"

He followed her gaze up now. "I'm interested in everything. The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."

Savannah registered the statement, knew she'd heard it in class somewhere before. "Plutarch?" she guessed.

She was rewarded with a sidelong grin from the gorgeous non-punk standing next to her. "A student of philosophy, I take it."

"It's not my strongest subject, but I get by all right in most of my classes."

His smile quirked a bit at that, as if he mentally scored a point in her favor. He had a nice smile. Straight white teeth framed by full, lush lips that made her pulse kick a little. And that English accent was doing funny things to her heart rate too. "Let me guess," he said, studying her in that unnerving way again. "Wellesley? Or maybe Radcliffe?"

She shook her head at the mention of the two prestigious, private women's colleges. "BU. I'm a freshman in the Art History program."

"Art History. An unusual choice. Most of the colleges are turning out high-priced doctors and lawyers these days. Or mathematics whiz kids hoping to be the Einsteins of the future."

Savannah shrugged. "I suppose you could say I'm more comfortable with the past."

Normally, that would be one hundred percent true. But not lately. Not after what she'd seen reflected in the sword's history yesterday. Now, she wished she could go back in time and undo the touch that showed her the horrors inflicted on the pair of young boys from the past. She wished should could deny the other horror she witnessed in the blade's history too--the monsters that simply could not exist, except in the darkest kind of fiction.

She wished she could turn back the clock to the moment Rachel told her about her date with Professor Keaton, so she could warn her not to go.

Right now, after everything that had happened recently, Savannah could find no comfort in the past.