Carrie Alexander - Three Little Words

“Outwardly, perhaps.” Connor’s eyes darkened. “Except I’ve already figured you out. You’re a happy, singsong Marian the Librarian to all appearances, but inside, beneath the cocoon of small-town life, is another person waiting to burst free. Like a butterfly.”

The muscles in Tess’s stomach clutched, even though he was getting carried away. She really was the nice, normal person she claimed. She didn’t need to be set free.

From what? she silently scoffed. Her life was her own. Entirely her own.

“Well, Connor, that sounds nice, it really does. But on the other hand, I’m pretty certain that you just called me a caterpillar.”

He smiled, but his gaze was even deeper and softer than before. It enfolded her. “By any other name…”

Dear Reader,

Hello from the North Country!

As I’m writing this letter, it’s a beautiful summer day with breezes playing through the trees and sunshine glittering on the lake. But by the time you read this, I'll be plunged into the dead of winter with snowdrifts up to my eyeballs. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a land of extremes, where only the tough survive—as long as the tough have a good heating system and a snow shovel.

In this story, the second in my NORTH COUNTRY STORIES miniseries, Connor Reed comes to the wilderness to escape his notoriety as a true crime writer. Is there anywhere more remote or romantic to escape to than a lighthouse, seemingly at the edge of the world? Small-town librarian Tess Bucek is certainly intrigued by the stranger in town, and it’s not long before truths of the heart are revealed….

Look for my next NORTH COUNTRY book in November of this year. And please visit my Web site at www.carriealexander.com for news of future books, contests and “North Country” photos and map.

Sincerely,

Carrie

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE MAN LOOKED like a smuggler.

In a library? Amused with the incongruity, Tess Bucek slid the card from the pocket of Sis Boom Bah! A Survival Guide to Cheerleading Camp and passed the book beneath the bar-code scanner. She was so accustomed to the task that it wasn’t necessary to look away from the suspicious character loitering between the arts and history sections. As he moved to one of the study tables with a stack of books, she stamped a date on the card in red and returned it to the pocket.

“Due back in three weeks.” Tess slid the book across the checkout desk to Sarah Johnson, who would have been her niece if she’d married into the family as planned. Instead, they were merely acquaintances, and lucky to be that since Tess wasn’t on speaking terms with Sarah’s father, Erik. “Have a nice time at camp.”

“Oh, I will. Thanks, Miss Bucek,” Sarah bubbled, thrilled about making the JV cheerleading squad before school had let out for the summer. “I can already do a super cartwheel, but my herkies…”

Tess smiled and nodded as Sarah went on about cheerleading stunts, surreptitiously rising off her heels and telescoping her neck to keep sight of the stranger seated beyond the girl’s bobbing blond ponytail.

He was tall, dark and mysterious. Tess would have shivered if she was the shivering type.

A smuggler with a tortured conscience, she decided as Sarah finally said goodbye. There was an air about him—intense, conflicted, maybe even dangerous. Definitely shady.

Grosse Pointe Blank, Tony Soprano, The Tulip Thief, every detective novel she’d ever read…they all filtered through Tess’s quick-firing synapses. After serving more than ten years as a librarian in a poky small town where “danger” meant icy roads or the fire index, pop culture was all she had for reference. She preferred fiction, anyway. Particularly when it came to the criminal element.

She’d honed a vivid imagination during the time when she’d been stuck in a one-bedroom cottage with her newly divorced and depressed mother, listening to a limited collection of Beatles, Bread and Simon and Garfunkel LPs. Ever since the bow tie that was really a spy camera in the song “America,” Tess had taken to making up little stories about everyone around her. Their next-door neighbor with the green thumb had become a poisoner burying bodies in the petunia patch. She imagined that her fourth-grade teacher, bland Mrs. Gorski, metamorphosed into a disco diva after the bell rang, complete with polyester wrap dress and sparkly blue eye shadow.

Even now, Tess continued to indulge her flights of fancy. Cheap entertainment for the comfortably settled.

Impelled by an inward squiggly feeling—not a shiver—Tess stepped out from behind the desk and grabbed the half-filled return cart parked nearby. The wheels squeaked as she pushed it toward the 900s—the history section. The stranger looked up from his book, his gaze watchful. Perhaps leery.

She smiled her pleasant professional-librarian smile. “Did you find what you wanted, sir?”

The man had keen eyes, even though his lashes lowered and his gaze avoided hers. Oddly evasive, Tess thought with a genuine twinge of suspicion.

The stranger nodded and returned to the open book, ducking his head between hunched shoulders. The back of his collar gaped around locks of wavy black hair. The long hair and a chin shadowed with stubble gave him the intriguing devil-may-care air that had sparked her imagination, even though a similar look was affected by a good third of the local single-male population. On them it was scrubby and slapdash. On this guy—dashing.

Tess sneaked a peak at the heavily illustrated book he’d selected. Lighthouses. Just as he’d asked for. She’d volunteered to show him the way, but he’d wanted to browse.

He’s the brains behind a Canadian smuggling operation, she decided. A modern-day pirate. Hence the lighthouse research. He’d come to Alouette scouting for a remote drop-off point. Guns or drugs, she imagined.

Or animal smuggling. Monkeys, marmosets or exotic birds—rare blue macaws. That’s what Jack Colton had been doing in Romancing the Stone and she remembered an article in a back issue of Smithsonian about the trafficking of rare species. Except it didn’t make a lot of sense, sneaking contraband across two borders….

Abandoning Dewey decimal, Tess blindly thrust a cookbook among the Egyptians. Black-bear organs—that was it! He was smuggling contraband out of the Upper Peninsula, not in.

Her imagination took full flight. A Chinese man with an eye patch was the contact. His name was Suk Yung Foo and he’d been sent by his gangster father to an American college to better himself. Instead, he’d met this guy, a former, um, professor…who’d been on the track to full tenure until the…cheating scandal? Embezzlement of research grants?

No. The man had too much sex appeal for his downfall to be anything but nubile young coeds.

Tess shook her head. “How predictable.”

The stranger glanced back at her. “Predictable?”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Why, uh, someone’s misfiled a cookbook. Dust Off Your Bread Machine does not belong beside Nubian Artifacts.”

“You put it there.”

“Did I?” The man must have eyes in the back of his head, but then she’d heard that of crooks.