Karina Bliss: What the Librarian Did / LA Cinderella: What the Librarian Did / LA Cinderella

And Mark grinned because one part of him wanted to run back to his apartment, jump on his computer and flog it on eBay, and the other wanted to sleep with it under his pillow. You are one screwed-up dude, Mark.

So what was new?

Still, he let himself be happy, because it wasn’t every day a guy got to meet his all-time hero. Then he looked toward the campus and his smile faded under the familiar gut-wrenching nausea, anger and terror. She was here … somewhere.

Mark had seen the University of Auckland envelope at the adoption agency when he’d asked the woman to check his file, claiming he was in an open adoption. Funny how people didn’t care about hiding envelopes. The woman had been very kind, considering he’d been lying to her. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

He’d lied again. “Sure.”

Abruptly, Mark stood and began walking. Why had his birth mother started out wanting an open adoption, then changed her mind and severed contact? The question had been eating away at him every since he’d discovered he had a different blood type to both his parents.

He’d searched through his parents’ private papers and found correspondence from an adoption agency. Mom and Dad still didn’t know he knew … and Mark tried not to blame them because it was clear she’d made secrecy a condition of adoption.

But his anger … his alienation had spilled over into his misbehavior. It had been a tough twelve months on everybody. He’d only talked his parents into letting him enroll at a university four hundred kilometers away because “honest, Mom and Dad, I see my future now and it’s all about getting an education and being normal like you want me to be.”

Like I used to be. When I knew who I was. But Mark had another agenda. He would confront his birth mother. She would sob an apology and beg his forgiveness. He would say, “You had your chance,” and walk away. Just like she had.

He’d worked out that she’d been seventeen when she had him. That made her thirty-four now.

It shouldn’t be too hard to find her.

THE FADED BLUE SEASIDE cottage was one of Waiheke Island’s first vacation homes, and unlike its newer neighbors, it was tiny and unpretentious. Not for the first time, Devin thought how well it suited his mother. He jumped the seaman’s rope fence and strode down the white shell path, giving a cursory pat to the concrete seal balancing a birdbath on its nose. Then he caught sight of the front door and frowned.

It was wide open and a gardening trowel lay abandoned on the doorstep. His pulse quickened, and though he told himself not to panic, he shouted, “Mom!”

Three heart-stopping seconds of silence and then a faint reply. “I’m out back.”

Devin walked through the dim interior to the rear garden, a sprawl of crunchy grass, lichen-covered fruit trees and roaming nasturtium. “How many times do I have to tell you to shut your damn door? Anyone could walk in.”

Holding a red bucket, his diminutive mother looked down from the top of a stepladder leaning against the peach tree. “And how many times do I have to tell you this isn’t L.A.?” She dropped a handful of small white peaches into the half-full bucket, then ran a hand through her short gray bob. “Any leaves in my hair?”

Devin put his hands on his hips. “Should you be doing stuff like this?”

“I’m not going to have another heart attack, honey.” Katherine held out the bucket. When he took it, she climbed sedately down the ladder. “Not now they’ve replaced the faulty stent.”

He reached out and helped her down the last couple of steps, and her hand seemed so frail in his. Briefly, her grip tightened, reassuring him with its strength.

Still, Devin said gruffly, “Is it any wonder I’m paranoid after two emergency flights in two months? If you’d listened to my advice earlier and got a second opinion—”

“Yes, dear.”

Reluctantly, he laughed. “Stay with me another week.” He owned the adjacent headland, sixteen acres of protected native bush shielding a clifftop residence.

“I’ve only just moved home. Besides, you cramp my style.”

“Stop you doing what you’re not supposed to, you mean,” he retorted.

“Dev, you’re turning into the old woman I refuse to become. I’m sure I wasn’t as bossy as this when you were in recovery.”

“No,” he said drily, “you were worse.”

She ignored that, instructing him to pick some lemon balm for herbal tea on their meander back to the house. “How was your first day at school?”

“The other kids talk funny.” Ignoring the kettle, he turned on the espresso machine he’d installed.

“Make any friends?”

He gave her the Devin Freedman glower, the one that Holy Roller magazine had described as the definitive bad rocker look. Being his mother she simply waited. “No, but then I don’t expect to.”

“You know I’m on the mend now, darling, so if you want to go back to L.A.—”

“I don’t,” he lied. “Got anything to eat?”

“There’s a batch of scones cooling on the counter.”

He burned his fingers snatching a couple, but feeding him distracted his mother from the subject of his future.

Five years earlier, when he’d quit rehab for the second time, she had told him she wouldn’t spend her life watching him self-destruct, and had moved back to her native New Zealand. It had been a last-ditch effort to snap him into reality. Devin had felt nothing but relief, then added insult to injury by minimizing contact. It hadn’t stopped Katherine from being the first person at his hospital bed.

Now she needed him to take care of her. Whatever she said.

His older brother, still living stateside, couldn’t be relied on. A keen sense of the ridiculous had kept Devin’s ego in check over the last crazy seventeen years, but the planet wasn’t big enough for Zander’s, who still blamed Devin for the breakup of the band.

The truth was Devin had held Rage together for a lot more years than its flamboyant lead singer deserved.

So if it turned out Zander had been screwing him over … well, Devin didn’t think he could put even his mother’s peace of mind before his need for justice.

“HE LOOKS LIKE HE NEEDS a friend,” Rachel said to Trixie two days later. She’d noticed the teenager yesterday during library orientation. Now, as then, he walked around with his shoulders slightly hunched, blond fringe falling over his eyes and a scowl on his young face that did nothing to hide his apprehension. She remembered what it was to be young, alone and terrified. “Maybe I should go talk to him.”

“Oh, hell, you’re not starting a new collection of waifs and strays already, are you?” Trixie complained as she sorted a pile of books for reshelving. “We’re not even a week into the first term.”

Rachel stood up from her computer. “You were a waif and stray once, remember?” Trixie had been a scholarship kid who’d practically lived at the library in winter because she couldn’t afford to heat her flat. Rachel had given her a part-time job, which turned full-time when she’d graduated last year.

“Which is why I’m protecting you now,” Trixie reasoned. “You’re useless at setting boundaries.”

“Tell me about it. I keep getting bossed around by my junior.”

The boy reached for a book on one of the shelves and the backpack slipped off his scrawny shoulder, spilling books and pens. A red apple rolled across the carpet. Rachel started forward.

Trixie caught her by the arm. “Leave some time for yourself this year. Especially now that you’re single again.”

Rachel freed herself, but the teenager had already fastened his backpack and was slouching out the door. She turned to Trixie. “Don’t do that again,” she said quietly.