Page 4 of Charlotte

“Not all of them,” Lottie said. “There are two more trunks.”

That produced a pause she would remember with fondness for years. The red-haired man nearest the crate set both hands on his hips. “Miss, you brought a library?”

“I brought the beginning of one.”

That seemed to alarm him more. The next several minutes became a spectacle. Lottie would have found it funny under other circumstances. Men advised one another, ignored the advice, changed their grips, argued about angles, and blamed the trunk as if it had malicious intent. Delly murmured something about the predictable consequences of underestimating books.

Lottie kept stealing glances at the tall, brown-bearded man.

He had moved closer, but not enough. He watched the trunks with a tightness around his mouth she could not understand. Once, when a crate shifted sharply, he stepped forward as though his whole body had answered before his mind allowed it. Then he stopped.

His right hand was tucked inside the front of his coat. In June.

Before Lottie could wonder properly over that, the shouting changed.

One moment the dock was full of laughter and men making a show of themselves. The next, a sharp cry split through all of it.

A crate of books swung hard against the gangway. A dockhand lunged for it, lost his footing, and went down beneath one corner as the surrounding men shouted over one another and started barking instructions.

Lottie’s stomach dropped.

“My books,” she whispered.

Delly was already moving.

Of course, she was. Delly moved toward disasters the way other women moved away from them, chin lifted, hands ready, fear folded somewhere so deep no one could see it. She pushed through the men, dropped to her knees beside the injured dockhand, and began issuing orders in a voice that made grown loggers obey before they thought to object.

Lottie stood frozen on the gangway with two books clutched to her chest and guilt closing hard around her throat.

It was one thing to bring a library to Wild Rose Ridge. It was another thing entirely to injure someone in the town before the library opened.

Then a large man with a dark beard and a leather satchel came through the crowd. He kneeled opposite Delly and said something Lottie could not hear. He set his hands to work with the calm certainty of a man who had met blood before and did not intend to be impressed by it.

For several minutes, the dock belonged to Delly, the injured boy, and the man with the satchel. Lottie could only watch.

The tall logger near her trunk watched too. His jaw tightened when the injured boy groaned. His right hand stayed hidden in his coat, but his left hand closed hard at his side. He looked, Lottie thought, as if he wanted badly to do something and hated he could not decide what that something ought to be.

That was the first thing about him she did not understand. The second came when a book slipped free from the loosened strap of her valise and landed open on the damp boards near his boot.

Tennyson.

Her poor Tennyson, face-up on the dock as if poetry had been struck down alongside everyone else.

The logger looked at it.

Lottie saw him look. Not glance in mild curiosity. Look.

The sounds of the busy dock, the shouting, the clanging, the creaking ropes, all seemed to diminish around him for a fleeting moment. The injured boy was being lifted. Delly wiped blood from her hands with the rag the healer had given her. Men were talking again, softer now, embarrassed by their own panic. The tall logger stood with his eyes on the open page, and something on his face changed.

Longing, perhaps; or recognition.

He bent and picked up the book with his left hand. Carefully. So carefully Lottie forgot to be embarrassed he had found one of her books lying in dock muck. His thumb rested along the spine, and his gaze caught on the open page before he closed it.

His lips moved once over the line. Only once.

Then he shut the book and held it out to her without meeting her eyes.

“You’d best mind your strap, miss,” he said. “The boards’ll ruin anything that falls.”