Chapter 7

The dust motes dancing in the shafts of pale morning light that pierced the heavy velvet drapes of the library’s main reading room felt like suspended gold, shimmering in the quiet stillness of the early hours. I had expected the crisp, sterile sheets of a luxury hotel suite, or perhaps the rumpled duvet of a guest room, but instead, I lay tangled in the deep green velvet chaise longue that had served as the impromptu throne for the evening’s most prominent guest. The air still carried the faint, lingering scent of old paper, leather bindings, and the expensive cologne that clung to him, a masculine warmth that had saturated the very fibers of the furniture. My head rested against the broad, solid plane of his chest, right over the steady, rhythmic thrum of his heart, which had finally slowed from its frantic, hurried beat to a calm, measured pulse. He was still awake, I could tell by the way his fingers traced lazy, possessive circles on the bare skin of my back, moving from the dip of my waist up to the nape of my neck, where a stray lock of hair curled against the sweat-slicked skin. His other arm