“You hike?”
The tone of the question was utter amazement. When she looked over at him again, all he was doing was leaning in that boneless way of his, as if he needed to prop himself up on the library desk to make it through his next breath.
“Why wouldn’t I hike?”
“This isn’t wherever you’re from—”
“Missouri.”
He looked almost pained. “We have actual mountains here. And real trails.”
“As it happens, Missouri is a part of no less than three mountain ranges. The Ozarks, the St. Francois Mountains, and the U.S. Interior Highlands.”
Jensen looked at her. For a while.
Harriet did not look away, though her ears began to feel singed.
“You hike a lot?” he asked.
“I hike enough.” Meaning, she had researched the proper shoes, tested out several different pairs, and now made a brisk trip into the foothills behind town a part of her weekly routine. She liked routines. “You are aware that hiking is just walking, but at elevation, aren’t you?”
“This is Colorado, Harriet. Nothing here is just anything.”
“In any case, I’m not allowed to take my class on the hiking trip that would likely do them the most good. You will have to be the next-best thing.”
“I’ll try to live up to the Rocky Mountains,” he drawled.
And inside Harriet, a thousand little fires kindled and burned.
She didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with that. How was she supposed to extinguish them while he was standing there, looking at her? “Hiking aside, all the kids in this class have at least one failing grade from the previous year. Unlike some of our summer school students, who were ill during the school year or are trying to place into AP classes or get college credit, these kids have received formal academic warnings. Some are on the verge of expulsion. As you might imagine, there are a variety of teenage reactions to the situation they find themselves in. None of them are what I would describe as charming.”
“I wouldn’t be all that charmed by having to give up my summer, either.”
“Yes.” Harriet nodded sagely, hoping her incendiary state wasn’t visible. She told herself it was heartburn. “You’re usually out of town, aren’t you?”
“You make it sound like a summer vacation,” Jensen said lightly, but when she snuck a look at him, his arresting gaze was anything but light. “That’s not quite how I would describe wildfire season.”
“You should talk about that,” she advised him. “They may sneer at you, because they’re teenagers and they’re required to, but that kind of bravery matters.”
He was quiet. And regarding her the same way he had at his family’s dinner table. Which did not help her personal, internal wildfire season at all, even if he was looking at her as if he were trying to figure her out. She supposed it was because, as usual, she’d done something odd when anyone else would know the right thing to do or say.
If she let herself get sidetracked every time it happened, she would never get anything done. So she smiled at him instead, as professionally as possible. “Do you have any questions?”
“I thought you were the librarian.”
“I am. Behold the library in which we stand.”
“Why are you teaching a class?”
This was a topic Harriet could talk about forever. And she never felt odd while she was doing it. “A lot of these kids who end up in summer school against their will seem to have a set of overlapping challenges. I’m not sure taking a remedial math class here and a makeup chemistry class there can really address those challenges, so I suggested we create a resources module that focuses on things like literacy rates, reading retention, and how to write an actual essay for that English class. If all they get out of summer school is punishment, we’ve lost them.”
“Does it work?”
It should have been impossible. She told herself she was imagining things. Because it seemed to her that when he wanted to, Jensen Kittredge could focus his attention in such an intense way that she would’ve sworn he was hanging on her every word. And more, as if those words mattered to him, deeply.
In case she wondered if she was still being silly.
“I think it does.” Harriet knew it did, but that was her gut feeling, not facts. And she always preferred facts. “I only started last summer. Obviously, you can never be sure about competing factors, but of the five students I worked with last year, none were expelled, all either graduated with their class or are still enrolled, and two improved so notably in the fall semester that they were off academic probation this last semester. Maybe it has nothing to do with my course. But between you and me, I like to think that it does.”
“I believe you, Harriet,” he said in that rumbly way of his that made her, uncharacteristically, want to turn a few cartwheels.
That would be undignified. Appallingly unprofessional. And worst of all, profoundly silly.
So instead, Harriet smoothed her hands on the front of her serviceable dress in a practical ponte fabric that did not require smoothing and rounded the desk, breezing past Jensen as she marched toward the big table she’d set up for her class in the center of the library.
And Jensen Kittredge might have been lounging about behind her, huge and smoldering and impossible, but she still took a moment to look around her with pride.
Harriet had always loved libraries, of course. She particularly loved school libraries. When she’d still attended public school, it had been the elementary school library that had made indignities like forced PE class bearable. The librarians there hadn’t treated her like an oddball or judged her for being forever out of step with her peers or being unable to climb a rope in full view of the whole of the fifth grade. They’d asked her what she wanted to read, suggested books, and helped her escape.
Now this one was hers, housed in this lovely old brick building with Old West flair and wooden accents everywhere. She was in charge. She was the one who got to suggest books and make lost kids feel found. She was the one who got to teach young minds how to be limited only by the spines of the books they held.
It turned out Harriet quite liked having charge of her own domain. Jensen here in the middle of it made her simultaneously aware of how much she liked her space while also being keenly focused on how very much of that space he took up.
In her head, she’d envisioned a very tidy, well-thought-out presentation to her class. Possibly involving her whiteboard. She’d imagined Jensen would sit at the head of the library resource table, make some sort of rousing speech about manly, heroic things, and jot down some notes with a dry-erase marker.
But she should have known that this man had no intention of doing a single thing unless he felt like it. And now that she thought about it, who could imagine Jensen Kittredge at a whiteboard? Even now, with him standing in proximity to hers, she couldn’t make the image come together in her head.
Instead of sitting at the head of the table, despite her clear indication that he should do so, Jensen kept on lounging about. He stood back against one of the low shelves that surrounded the table on three sides, reminding her a little too intensely of the way he’d leaned against the wall in the hallway of his parents’ house. Looking boneless and lazy from head to toe, as long as she didn’t look too closely at that gleam in his eyes.