Wild Ride: A Changing Gears Novel Read Free Page A

wore rugged leather walking shoes and he’d carried a sturdy and beaten-up leather bag.
    A wanderer, that’s what he looked like. She imagined that sun-streaked hair blowing in the wind, the blue eyes squinting at the horizon, and smiled to herself. Not any wanderer. A pirate. A modern-day pirate with plunder in his blood, who took without asking. He’d certainly helped himself to the view up her skirt without permission.
    That had been bad enough. Worse had been the dizzying rush of attraction she’d felt when she’d first caught him studying her with his deep blue pirate’s gaze. For one wild second she’d imagined she’d quite like to be plundered.
    She slapped the counter as though the white laminate were having the inappropriate impulses. A footloose pirate was exactly the kind of man she didn’t need complicating her life. Leaving the coffee room, where heavenly smells were already beginning to waft, she headed for the books.
While the computer was booting and the coffee brewing, it was her habit to walk through the quiet library and make sure all was in order.
    The cleaners had been in last night. She still shuddered at the memory of the night they’d left behind a spray bottle of window cleaner and a couple of sixth grade hooligans had found it first.
    Stepping out from behind the checkout desk, she decided that if Mr. Forbes returned today, she’d remind him of all the superior research centers in other parts of Oregon.
    The man was sexy as hell in a sleepy, rumpled way, but she’d be busy for the next few months with her own agenda. She’d given herself until Thanksgiving to transcribe her grandfather’s life story from audio tape to print and get her grandparents’ house listed and hopefully sold. Once all that was done, she’d help hire her replacement and then she was out of here. She’d find a job in a big, exciting city where anything was possible and people were too busy to gossip about her and her cousin.
    The only reason she’d come back to Swiftcurrent was to look after her grandfather once her grandmother passed on. Now that he was gone– The pang of grief was a small, sharp pain in her chest. She rubbed it, feeling the outline of the necklace Grandpa had given her for her twenty-first birthday.
    He’d been an old man who’d lived a good life, but still it was hard to believe she’d never see him again.
    She shook off her gloom. It was time to get back to her life plan. Marriage before she was thirty-five—well, it was her modified plan. Originally she’d planned to be married by thirty, but since her big birthday last month, she’d had to adjust her life map. She still hoped to have her first child before and her ovaries started emitting warning signals.
    For her plan to work, she needed to move to a bigger city where she might actually find a decent, well-educated man in her age range with good eyes and strong teeth, who was good in bed and a good conversationalist. In Swiftcurrent, you could find up to three of those attributes in any one single guy. But Alex was particular. She wanted them all.
    She had one other unshakable requirement. He had to be a stay-put kind of man. She wouldn’t put her kids through the vagabond life she’d lived.
Besides, a move out of Swiftcurrent was a move away from her troubled cousin. The familiar feeling of helpless frustration smacked her at the thought of Gillian, so she put that thought firmly away, the way she’d put a damaged book in the basement storage room.
    She loved the first luxuriously peaceful minutes of the day. Everything was as quiet as a library should be and in perfect order. She walked among the stacks, breathing the smell of books. The paper and glue, old leather and dust. The smell of learning. She loved being alone with volumes crammed with ideas and knowledge waiting to be explored. She stopped to straighten a row in the children’s section, then noticed that the Narnia novels were out of order and took a moment to