Page 10 of Charlotte

He was leaving.

No.

She moved before she could argue herself out of it and scurried across the room.

“Mr. Peterson?”

He stopped at the edge of the hallway. The nearest men found sudden reasons to examine the floorboards. She kept going anyway.

“Please don’t go on my account,” she said.

His brows drew together. “I wasn’t.”

That was not especially encouraging.

“Oh. Well. That is better, I suppose.” She shifted the book in her arm. “Unless you were going on your own account, which is no better. I mean, it is entirely your right to leave a hotel parlor when you like, only we have barely spoken, and I thought perhaps we ought to try it once properly before deciding we are both impossible.”

His mouth moved beneath his beard. “Miss Bellamy.”

“Lottie, please.”

He looked toward the parlor, then back to her. “Miss Bellamy.”

She sighed inwardly. Not Lottie, then.

A lesser woman might have been wounded beyond speech. Lottie was wounded, but not beyond speech, which was fortunate since speech was one of her steadier talents.

“I wanted to thank you for my book,” she said, lifting the Tennyson slightly. “On the dock. You saved it from a very undignified end.”

“A book ought not be left in the wet.”

“No. It oughtn’t.” She smiled. “I thought the same thing, which means we agree on one point already. That seems promising.”

He looked at the book instead of at her. “You brought a powerful lot of them.”

“I did.”

“For a western town on the edge of civilization.”

“I find Wild Rose Ridge immensely civilized. In fact, I already adore it.”

His gaze lifted then.

Lottie wished he hadn’t, because being looked at by Mr. Peterson was not a simple matter. His eyes did not pass over her the way other men had since the boat docked. They stopped. They noticed. For one breath, Lottie had the terrible feeling he could see the hope she had carried all the way from Chicago and did not know what to do with it.

“I mean to start a lending library,” she said, because she needed something to do with the sudden flutter beneath her ribs. “Only a small one at first. A table, perhaps. A ledger if Delly is allowed within ten feet of it, which she certainly will be, because no power on earth can keep my sister from a ledger. One day I should like proper shelves, a sign, and a place where any person in town may borrow a book without feeling foolish for wanting one.”

His left hand tightened around the brim of his hat.

His right remained hidden.

Lottie saw it. She tried not to look too long.

“That so?” he said.

“Yes. Does Wild Rose Ridge have many readers?”

“Some.”