Librarian Bear

  LIBRARIAN BEAR

  Copyright © 2021 by Zoe Chant

  All Rights Reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Artist: Ellen Million Graphics

  Librarian Bear

  a Virtue Shifters novel

  Zoe Chant

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Epilogue

  A Note from Zoe Chant

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sarah Ekstrom had always wanted to be a librarian.

  She had grown up in the local library, checking out actual stacks of books even though the rules said she was technically only allowed four at a time. The librarians knew her, though, and knew she would finish reading a measly four books before sunset. At age nine, she had spent summers volunteering, shelving books and sometimes—excitingly!—getting to stamp the due dates into books as other people checked them out. That led to discovering romance novels when she was ten, which was good, because she'd already finished all the horse books, the mysteries for kids, and the entire science fiction section, marked with little rocket stickers on the spine.

  By the time she graduated high school, Sarah liked to say she hadn't read every book in the Virtue library, but only because they'd bought a bunch more kids books since she'd leveled up from that section.

  She came back after college, a shiny new Masters degree in Library Science in hand, and got a job in her beloved home town library, an institution that had served Virtue faithfully for nearly 200 years.

  Not until Sarah became head librarian, though, did anybody have the bright idea to use the library as a double-duty, de facto daycare.

  A small child whisper-shouted, "MegloBots! Attack!" and a sudden thunder of tiny footsteps rose from the children's 'wing' of the library.

  Someone else, forgetting about the 'whisper' part of shout-whispering, yelled, "Elektotwuks! Bwace!"

  A tremendous crash echoed through the entire library building as the oncoming MegloBots smashed into the braced Electrotruk wall. Joyful screams rose up, punctuated with the occasional howl of protest. Sarah let them whale on each other for about thirty seconds, trusting that their foam swords and shields (reinforced with duct tape, as she'd learned the hard way that without reinforcement, the toys didn't survive half an hour, much less a whole day of playing when thirty or forty children used them) wouldn't do too much damage in that time.

  Then, as she prepared to wade in and bring the conflict down to a dull roar, if not an end, the library doors swung open and five-year-old Noah Brannigan marched in with the confident swagger of someone twenty years his elder. "Don't worry, Auntie Sarah," he proclaimed. "I'll take care of it."

  Sarah choked on a laugh. "Will you? Thanks, Noah. Remember to be fair and kind!"

  Noah, not precisely accurately, caroled, "I always am!" and waded into the fray as his mother hurried in the door behind him.

  "Oh—oh no. Oh dear. No—Noah—stop—!"

  "No, it's okay," Sarah assured her. "He's helping."

  Mary Anne 'Mabs' Brannigan gave her a dubious look, but shrugged acceptance. Mabs and her kid had become some of Sarah's favorite people since they'd moved to Virtue a year ago, and not just because Sarah had successfully played matchmaker to Mabs's ailing love life. Sarah, smiling, asked, "How's Jake?"

  Mabs met the smile with one of her own. "Working on Jenny Minor's house, now that half of Virtue's been through ours to see all the work he did. Noah—oh—Noah..." Mabs grimaced in dismay as Noah finished breaking up the Meglo-Truk wars by dint of taking one kid's sword, another kid's shield, and hitting them both with them. As it turned out, though, that was the right thing to do, because both of the other kids 'died' dramatically, and Noah, by all appearances, became the leader of a new, allied MegloTruk faction.

  "That kid is going to take over the world by the time he's seventeen," Sarah said approvingly.

  Mabs exhaled noisily. "Assuming I don't kill him before then. I don't know how you do it, Sarah."

  She gestured at the library, and more particularly, at the largish, roundish, 3-steps-down 'children's wing' that lay just to the right of the library's doors. There were beanbags and chairs scattered around the area, with a couple of tables, but no writing materials. Sarah or one of the other librarians did story hour in there, and the kids mostly didn't seem to notice that they were blocked off from the rest of the library by a child safety gate and the comparatively tall shelves filled with books suitable for their age ranges.

  Right now there were mostly small children and a few harried parents trying to find reading material while the kids happily slew each other. The library didn't technically open until 9:30am, but since Sarah had opened the 'daycare', there were often children there from 7:30am onward. As long as they were toilet trained and willing to look at a minimum of one book, they were welcome. Quite a few parents dropped their kids in long enough for a cup of coffee or a quick shopping trip. The kids, given a sense of autonomy, almost always read something—or at least looked at picture books—and generally stopped trying to murder each other with toy swords when told.

  "I love it," Sarah admitted. "That's how. I remember how independent being left in the kid's section made me feel when I was little. I want to give these kids the same thing."

  "Yeah," Mabs said dryly, "because what Noah definitely needs is a sense of independence."

  Sarah laughed. "Some kids need it more than others," she agreed. "Not all of them have purple-haired massage sorceresses for parents. How are classes going?"

  "Assuming nothing goes crazy, I'll finish the week before the wedding." Mabs did a little dance. "I've been talking to the bank about a loan so I can turn one of the empty town square storefronts into a massage therapy business, so I'm hoping to do a grand opening near the end of the year. Maybe I can get everybody in Virtue to buy each other gift certificates for a massage as holiday gifts."

  "Well, you talked me into it. I think my shoulders are made of actual stone."

  "That," Mabs said wisely, "is because you do too much. Librarian, daycare operator, Meals on Wheels, Historical Society Board, and I know there are at least six other things I'm forgetting besides your matchmaking hobby."

  "Once is not a hobby!"

  Mabs's laughter pealed across the library. Noah looked at her, waved vigorously, and dove back into whatever intense game the kids had going on. "If you say so. Oh, isn't today the day? Your new archivist is coming?"

  Sarah, aware she sounded a great deal like Noah, said, "Uuuugggghhhh. Yeaaaah. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I'm sure he'll be fine, but—"

  "But you hate giving up control
over any part of your domain," Mabs said wisely.

  "It's not even that. I mean, yeah, you're right, I'm not gonna lie—" Sarah tried to give Mabs a withering look as the other woman laughed, but ended up laughing reluctantly herself instead. "I don't like giving up control over my domain, but mostly it's that I know what happens with archivists who've gotten grants to come in and sort out a collection. They ignore what anybody else has done in the past, introduce their own entirely new system, barely scratch the surface, run out of money, and leave. Then three years later somebody else gets a grant and does exactly the same thing. I worked in the archives at my university," she said strenuously. "It happened all the time."

  "Did the university archives not have a process for them to follow?" Mabs asked, mystified. "That seems like an oversight. And surely if I, the woman who thought she could single-handedly restore a three-hundred-year-old farm house, thinks something's an oversight, it must be."

  Sarah laughed again, less reluctantly this time. "Yeah, but that worked out pretty well for you. And no, I guess they didn't have a system."

  "But you do, right?" Mabs asked encouragingly.

  "Well, yeah...."

  "Well, okay then. He'll just have to do what you want."

  "He's a big city library type," Sarah said morosely. "He's not going to want to listen to a small town librarian."

  "Woe betide the man who doesn't want to listen to you," Mabs replied airily. "Look, I've got massage therapy class in a few minutes, but I'll be back to get Noah around eleven, okay?"

  "Aren't you working today?"

  Mabs glanced in the general direction of the diner she worked at. "I am, but Robin Owens is trying to earn some money this summer so she's babysitting Noah four hours a day, three times a week, and that'll cover half of my shifts."

  "Well, you can drop him in here any time you need to, you know that."

  "I do, but I also know what a handful he is, and I imposed on your generosity a lot last year."

  "Yeah, but look at my reward. I get to be your maid of honor!" A genuine thrill of delight splashed through Sarah. She'd never been in a wedding, much less helped organize one, as she had—perhaps inevitably—volunteered to do for Mabs.

  "You have a strange idea of 'reward'," Mabs informed her, then gave her a quick hug and ran off in a flash of purple hair.

  "Busy-ness is its own reward!" Sarah called after her, then went to convince a dozen three-to-seven-year-olds that now was a good time to find a book and read. She left them reading to each other a few minutes later, with Mabs's son providing sound effects. For everybody.

  The next couple of hours at the library were her favorite time of day. Parents dropped younger kids off or came in with older ones, everybody eager to check out new books. Someone almost always brought in a snack tray for the 'day care', usually carrot sticks and cucumber slices and other healthy treats that the kids were ravenous enough to eat even if they weren't chocolate-based. Sarah suspected that the local parents had a rota to determine whose turn it was to bring in snacks, but they denied it when asked. Furthermore, it wasn't like Judge Owens always brought something on the third Tuesday of the month so Sarah could figure out a pattern or anything. The food just showed up, and she, grateful to be provided with effortless snack food herself, didn't enforce the "no food in the library" policy during Snack Tray Hour.

  After eleven it quieted down for an hour or ninety minutes, before a lunch rush that usually saw a total changeover of kids in the makeshift daycare, and then after lunch there was generally a lull that could, in the summer, last the rest of the library's opening hours. Sarah's new archivist was supposed to arrive just before closing, so she could spend the evening discussing the historical papers project with him.

  Around two, just post-lunch-rush, Mabs, who had already collected Noah and left, returned, looking harried. "Jake just called me. You know that development company, the people who were trying to buy me out? They're up at Jenny Minor's ranch, claiming they've got some kind of eminent domain agreement with the state government and are going to start breaking ground tonight on a new waterway for the resort they want to build."

  "Well, they can't do that!" Sarah knew perfectly well that what they could and couldn't do really depended on whether people let them get away with it, not whether it was actually legal or not, but she said it anyway. "Has Jenny agreed on a price? Has the town agreed to anything? Has the county? No! They can't do that!"

  "I'm going up there to provide moral support," Mabs said. "Do you think you could get anybody else to join me?"

  Sarah, practically sparkling with fury on Jenny's behalf, said, "You want me to organize an on-the-spot protest on a ranch seven miles out of town?"

  Mabs, in a small voice, said, "Yes?"

  Sarah grinned sharply. "Sounds like fun. I'll text the historical society, the Meals on Wheels crew, the PTA, and the school board. Head out there yourself, we'll be right behind you."

  "You are an amazing human being, Sarah Ekstrom." Mabs hurried out and Sarah got her phone, sending texts in a flurry. Responses began buzzing in almost immediately, and within a couple of minutes she was confident of having enough people to slow the developers down for today, if not permanently.

  She'd gone around the library, talking to the patrons about the local emergency—several of them headed out immediately—and was in the middle of writing a poster-sized note to stick to the library doors when an unfamiliar voice at the door spoke in a soft, very light Spanish accent. "Sarah Ekstrom?"

  "Yes, I'm—" Sarah glanced up from work and somehow managed to fumble her Sharpie so that it skidded across the poster board, scraped the side of the library's front desk, and flipped out of her hand to land on the desk behind her.

  The man at the door watched it do its dance, his gaze stricken with a kind of gentle awe as the pen clattered to a rest. Then he turned an uncertain smile on Sarah, as if wanting to laugh but afraid she might not see the humor in her mishap.

  In her own defense, usually she would. But the guy at the door was so staggeringly attractive that the very idea that she'd just embarrassed herself in front of him made Sarah want to retreat into a hole and pull the earth up over her.

  He was so good-looking. His hair, cut relatively short, fell in black curls over his forehead. He had heavy eyebrows, and glasses with bulky enough frames that they could have made him look less cute, except clearly nothing on earth had that power. His cheekbones, Sarah thought, could cut glass. His mouth was perfect, and his cautious smile was blindingly attractive. His skin was warm golden brown, not far off the shade of Sarah's own, and his shoulders had evidently been carved from stone. In a good way, not like Sarah's own overly-tense shoulders. He wore a loose-collared white shirt and, heaven help her, had the sleeves rolled up to reveal strongly muscled forearms.

  Sarah and Mabs had once had a three-hour discussion about how sexy forearms were, displayed like that. She felt like maybe this guy had overheard it, and come prepared.

  He was also wearing jeans, and boots, and she could let her gaze linger a long time on his thighs, except that would get increasingly weird. She hauled her attention back up to his face, only momentarily distracted by the glint of a gold necklace just below his collarbones. Sarah was reasonably confident that he could have been the model for Adonis, Greek god of beauty.

  "I'm sorry," she said hoarsely. "The library is closed for the afternoon. Could you maybe come back tomorrow?"

  Even as she suggested it, it was clear to Sarah that she was proposing the worst idea in the world. If he left now, someone else might see him, and if someone else saw him, they would definitely leap on the opportunity to get to know this guy, which is what Sarah should be doing.

  Not that she had time for romance. She had seventy thousand other things to do, and couldn't remember the last time she'd been on a date.

  Not that he'd asked her on a date. She said, "Jeez, Sarah, get ahold of yourself," under her breath.

  Evidently not quite enough under h
er breath, though, because the man's smile brightened considerably, and it had been wonderful to begin with. "You are Sarah Ekstrom? That's great. I'm Matthew Rojas. I'm your new archivist."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Matthew Rojas knew what to expect from a small-town library grant job. He'd spent most of his undergrad summers and all of his grad school summers doing those kinds of jobs.

  They involved a well-meaning but overwhelmed librarian who'd left the archival materials moldering in a back room for decades. They meant literally hundreds of National Geographic dating from whatever era the librarian had become aware of the publication. Although in this semi-imaginary librarian's defense, everybody had a hard time throwing away NatGeo magazines, even if all their articles were online now.

  In the best case scenario, summers like this involved Matthew being left alone to introduce an archival system to the library, so photographs, old papers, books, et cetera, could be found in a consistent manner.

  They did not involve the most incredibly striking woman Matthew had ever laid eyes on staring at him like he was the least-wanted item on a long, long list of Do Not Want.

  He'd vaguely expected Virtue's head librarian to be old, despite having worked in libraries his entire life and being aware that librarians didn't actually start out old. They got that way, just like everyone else. Nevertheless, he still fundamentally thought of librarians as old and sort of frumpy.

  Sarah Ekstrom was neither. She was in her mid-thirties—about his age—with tightly curling black hair pulled back in a graceful twist, snapping black eyes, and skin a golden hue a few shades lighter than his own. Furthermore, 'frumpy' had clearly never come near this woman's vocabulary, except as a description for something else. A blazing red off-the-shoulder shirt displayed the most amazing collarbones Matthew had ever been lucky enough to see. The shirt fit snugly across her chest and tightly through her waist, showing off a 1950s pinup-girl figure. He assumed she had something on her lower half, too, but the library's checkout counter blocked that from his view.