Guarding the Treasure Read Online Free

of bookshelves. She was close enough to the children’s reading area to notice they were finished with Story Time with Darcie for the afternoon, so there would be no little ones interrupting her thought. She set her purse on the smaller of two round tables near the shelves where she would be searching, far enough from the front desk to allow plenty of privacy. The area she needed was in the nine hundreds, and glancing to her right, she saw the nine-hundreds almost directly in front of her.
    “What luck,” she said, smiling as she pulled the diary from her backpack. Opening the old book, Sophie headed to the first set of shelves in hopes of retrieving the book on the Gaelic language she had opened earlier that month. That encounter with the reference book had been brief, she recalled. A couple of students had discovered her and consumed much of her free time, asking questions about Gaelic history as well as offering their opinions. Shaking her head, she moved through the narrow aisle, perusing the selections. How amusing that people thought she only wanted to talk about school and history as if she had no other interests. Running her fingers over five or six titles, she discovered the coveted volume. “Here it is,” she said, quickly pulling it from the shelf. Sophie anticipated what she would find between its yellowed pages, feeling like a kid in a candy store, wanting to learn as much as she could about the language dominating the diary she balanced in her hand. Sophie turned and leaned against the shelf of books, randomly thumbing through the pages. The words were foreign to her yet deeply familiar. She had memorized the handwriting of some of the words from the diary and could form them in her mind as she looked at the same words in the reference book. It seemed a little more difficult today than she remembered, trying to put the words together to form sentences while struggling to hold both books open at the same time.
    “If you want a good book on understanding the Gaelic language, may I suggest this one?”
    Sophie’s head rose with a jerk. “What?” Her eyes were automatically drawn to a man with deep blue eyes, brown shoulder-length hair, and a Yankees baseball cap pulled over his eyes.
    “This book,” he said, opening to an obviously familiar page, “has origins—as well as dates and definitions—of the lost language of the Irish people. It’s one of the best I’ve ever read on the subject,” he said, looking up and catching the noticeable expression of surprise on her face. Recalling a job he’d done for a friend at the television station several months earlier, he decided she was much prettier than she had looked from behind the camera. Her hair was as brown as her eyes, and she had a beautiful mouth that held a slim smile as she continued to look at him with a bewitching bewilderment in her eyes. He had already sized her up, something he had grown accustomed to doing in his profession. She was quite a beautiful package, he decided.
    Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?” she said, trying to decide if he was one of her students or a new faculty member.
    “Do I know you?” came out of her mouth just seconds later as a wrinkle formed above her eyebrows. Then Sophie realized he hadn’t been one of her students because she would have remembered his self-assured mannerisms—not to mention that every pore on his body screamed sexy, and he had a smile to match. She decided he must be one of the new teachers for the summer semester.
    “I’m sorry, let me introduce myself,” extending his hand to her. “My name’s Kevin Gates. I’m sure you don’t know who I am, but I—along with perhaps the entire city—would recognize you a mile away. You’re Sophie Hanes, am I right?”
    Sophie narrowed her eyes at him again, still questioning how this Mr. Gates knew her. “How could the entire city—” Just then the diary slid from atop the reference book. She quickly bent to retrieve it at the same moment