Delivering His Package: A Secret Baby Romance by Jamie Knight (best love novels of all time txt) 📗

the front desk again. She must’ve also summed Eleanor to that same front desk. She was already at that front desk, waiting and looking slightly impatient, shaking her head at her coworker who’d sent her there.

“Alright, so this is it?” she asked.

“Yes. Thanks very much.”

I speed-walked back to my truck before anyone could summon me back or before my own desire could bring me back to revisit the cute librarian.

Chapter Two - Eleanor

“Eleanor! Paaackaaaage for you!” Claire called out in her usual tone. It must definitely have been UPS, and she really must have confused the New York Public Library with a matchmaking service. She never called for me to come out from the back room when it was just the USPS delivery woman or the elderly FedEx man making a delivery.

Claire meant well. She’d seen me ravaged by the breakup with Richard a year back. Richard went from being mister perfect to suddenly married when his rich ex-girlfriend came back to town. He quit his library job soon after quitting me.

Yes, I had moped, especially for the few weeks after the breakup, when the reality of it was sinking in, that Richard was a jerk, maybe Richard still loved me, but Richard would never speak to me again. He was gone from the library and gone from my life.

That was also when I withdrew money from my 401K and went to the sperm bank. I had always wanted to be a mother and didn’t intend to wait any longer. After a few unsuccessful attempts at getting pregnant, I saw a doctor. Loads of tests later, I pulled out more money and tried in vitro fertilization. The hormones were awful, the shots were horrid, but I’d go through any physical pain to have a baby — still a no-go.

I didn’t even have a boyfriend, but I had a sliver of hope of one day being a wife to a special man and a parent to a child. Now that hope was gone. I was infertile. Adoption was still an option, but I had to save up again for that to happen. It was a hard pill to swallow, and my despair about never carrying a child wounded me deeply.

Meanwhile, Claire couldn’t let an opportunity pass her by to introduce me to almost any man who passed through the library. Her criteria seemed to only be that he was not obviously dangerous, not obviously taken, and not obviously over seventy years old. Maybe she was flexible on the over-seventy part, judging from some of the patrons whom Claire had wink-wink-nudge-nudge suggested to me. Anyway, she meant well.

In part, she just wanted to get me to come out of my hiding spot in the back reading room. I knew that. I holed up there because I was most comfortable in its predictable ambiance of well-lit silence. I got a lot of work done sitting in that room with my laptop. I ran the whole library from there. Still, I knew it was slightly unbecoming of a chief librarian to be so hidden away from the patrons and the library’s public areas.

I took the last gulp of my six-hour-old, no-longer-very-cold iced latte and stepped out to the main front desk area. There was Aiden again. He was at least as handsome as last time, but even more handsome this time, because I had been thinking about him for the week since his previous appearance in my library: absence and heart fonder and all that.

I gulped. Unlike most guys, being blurred and far away wasn’t Aiden’s best side. He only got better when I was looking at him up close. This UPS driver was more gorgeous when I could see him and make out his features; attractive masculine features. Pipe dream, of course. No way was this dreamboat interested in me. With his brown uniform and muscled triathlon-qualified legs, he was entirely focused on deliveries. Other than the time last time when his eyes and attention wandered through the bookshelves — but only through the bookshelves.

“Hi. Thanks for the delivery. Um, I don’t think we ordered anything from Amazon.”

I shook the box. I knew the feeling of a boxed book, and this was definitely a boxed book. We definitely hadn’t ordered anything from Amazon. Maybe it was a donation or a free copy.

“I just thought you might — hey, you wanna open it?” The UPS guy was inquisitive. “I mean, just to, maybe, check for damage.”

In all my eight years working as a librarian, I had never heard of a book being damaged in transit. But maybe it was possible. And it wouldn’t hurt to open the package in front of the cute UPS guy.

I needed the box opener. “Hold on a second.” I looked around the front desk, but it wasn’t there. Maybe I could try to go without. “Do you mind — do you mind if I just open it with my hands?”

“Fine with me.” The UPS guy laughed.

I stuck my fingers down into the box and pried apart the lid. Inside was a layer of Amazon bubble wrap. I peeled it away, and inside was a book. “Wow, Khalil Gibran. The Prophet. I actually don’t think we have anything—” We did have it, but it was always stolen. It was one of those books that keep walking out of the library. Maybe people didn’t want to part with it when they were leaving the building.

“You don’t. I checked your online catalog. It was weird that you didn’t. That’s why I bought this.” The UPS man nodded.

“You… you bought this? You sent this package?”

“I hope you don’t mind the donation.” Aiden smiled.

I didn’t mind the donation. The library received donations all the time, usually when people were moving and would’ve felt bad about throwing away books. We usually received collections of useless, outdated junior-high history textbooks and pulp novels that had long gone out of fashion. Those well-intentioned dusty tomes went right to the monthly library