The Fireside Inn by Lily Everett

unashamedly in the dappled sunlight. She swallowed down the lump of emotion in her throat. “Don’t you want to get back to the task at hand? We only have a few weeks to come up with your reading for the wedding.”
    “Sod the wedding,” Leo growled, and Serena made an embarrassingly high-pitched noise as she was pounced from behind. The clothes she’d gathered went flying in all directions. “What’s wrong?”
    Apparently a single afternoon was enough to condition Serena’s body to respond to Leo’s. She arched under him instinctively, his bare chest searing into her back. Moaning low in her throat, Serena settled with Leo draped over her like a particularly hot, hard-muscled throw rug.
    Even so soon after being turned inside out and left panting, Leo’s closeness still had the power to shorten her breath. But the way his body bracketed hers also felt intimate and safe, almost protective. Somehow, it was easier to talk like this than face-to-face and fully clothed.
    “Nothing is wrong,” she promised him, hearing the thickness in her own voice. “Absolutely nothing, for once. You told me from the beginning that you wanted me, and I was able to believe you because why else would you come up with such a flimsy pretext to spend time with me?”
    Pressed so tightly together, Serena felt the instant Leo went stiff and wary, and she hastened to clarify. “I’m not complaining! It’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me, actually. In my experience, it’s usually the exact opposite.”
    “I don’t follow.”
    Serena cleared her throat. “Well, as it happens, I was at the top of my class all through school. Let’s just say there was more than one football player who realized if he smiled at me in the cafeteria, I’d fall all over myself to help him with his homework—which usually translated to me doing his homework for him. Until he passed that class and dropped me like a bad habit.”
    She could hear the thunderous frown in Leo’s voice. “And this happened more than once?”
    “For a supposedly smart person, it took me a ridiculously long time to recognize the pattern.”
    There was a moment of heavy, charged silence broken only by the cries of gulls circling overhead. Then Leo said, very calmly, “I should like the name of every single callow youth who used you that way. In alphabetical order, please, to make it easier for me to track them down and destroy them.”
    Serena laughed, even as Leo’s staunch support warmed her chest. “Oh, leave them alone. I console myself by imagining them all pumping gas and collecting garbage for a living. Staying stupid and ignorant forever is its own punishment, right?”
    Leo hummed and stroked a contemplative hand down her side, fingers pressing just firmly enough not to tickle. “You don’t want revenge, even though these idiot boys clearly left you with an inability to believe in your obvious beauty and desirability.”
    “Well, they taught me the first lesson,” Serena admitted, tilting her head until the blanket almost muffled her voice. “But grad school was where I earned my advance degree in romantic idiocy, as well as library science.”
    Pressing a kiss to the sensitive skin behind her ear, Leo murmured, “Tell me.”
    She couldn’t resist the tender demand. Serena rolled her tense shoulders slightly, loving the way his arms tightened around her in response. As safe and secure as she’d ever felt in her life, she told him the story she hadn’t told anyone in years.
    “I didn’t originally plan to be a librarian,” she confessed. “It’s funny how life turns out—I can’t imagine being anything else, now. But when I started grad school, I thought I wanted to be a professor of library science. I did a ton of work and research developing a new reference system—it was an independent study I hoped to turn in as my dissertation.”
    “So what happened?”
    This was the part that made Serena want to squirm with remembered