Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) by Patrick LeClerc Read Free Book Online Page B

the library.
    This was where they kept the books nobody read. Ancient languages, philosophies and politics that had gone out of fashion, history that nobody wanted to remember; probably so they wouldn’t feel so stupid when they repeated it.
    I hadn’t realized there were offices back here, but there were two brass plates screwed onto one of the doors, indicating a shared office. I could imagine a professor of ancient languages requesting such a place. They tend to be an odd bunch. Linguists who deal in current languages are generally alright, since they talk to living people. If all you study is what a handful of bureaucrats and philosophers left behind in a tongue nobody has heard in a millennium, you get a bit rusty on social interaction. I prepared myself for an elderly, pallid, bespectacled gentleman in a tweed jacket with elbow patches. The door was slightly ajar, after the fashion of doors that open onto the offices of the absentminded, so I just gave a courtesy knock and stepped through.
    It was a typical shared office; a window directly across from me opening onto the pleasant rolling green of the quad; a desk facing each side wall, so nobody had a good view of either the door or the window; bookcases and posters on the walls. Cats figured heavily in the posters on the side with the unoccupied desk, as well as Mel Gibson dressed as Hamlet and Sting in a puffy shirt on the grassy courtyard of a romantic castle, apparently reading. Someone was sitting sideways to me at the other desk.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I began, ‘I’m looking for Professor Deyermond—’ and I stopped dead.
    ‘That would be me,’ came the reply.
    I was right about the glasses, but that was all. Regarding me over the rims of those glasses through the most amazingly green eyes on the planet, in place of a pale, greying old man muzzily annoyed that I’d intruded on his session with Plutarch, was a breathtaking blonde in her late twenties.
    To be fair, she did exhibit a few signs of absentmindedness. She was poring over two books at once, making notes in a third; she held a pen in one hand, and had another tucked behind her ear. An impressive mass of loose golden curls was rumpled from the hand she was running through it as she worked, and stray wisps trailed over her forehead. She was dressed modestly enough in the finest academic tradition: a grey cardigan over a white blouse, the top two buttons undone and the collar gaping slightly as she bent over the book. A glittering pendant on a silver chain hung down just to the top of the shadow that teasingly hinted at cleavage. Long, shapely legs emerged from a knee-length black skirt, sheathed in black stockings and ending in black, low, fairly sensible shoes.
    When she saw me, and my sentence died without any sign of continuing, she raised one perfect eyebrow, took the pen she had been chewing from between her teeth and curled her lips into a smile that was warm and inviting, but had mischief in it. Her glance flicked from the fencing bag slung over my shoulder to my clumsily bandaged hand.
    ‘If you’re looking for books on fencing, there’s a nice copy of Talhoffer two rows back, but I can save you some time and tell you you’re probably holding the wrong end of the sword.’
    At that moment, something happened. A tightness in my throat and my chest and, to be honest, my loins. I knew Dr Deyermond was probably not the most beautiful woman in the world, but that’s a hard thing to judge, especially across centuries. Cleopatra, for example, would need the services of an orthodontist if she were to vie for an emperor’s affections today, and with a six-week aerobics class and a decent salon, Lady Godiva might have set western civilization back a century with that ride of hers. That said, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so attracted to someone.
    For a man of my talents, long-term relationships don’t work. You can only stay young so long while people age around you before they