But, then again, it was not entirely good, either.

Being startled while perched on top of a ladder was always going be risky. On a library ladder with an inclination to take off on its tracks at the slightest provocation, it was just asking for trouble. And trouble was what Ellie got.

Twice.

Losing her balance six feet above ground was bad enough, but her attempt to recover it proved disastrous as the ladder shifted sideways, taking her feet with it.

Too busy attempting to defy the laws of gravity to yell at the fool who’d caused the problem, she dropped her duster and made a desperate grab for the bookshelf with one hand-while clinging tightly to the precious leather-bound volume she’d been reading in the other.

For a moment, as her fingertips made contact with the shelf, she thought it was going to be all right.

She quickly discovered that she’d been over-optimistic, and that in lunging for the shelf-the laws of physics being what they were-she’d only made things worse.

Her body went one way; her feet went the other.

Fingers and shelf parted company.

Happily-or not, depending upon your point of view-the author of her misfortune took the full force of her fall.

If she’d been the waif-like heroine of one of those top-shelf romances-or indeed of her own growing pile of unpublished manuscripts-Ellie would, at this point, have dropped tidily into his arms and the fool, having taken one look, would have fallen instantly and madly in love with her. Of course there would have to be several hundred pages of misunderstandings and confusion before he finally admitted it, either to himself or to her, since men tended to be a bit dense when it came to romance.

Since this was reality, and she was built on rather more substantial lines than the average heroine of a romance-who wasn’t?-she fell on him like the proverbial ton of bricks, and they went down in a heap of tangled limbs.