Harlequin Superromance November 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2

by Mary Brady

  “I got the morning-note thing.”

  “Ah.” Monique refilled their cups before she sat back down in the chair. “How bad was it?”

  “Said he left because he needed to get to the university and make sure the students were on top of things.”

  “The cad. Doing his job. How could he even dare?”

  “He could have woke me up to tell me.”

  Monique grabbed her sides and laughed out loud. “You are kidding me, right? Wake you up from a deep sleep? A parade of elephants could march through your bedroom and you’d just dream on.”

  Mia slumped and took another gulp of her smoky tea. She knew this was true or at least her parents, her friend and others she no longer considered important had told her.

  “Daniel’s excuse is a reasonable one.”

  “Plus we ran out of condoms at 3:00 a.m.”

  Monique started counting hours on her fingers and Mia was sure she was about to compare the results to the number of condoms.

  “Stop it.”

  “Wow. So you didn’t take that as a demonstration that he likes you?”

  “I guess I’m bummed because he likes me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Monique huffed disbelief. “Explain that one.”

  “Daniel made it very clear there could be nothing long-term between us.”

  “Because he has a wife? He’s really an alien from an invisible planet circling Alpha Centauri? What?”

  “He doesn’t have a wife, but he might be an alien because I’ve never had anyone like him. He made me insatiable.” Mia swirled her tea. “I don’t know what’s the matter, but he made a point of telling me right after we kissed at the police station there could be nothing between us, so there could be no confusion later.”

  Monique held her counting fingers up again. “Meet on Monday. Police station kissing on Tuesday. Wow. Sometime after two. Wow. Condoms gone by Wednesday. I might have to go to the yarn shop and see if they’re gossiping about you yet.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay. Soon. So, a fiancée somewhere or he’s got a fatal disease.”

  “I don’t know, Monique, and I didn’t think I cared, but I’ve never felt like this with anyone before, anyone, ever. I didn’t even know him a day and I wanted to kiss him. Okay, ten minutes. What does that make me?”

  “Picky. Nothing wrong with that. You picked. I mean you really picked. You connected with this guy, you knew it and you acted on it. That is wicked good.”

  “It does feel so...right, so very right.”

  “Maybe you can find out what his roadblock is and give it a nudge, or maybe a blast.”

  “I don’t know. I got the feeling whatever it is it’s something scary. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he has a fiancé in a long-term coma somewhere. That would make me selfish.”

  “Yeah, the woman who came home to save a town. Selfish.”

  “So, you want to tell me why you had a bunch of condoms?”

  “Bought out Portland on that shopping trip yesterday. Once I started thinking about Lenny as a possibility, I really put my heart into it. He trusts me to get his laundry processed according to his standards. That’s a big deal for him. He looked around my house as if—”

  “Wait. When was he here?”

  “Last night after he got off work. We sat and talked and kissed. Now, I gotta admit, it was nothing like you and Dr. Lovemachine, but we had fun. I had fun.”

  Mia spotted the clock on Monique’s microwave. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. It’s almost eight o’clock. I gotta go. I’m doing something for the chief and I don’t want him to think I’m not interested.”

  Mia tossed her red scarf around her neck and yanked on her coat.

  “Call me later if you have time,” Monique said.

  Mia grabbed her friend in a quick fierce hug and then fled the kitchen.

  At the police station, she flipped on the lights in the basement storage room, hung her coat on a chair and pulled out the box she thought might contain the oldest files.

  The room was cold and lonely without Daniel.

  Deal. She’d deal. She always did.

  She tried to get excited about the files as she donned gloves, sat down on the floor and pulled the box close to her. Liam Bailey’s logbook was at the front of the box. She stopped for a moment, contemplating what the pirate Bailey might have to say. Would he talk of treasure, of his great love? Funny, a two-hundred-year-dead man could ruin her life.

  Deal.

  The book had unlined pages, and he wrote in an uneven scrawl, faded and difficult to read. Someone had made longhand copies because of the fading ink and filled in their version of what he might have said.

  He had logged in as simply Liam Bailey, not captain. He might have wanted to leave that part of his life behind. After she had read for a while she thought, too bad this was a record of law and order and not a bawdy pirate’s tale. It seemed law and order wasn’t all that exciting. Theft, brawls, treatment of women that made her want to go back there and tell them to grow up.

  Though every word held historic interest, conveyed the difficulty of establishing a town in such a remote area, about building the hotel, there wasn’t anything enlightening as to what happened to him. There was very little personal information at all, and when the log ended abruptly, it spoke to her of a man interrupted.

  Interrupted by being dead or by getting paid by daddy to leave town? she wondered.

  The record keeper second in line, whose notes began May 16, 1820, was a Woodrow Harriman who was appointed a commissioner of sorts by the first governor of the State of Maine. Harriman was to oversee the budding towns on Maine’s central coast until some formal system of government was established. As she read on, Mia realized Liam Bailey did not quite finish the hotel before he disappeared. According to Harriman’s file, Bailey hadn’t finished the outside steps or the balcony—which if ever built was now gone. No mention was made of the wall.

  The hotel, which Bailey had called the Sea Rose Inn, was not occupied for the first two years due to some kind of ownership dispute. That would explain how a body could reside there during decomposition and no one suspected anything.

  The person responsible for the final disposition of the property was a man named Archibald Fletcher. The man seemed to own most of the land around Bailey’s Cove that Liam Bailey did not own. He claimed Bailey owed him money and ended up with Liam Bailey’s hotel and much of his land.

  “Whoa!” She backed up and reread Harriman’s next passage. “The home Mr. Liam Bailey built on Sea Crest Hill was also taken over by Mr. Archibald Fletcher, as it was insisted by his daughter that he install her and her new husband, a man named McClure, in the residence.”

  Mia knew that home, undoubtedly a mansion during the time of Liam Bailey, on the hill overlooking town. The home still sat there, mostly empty because a local man who now lived as a tycoon in Boston owned it.

  Chief Montcalm was right. There was information in these records that should not be released without first considering the consequences.

  Mr. Harriman didn’t speak of what became of Liam Bailey at all, to say if he went west or back to sea. No mention was made of anyone paying Bailey off, although, in Mia’s thinking, Mr. Archibald Fletcher would have been a prime candidate to have the wherewithal to buy off a pirate to save his daughter from a disastrous relationship as legend had it.

  Mia found herself eager to search out more information about Mr. Fletcher, about his daughter.

  She sat on the floor and leaned up against the wall. The dashing pirate Bailey may have used his stash to build the hotel, trying to prove to the father of his ladylove that he was worthy husband material. Then he built a lovely home on a hill overlooking town, a place to raise a family.

  And then he walked away. Mia didn’t believe it.
No matter how many men had walked away from her, she didn’t want to believe it.

  By lunchtime she had made it through the first ten years of life in Bailey’s Cove. She had also made it through the entire morning without leaving to see if Daniel had come back. What if he never came back? Ridiculous, he had felt the same things she had felt last night.

  Then why was a tear trickling down the side of her face?

  When there was a knock on the door to the records room, Mia swiped at her eyes and put on a big smile. The chief would see right through her anyway, but she could fool Melissa.

  She opened the door to her mother’s smiling face.

  “I’ve found you at last,” said five-foot-six, one-hundred-and-twenty-pounds-exactly Marianne Parker.

  “Hi, Mom, you look great.” And she did, always. Perfect blond hair, short knit jacket that matched her knit slacks, scooped-necked blouse in a lighter but matching shade.

  “I’ve come to take you out to lunch.” She looked Mia up and down and Mia forced a smile because she knew no matter how hard she tried, she felt as if she was letting her mother down in some way. Her hair might be parted on the wrong side, her black suit jacket not perfectly matching her black skirt. There was always something.

  “Hang on a minute, Mom, I’ll get my coat.”

  “Can’t I come in?” Her mother craned around her to see into the room.

  “Sorry, Mom. Chief Montcalm asked me not to let anyone in here.”

  Mia grabbed her coat and pressed the corners of her eyes to get rid of the moisture. Apparently, her heart had hoped Daniel would be at the door. Silly thing.

  She smiled apologetically at her mother. “Sorry, I forgot we were having lunch today.”

  “Your phone must not work in the basement,” her mom said as they climbed the stairs.

  “And you found me anyway. Thanks. I would have felt bad if I missed you.”

  “It was easier to find you when you were always working on that building.”

  She squeezed her mom in a quick hug.

  “I forgot why you’re off today?” Mia asked as they crossed the street to Mandrel’s Café.

  “We surpassed our quota of home sales for last month, and believe me, that hasn’t happened in a long time, so they gave us today off. Wednesdays can be slow, so it was a good day.”

  “How’s dad?” Mia asked when they were seated at Mandrel’s in her mother’s favorite spot.

  “Your father is always the same.”

  Her mother sounded sad when she spoke and that troubled Mia. Mia also knew better than to probe for details. Marianne Parker didn’t respond well to personal questions from her daughter. “I feel like you’re judging me,” her mother would say.

  Mia ordered her usual, oatmeal pancakes with maple syrup, and got her mother’s usual response. “I don’t see why you can’t eat normal lunch food.”

  “Because I like pancakes and the oatmeal is good for me.”

  Her mother tsk’d as she dug into her chef’s salad.

  Lunch had to be cut short. Her mother had a meeting of the herb society to run to and Mia had records to read, not to mention, when she’d arrived that morning at the station, word was the police might be finished with the Roost this afternoon. Not that it would mean much for her if she still wasn’t allowed to work on the remodeling, but she could always hope. With the crypt demolished, Daniel might be able to release the building to her.

  And be gone.

  Her steps faltered. By the time she put the key in the lock she wished she was anywhere but there. Reading records by herself might have its moments, but it was not much fun.

  She swung open the door and sitting on the floor beside the boxes was Daniel.

  He looked up. His eyes were tired and his face more drawn, as if he hadn’t slept since she saw him last.

  She stopped. What was she supposed to say? She felt her smile desert her as she closed the door behind her.

  He leaped to his feet and was standing right in front of her in a blink. He searched her face and then drew her into his arms.

  The warmth of relief swept through her followed closely by heat.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said as she put her cheek against his chest. He smelled good, like shower and shaving cream.

  She pushed back to look at him.

  “You shaved.” She reached her hand up and stroked the softness of his cheek.

  “Disappointed?” He smiled at her.

  She shook her head, her eyes glued to his face. He was good-looking before, but now... She swallowed. “Um—no.”

  “I needed to be at the university this morning to go over the processing techniques again with the students. They’re good, but need a lot of guidance.”

  She plucked at the sleeve of his pale blue oxford shirt and then looked down at unholey jeans and professorish shoes, definitely a departure from worn leather boots. “So, Mr. Indiana Jones, do new students fall in love with you every term?”

  “All the time, but I make it a point not to fall back.”

  “I missed you this morning.”

  “I’m sorry about the note. I tried to wake you, but you were in too deep. Maybe we worked too hard.” With that he leaned in and kissed her hard on the mouth and just as quickly broke away. From arm’s length he said, “If I start that, I won’t get any work done.”

  She grinned and felt happiness wash down her body and settle as warmth in her heart. “Sometimes I think work is overrated.”

  He slid his hand into hers. “Come and do some overrated with me.”

  * * *

  DANIEL MADE HIMSELF let go of Mia’s hand. What he wanted to do was take that hand and put it against his heart to tell her how much he had hated leaving her so early this morning, how much he loved to touch her, have her touch him.

  What he needed to do now was to keep his hands off her, his hands, his lips and everything else. She did not need his problems in her life.

  “I saw you finished with the first box.” And I see your heart in your eyes right now. He knew what he saw there because he felt the same longing. Their connection was strong and undeniable, but he had to keep telling himself that it could not matter.

  “Liam Bailey’s account of maintaining law and order in the early 1800s is a combination of fascinating and mind-numbing.”

  “I don’t suppose he built a tomb and walled a man up in it.”

  She sputtered out a laugh. “I’ll kill him if he did. He has messed with me enough.”

  “Remind me not to cross you.”

  “Oh, please, you have crossed me too many times to count.”

  He quit paging through the file in his hand.

  “Okay, so some of the times you crossed me, I liked it.”

  She grinned at him and he wanted to make love to her right there under Chief Montcalm’s nose. Instead, he studied the file.

  She told him eagerly about Bailey and Fletcher and Fletcher’s daughter, about the Sea Rose Inn and the mansion on Sea Crest Hill, and about there being no hint about what happened to Bailey.

  Then she continued with reading the nineteenth century and he started in the middle of the twentieth. They read to the shuffling of paper, the sound of the clicking clock and the vibration humming between them. When he came across a file from 1956 he read until he knew he had to share the information.

  He held out the file toward her. “There is something in this one I think you might want to see.”

  “Read it to me.” She gazed steadily at him as she made the request.

  “It’s from the 1950s. The name on the record is Chief of Police Buddy Knox. ‘The town is restless. An outsider has come to claim the treasure of Liam Bailey. She says it is buried in a building of much importance to the town.’ The next day he says: ‘Henri
etta Loch has destroyed us.’”

  Her eyes were wide with alarm. “Loch. L-O-C-H?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you suppose that Loch is the same Loch family as Heather? Do you suppose that’s why Heather came here and turned the church into a museum in the first place? I mean, she has always claimed to be a descendent of the pirate. She wouldn’t have broken into the Roost, I mean, I’ve never had any reason to suspect her of anything so nefarious as to break in and destroy someone’s property.”

  He wondered if she knew how beautiful she was with excitement gleaming in her eyes.

  A crisp knock got their attention and she jumped to her feet.

  “Hello, Chief Montcalm,” she said as she opened the door. “You have arrived just when we had something to show you.”

  “I have some information for you, too. The preliminary investigation of the break in and damage to your property has been completed, Ms. Parker. We have some persons of interest, but no arrest warrants.”

  “Thank you, Chief. I appreciate everything your department has already done.”

  “We’ll continue to keep an eye on the place and if we find out anything else, we’ll let you know.”

  “We have a couple of things that might interest you, Chief. The house on Sea Crest hill was originally built by Liam Bailey.”

  “That one should stay under wraps for now.” This was, of course, an order from the chief, not a request.

  Daniel handed over the report from Chief Knox. “The page of interest is on top.”

  The chief scanned the document and handed it back. “If either of you has any questions, please feel free to call me. I expect you’ll wrap up by four-thirty,” he said as he nodded at the clock, which said four-fifteen. “Dr. MacCarey, if you’d come up to my office, I need to speak with you in private.”

  The chief marched away, closing the door softly, leaving Mia and him alone in the room. They stood facing each other, no boxes separating them.

  He wanted to pull her into his arms again and kiss her, give her everything a man should give a woman, love, respect, himself. All he had to give Mia were promises he couldn’t keep. He broke away from her questioning gaze and moved toward the door. “I’d best go see what the chief wants.”