Better Than Gold

by Mary Brady

  He put his hand on her thigh and smiled. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a frank person?”

  “I’m not always. You bring that out in me, and, hey, was that a dodge?”

  “It might have been.”

  “Okay, new subject. Concerning you and me.”

  He looked at her curiously but didn’t say anything.

  “As far as I’m concerned, whatever is between us is just between us. If it’s a night, a week, a millennium, each of us gets to decide for ourselves. You don’t want anything long-term and that’s your stuff. I, on the other hand, just love to have my heart broken, and I can’t do that without falling for someone first. That silly habit of mine, in fact, netted you a robe and slippers for the evening.”

  “A very comfortable robe and slippers, too,” he said, and then his brows drew together in concern. “I don’t want to break your heart.”

  “I did this to myself. I wanted you, Daniel. I wanted you badly, and I got you.” She squeezed his hand. “I guess breaking my own heart is, I don’t know, just one of the things I do. Lets me know I’m alive.”

  He squeezed back. “You don’t need to break your heart. You are one of the most alive people I’ve ever met. You’re so alive, you’d scare the hell out of most of the staff in my department.”

  “Do I scare you?”

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her on the mouth, a lovely lingering kiss. “You scare me silly.”

  “But you don’t mind.”

  “You’re like skydiving.”

  “And you like screaming all the way down?”

  “So much that I want to go up again.”

  She turned on her side. “I can help you with that.”

  He got up and put another log on the fire and closed the glass doors.

  “I have something I need to tell you,” he said when he was finished with the fire and came back to the quilt.

  “We’ve already got the ‘I can’t get involved’ and ‘the university rules my fate’ stuff behind us, so let’s have it.”

  He laughed.

  “Oh, good, it’s funny.”

  “No, it’s not funny at all. I should have told you when I first got here tonight.”

  “I think the entire conversation between us when you first got here tonight was You look terrible. Pretty hard to squeeze any more in between the lines there.”

  * * *

  DANIEL REACHED OUT and played with one soft wisp of Mia’s hair.

  Propped up on one elbow with the neck of her robe gaping open in such a tantalizing way, one breast sloping down until the edge of her nipple showed was almost enough for him to push her on her back and take her again, well and without mercy.

  But he needed to get this out.

  “I told you my department head wanted me to keep everyone away from the site until a determination was made.” What a hideous contrast to speak about his boss when he wanted to make love to Mia until the sun came up. He’d never seen such ecstasy before and he wanted to see it again and again.

  “Go on.”

  “What?”

  “You seemed to get lost somewhere.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did. My boss also told me, if this is Liam Bailey, and if I take my time, get all the evidence, I can put myself back on the tenure track. I got diverted from the track several years ago.”

  She stayed up on her elbow and watched him. There was no anger in her face, not even disappointment.

  “I should have said something before we had sex. Heck, I should have said something before I kissed you the first time.”

  “Listen, Daniel.” She rolled onto her back. “I do appreciate that you are telling me now. I can see where it might get difficult between us. There was a time in my life when I would have been really mad at you.”

  He suddenly wondered what she knew about him. How much had the chief told her? “And now?”

  “I have learned to deal with more in the past two years than I ever dreamed I’d have to put up with—”

  He frowned in concern.

  When she said nothing, he took a hold of the collar of his robe and raised his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, that guy would be one of them.”

  “I’m making things harder for you.”

  “Not tonight you aren’t, but I get the feeling we are— You are—” she turned her head and looked up him “—dancing around something, something dark.”

  Grief socked him so hard in the midsection he almost gasped and the harder he tried to push it down, the more it streamed forward around his barricades. Tears sprang to his eyes and trailed down the side of his face.

  He tried to stem the flow.

  No one, absolutely no one since Mandy had seen him cry, and she had not seen his tears since he had held his son in his arms the last time. Yet here he was, in the home of a woman he barely knew and whose life he could ruin and he was practically bawling.

  She leaned over and dabbed at the corner of his eyes and the sides of his face. “It’s okay. These are old tears.” She spoke softly. She understood. “They need to be shed.”

  He couldn’t form the words. Couldn’t talk about a child who had been cursed with the genes of his father, cursed until death at the age of thirty months. Couldn’t talk about the woman who loved them both and who had been decimated by that love until she had to flee just to survive.

  Mia gathered him into her arms. “Thank you for sharing these tears with me.”

  He pulled her to him and hugged her for her compassion. She returned the hug and put her quilt over both of them.

  If there were ever another woman he could love, it would be Mia Parker.

  After a while, she opened his robe and put her hands on his chest, exploring. She kissed his neck, his chest and down his belly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “HOW’D IT GO?”

  On Wednesday morning, eight days and counting, minus a little change, since the find in her wall, Mia sat in Monique’s small neat kitchen sipping lapsang souchong tea and trying to behave as if all were fine with the world.

  “Well. Very well,” she responded.

  “Details!”

  “No.” Mia plunked her teacup down on the old wooden table, shined to the limit of its patina.

  “All right.” Monique scrunched up her forehead and if Mia knew her friend well, she was looking for an end run around no.

  “No and no,” Mia said to ward off any attempt at getting details about the night. And she didn’t want to think about this morning—at all.

  “Awright, a’right, a’right, just answer me one thing. How many of those condoms I brought to you did you use?”

  Maybe a bit of the truth might just shut her friend up.

  “All of them.”

  “All of them?” Monique pounded her fists on the tabletop, slopping tea, and in an almost continuous motion fetched the dishrag to clean it up.

  Mia raised her chin and did the slow nod of smug.

  “Oh, my God, you, you, what’s female for dawg?”

  “What was I supposed to do? He has a six-pack.” Mia pointed to her abdomen and moved her hand up and down to illustrate she was not talking about beer.

  “I would have thought getting it that many times would make you much less grumpy. Wait, where is he? Why are you here?”

  “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 la
ughed 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 doo
r 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.