Read Online Better Than Gold by Mary Brady - Free Book Online

heads together. Their glances kept turning to where he and Mia Parker sat on the bench.
    “You’d like to toss me out of town, wouldn’t you?”
    She snapped her eyes to his face. “Yes.”
    He laughed at her honesty. “Then I’d better get started on finding out about what went on in there.”
    “Please do.” She picked up the empty coffee cups and carafe and stood.
    “I need to do the preliminary examine by myself.” And then, so there could be no misunderstanding, he added, “I’d like it if you left for a half hour or so.”
    There was a time in his life when she would have been just the type of woman he would have sought out. She didn’t have to give him any information he had not found at the university, but she did. She could have been bitchy about wanting him to get in and get out, but she wasn’t. Yet, if she had come into his life years ago, he would have hurt her, too, just as he had Mandy.
    “I have a few things to do. I’ll be back in thirty minutes...or so. My phone number is inside, on the back wall.”
    He notched an eyebrow.
    “That way my workers have no excuse not to call me when they need me.”
    She walked quickly away and he wondered how much she had invested in this project, and even more, how valuable a historical site this might turn out to be. The more significant each of these factors, the greater their problems would be.
    With a toss of her head, she flicked the hair from her face and climbed into a small green SUV.
    He wondered how she’d feel about him and the guy in the wall if she knew the state had given the university, and therefore him, the power to keep her site for as long as he deemed necessary. How she’d react if the university asserted its right to the Power of Eminent Domain. With that power, they could buy her building at fair market price, which in this depressed town would pay her only a fraction of what she had already invested in the remodeling.
    She wasn’t even a part of his life and already he could do her harm, he thought, as he went back inside the building. Flashes of old memories, the smiling face of a little boy, the feeling of proud parents when the child was born. And the pain when it all fell apart.

CHAPTER FIVE
    M IA PLUCKED HER keys from under the seat and was about to start her SUV when a shadow blocked the sun coming in the side window. Mickey Thompson, one of the teenagers who had been loitering across the street, grinned in at her, one of those half ogle, half goofy kid grins only a fourteen-year-old could manage.
    She lowered the window. “Mickey, why aren’t you in school?”
    “We got a late start today and the bell don’t ring for another ten minutes.”
    Which meant he’d be late and didn’t much care. “What can I do for you?”
    “Can we go in now that the cops have taken the police tape down?”
    “The building is private property. You don’t get to go in without an invitation.”
    “Who do we have to ask?”
    “Me.”
    “So can we go in?”
    “You can go to school.”
    Another shadow joined Mickey’s. Between Mickey and his friend Tim O’Donnell, they had nearly a bushel of shaggy brown hair.
    “What’d she say?” the other teen asked.
    “She said to go to school.”
    “Now,” Mia said, and as the teens moved off slowly, they balefully eyed the building with secrets they weren’t being allowed to poke around in. The trickle before the flood.
    Right now, she had to get away from Daniel MacCarey and the destruction he could cause in her life, and she needed to marshal her mental troops before she dived back into a pirate-infested pool.
    One person in town would sympathize with her.
    Apex Cleaners, where Monique worked, shared an old aluminum-sided strip mall with the Cove Real Estate Agency, a pharmacy, three other small businesses and two empty stores. As Mia approached, the front door of the cleaners popped open. Mrs. Carmody, the lonely cat lady, emerged and streaked to her car, leaving Monique standing in the