Page 3 of Dangerous December
Keeley’s irrepressible grin matched the sparkle in her eyes. “Maybe she wanted to divide it up.”
“I’m sure she wasted no time amending her will after our divorce. She always thought he’d married down the social scale and way too young, even though he was twenty-one. “
“She sounds like a peach.”
“Honestly,” Beth said with a rueful laugh, “she was probably right on both counts.”
“Well, he was lucky to find someone like you,” Sophie said staunchly.
“My own mother wasn’t any happier about our marriage, believe me.” Beth shrugged. “I’ll show up for the reading. Then I’ll slip away so Dev and the lawyer can get down to business. If I can just get past this next week, everything should go back to normal. I hope.”
Dev wearily dropped his duffel bag at his feet, fished a key out of his pocket, and opened the front door of the empty Walker building to look inside.
The massive limestone walls of the two-story structure had stood solid and uncompromising for well over a hundred years, home to everything from a turn-of-the-century wood mill, to a medical office, and finally the law offices of a long-departed attorney and his partners back in 2010.
This one was at one end of a block-long row of four large buildings his parents had owned, which all backed up to Agate Creek.
The middle two buildings had been leased as storage for the past few years, though one was now empty. The bookstore was the only busy commercial establishment left at this end of Hawthorne Avenue.
At that thought, he sighed.
After the reading of his mother’s will, he would need to make some hard decisions about the family home and theseproperties. And he’d need to do it fast before he shipped out to the Middle East again.
But what would happen to Beth’s beloved store if he sold out? He knew she couldn’t possibly have the money to buy it. If the new owners offered to lease it, it could end up far beyond her means.
He took a step into the empty building and surveyed the trash, old lumber, and crumbling boxes that had accumulated inside over the years.
During some of his long, cold, and deathly quiet nights on recon missions since his mother’s death, he’d sometimes let his mind wander back to these buildings.
Since this one had been vacant for a few years, would it even attract buyers?
Yet it seemed like a perfect location for a fine restaurant, or an upscale clothing store of some kind.
Or even better, a high-adventure sporting goods store, with kayak and canoe rentals handled at the walk-out basement level, where customers could launch a few yards from the back door.
Surely the increasing adventure-based tourism in the area would draw buyers with something like that in mind.
He stifled a flash of regret at imagining the place belonging to someone else. Still, he certainly wasn’t planning to stay in town, much less start a business.
Sentiment wouldn’t pay the real estate taxes at the end of the year or the cost of ongoing upkeep.
Selling it to the right buyers could even bring more traffic to this secluded street and help Beth’s bookstore in the process, which would all be for the good.
Running a hand over the rough stone walls, he tried to force her from his thoughts, but her image stayed there—wounded, vulnerable, betrayed—with shock and pain in her eyes when he’d demanded a divorce and then walked out of her life.
Maybe he could finally absolve some of his own guilt if he were to set a rock-bottom price and a no-interest payment contract, to ensure that she could buy her beloved building. He owed her that and more for how badly he’d treated her.
Ifshe was even willing to talk to him about it. He had no doubts about her reaction when they met face-to-face at the lawyer’s office.
Her formal, distant words of sympathy at his mother’s funeral marked a chasm between them that would never heal.
He’d be lucky if she even showed up. But what did he expect, after what he’d done to her?
She was a forever kind of woman. She’d deserved so much more than being married to someone as damaged as he was.
At the oddly magnified sound of approaching footsteps, he lifted a hand to adjust his new hearing aid and froze, his senses still hyperalert as he fought back a flashback to mortar fire and an explosion of rock and steel.
For a split second, he couldn’t draw breath in that choking dust.
