Free Hot Money by Sherryl Woods Page A

can even catch an early movie.”
    “Yeah!” Brian said enthusiastically, clearly bored by the lack of action here and fearing he might actually have to view the museum after all. “Can I have the biggest popcorn they’ve got? With butter?”
    “Only if you’ll share with me,” Michael said. “Molly?”
    “Oh, all right. If I can’t solve this mystery, maybe I can figure out why men are born with absolutely no curiosity whatsoever. The bookstore at Cocowalk probably has a whole section of books on that topic alone.”
    “All written by frustrated women, no doubt,” Michael countered.
    “Exactly,” she agreed. “No man would even be curious enough to try to figure it out.”
    “Are you guys going to stand around arguing all day?” Brian demanded finally. “I’m starved.”
    “You’re always starved,” Molly retorted.
    Michael rested his hand on Brian’s head. “Just another one of those idiosyncrasies we men share, right, kid?”
    “Right,” Brian said.
    Molly wondered, not for the first time, why the Cuban-American cop understood her son so much better than the Harvard-educated lawyer who’d actually fathered him. The easy rapport between Michael and Brian was just one of the things that made him dangerously seductive to her. It would be very easy to fall for a man who was as easy with kids as Michael was, while at the same time exuding enough sex appeal to stir the most jaded female senses. When his hand moved from Brian’s head to her hip, she stopped thinking about anything of substance at all.
    In fact, Molly decided eventually, it would probably take something of the magnitude of another murder to drag her attention away from the deliciously wicked way that faintly intimate gesture made her feel.

CHAPTER
SEVEN
    Obviously, she’d tempted the fates once too often just by thinking that another murder might be the only adequate distraction, Molly realized on Monday morning. Her contemplation of a tedious new work week was interrupted first thing by the one other matter guaranteed to drag her thoughts away from Michael O’Hara, whose unexpected hint of jealousy on Saturday and whose attentiveness on Sunday had tantalized her all night long.
    “Your ex is on line one,” Jeannette said as she punched the hold button on the office phone. She rolled her eyes, indicating that Molly’s ex-husband was probably in one of his surlier moods.
    Molly suspected an already lousy morning was about to get a thousand times worse. She groaned at the prospect of dealing with Hal DeWitt, who was no doubt in the mood to pick a fight after reading the morning paper and its enthusiastic reporting of one more body. Seeing his ex-wife’s name in print was the only reason he ever called her at work.
    “I could tell him you are out, yes?” the Haitian clerk offered, her soft, lilting voice laced with sympathy.
    Molly considered the offer, then shook her head. “No. I’ll just have to deal with him sooner or later anyway. I might as well get it over with.” Reluctantly, she picked up the receiver and injected a note of cheerfulness into her voice, hoping to catch him off guard. “Hi. What’s up?”
    “As if you didn’t know,” Hal grumbled. “You were there when Tessa was killed on Saturday, weren’t you? Right in the middle of things … again.”
    “It was in the paper that I discovered her body,” she said with exaggerated patience, regretting deeply that Ted Ryan had somehow discovered that after all. “Did you expect me to deny it?”
    “I don’t know what to expect from you anymore.”
    His exasperated, aggrieved tone had her twisting the phone cord into a knot. It took everything in her to keep from snapping back with some sharp retort that would only add to his self-righteous annoyance. How had their once-happy relationship deteriorated to this ongoing stream of petty arguments?
    “What’s your point?” she said finally.
    He drew in a deep breath. “Things cannot continue like this,” he