Free The Stranger: The Heroes of Heyday (Harlequin Superromance No. 1266) by Kathleen O`Brien Page B

eyes. She suddenly found herself trying to imagine how his voice would sound if it had been mechanically altered.
    He was trying to pick out an antique book about thecircus to give a friend he wanted to impress, and he’d been combing through Mallory’s special collection for two hours now. She couldn’t just leave him here alone. He was heavy-handed and had already almost torn one of the old, fragile pages.
    So, though she’d much rather be back in Calliope Corner, watching Binky act out Madeline’s Rescue, she was forced to stay and listen to Joe criticize the books in a transparent effort to shame her into lowering the prices.
    â€œIs this mildew? Oh, that’s too bad,” Joe was saying as he leafed through a lovely copy of A Scotch Circus. “You know what that will do to any other books on the same shelf.”
    Mallory didn’t answer. Her vision was pretty good, and she saw no discoloration at all. And she wasn’t lowering the price on that one, even if it was speckled brown clear through from endpaper to endpaper.
    Stifling a yawn, she scanned the store, looking for Wally. Maybe she could get him to babysit Joe for a while.
    Instead, she noticed Slip Stanton standing over by the magazines, talking to a couple of other men, one of whom was, she saw with dismay, Tyler Balfour.
    Great. All her favorite people in the store at once. Seeing them together surprised her—Slip was hardly Tyler Balfour’s type. But then she made the connection. Slip had just bought the Black and White Lounge from Tyler.
    That made Slip the newest member of the Downtown Merchants Association. Which didn’t make any of the old members very happy.
    He seemed to feel her attention on him, and looked up with a smile. She was surprised to see that the gold tooth he’d always had in the front was gone. He must have realized that, while it might have looked appropriately roguish at the Absolutely Nowhere, his bar on the outskirts of Heyday, here in the chamber of commerce crowd it marked him as an outsider.
    â€œHey there, Mallory,” he said, moving away from Tyler who, Mallory noticed, made no move to follow.
    Slip was holding out several long white pieces of paper. “I’m giving away some free dinners at the Black and White. Just to the other merchants on the street. Want a couple?”
    Mallory tried to look pleased, but everyone knew about the lounge’s dreadful food. “Well,” she said, “I usually work right through dinner.”
    He thrust them forward another couple of inches. “Take some anyhow. We’re open late. We’ve completely overhauled the menu, and I gotta get the word out things have changed for the better.”
    Reluctantly she took them, scanning her mind for anyone she could give them to. Wally was always broke, always scrounging for a free meal. But he was only eighteen and wouldn’t be able to order the stiff drinks necessary to help him choke down the nasty fare.
    â€œHey, your sister’s coming to town today, isn’t she?” Slip grinned and added another ticket to the stack.“Bring her with you. If she’s not too good for us here in Heyday, that is. Now that she’s marrying into the big time.”
    His tone had an edge of bitterness, and Mallory wondered just how far this man’s outsider complex might go. She tried out his voice in her mind, too. If he distorted it electronically, how would it sound?
    Linda Tremel, who had been standing at the register looking at greeting cards and, obviously, eavesdropping suddenly made a rude noise. “She’d better not start thinking she’s too good for Heyday! Just because you marry into the big time doesn’t mean you get to stay there.”
    Linda jammed one of the cards back into its slot and slapped two more onto the counter. “It’s not quite ‘till death do us part’ in their world. It’s more like ‘till boredom or a