Water. She needed her fountain.
Its flow was endless. Even in the desert. Water sustained life. A nearby mine was flooded with it. Water recycled. It got dirty and came out clean.
Staring at the fountain from the patio doors, she remembered the day she’d brought it home. The first day she’d met Mark. The sight of those muscled legs walking across the couple of feet of lawn toward her. His low, half-amused rumble as he’d offered his help. The way his upper arms had tensed when he lifted the rock basin out of the box...
A door closed.
Her heart pounding in her chest, Addy moved only to take a small sip of wine. Mark was home.
* * *
HE WAS NOT GOING outside. He couldn’t trust himself to do so. All the way home, Mark had talked to himself, preparing for the moment when he’d unlock the door to the duplex and step inside.
Check on Nonnie. That was his first responsibility. The old woman lay flat on her back in bed, her chair at the edge of the mattress beside her. Her cell phone lay perched on the empty pillow next to her head.
He’d told her to keep it close and she had. He smiled.
She was a good woman. Deserved the best he could give her.
Closing the bedroom door softly, he stood outside for a long minute, fighting with himself.
Take a shower. That was second on his list. A long shower. First hot. And then cold. He was in no hurry. Had no place to be and no desire to lie in a dark bedroom and stare at the ceiling.
Dressed in silk basketball shorts and a clean T-shirt—presents to himself purchased with the small portion of his Christmas bonus he’d slated for savings the previous year—he left his flip-flops in his room and wandered barefoot to the kitchen. He wasn’t going outside. Didn’t need shoes.
He needed a beer. And poured himself a glass of milk instead. White, not chocolate. No caffeine.
A baby?
Him, a father?
He had to do the right thing. Had to make damn certain that he was the best dropout Bierly had ever seen.
Unlike his old man, the world would be a better place for him having lived in it.
Life didn’t hand out happiness. A guy had to make his own.
Movement from the patio caught his eye.
Addy was out there.
Waiting for him.
Amazing, how her mere presence compelled him to want to talk to her. As though she could somehow make a difference to the news he’d just received, the mess he’d made. And to go to her under the circumstances, when he might be committed to another woman, was pure selfishness.
There was no point in making matters harder on himself by giving in to temptation. Sitting outside with Addy, sharing his distress, would be a small-picture choice—and make life harder in the long run when he had to shut her out to open the door to Ella.
He watched Addy lean forward on her chair toward the fountain, her forearms resting on her knees. She rubbed the back of her neck.
Talk about selfish...he’d been so wrapped up in his own woes, he hadn’t even thought about what Abby might need. What if she’d had a bad day, too? Needed to talk to him?
What if she was hurting because he’d come on to her and was now leaving her sitting out there without any explanation? She’d know he was home. Probably knew he was standing right there, just a few feet away from her, aware that she was outside. She’d have seen the light go on in his kitchen.
His milk glass in hand, Mark opened the sliding door.
* * *
HE’D GIVEN HER enough time to reassess. To analyze, overthink and talk herself out of the advisability of entering into any kind of intimate relationship with her kind and incredibly sexy neighbor.
She hadn’t done so.
Her nipples hardened against the white cotton of her blouse. Mark’s hands had been gentle, his touch assured, as he’d assembled the small tubular pieces of her fountain. Would they be as attentive to her body?
Would he want her tonight? Or be too tired after a long day of classes and work.
She took in his glass of milk. And then, raising her gaze to his face, crossed her arms over her chest. Her outfit was completely modest to the eye, but she felt far too exposed.
“Bad day?” she asked, wishing her wine wasn’t on the table between them, signaling the more libatious evening she’d envisioned.
He stood looking at her for a few very long seconds before picking up his chair and setting it down next to her. “Long day.” The way he said it, his reply sounded like an understatement.
“You didn’t get a lot of sleep this weekend.”
Looking slightly morose, he stared out at the yard. Of course, it was dark and most of the yard was in shadows.
“How’s Nonnie?” It had only been an hour since she’d been next door.
“Fine. Asleep and breathing normally.”
“She ate a good lunch. Even had seconds.”
“Thirds,” Mark said, sending her a weary smile. “I just noticed that the leftover chicken salad is gone from the fridge.”
Gran had taught her how to make it. The secret was in the grapes, and using leeks instead of onion. “I left out the almonds and water chestnuts,” she said aloud, wondering what was wrong with Mark. “I wasn’t sure she should have them.”
“She loves nuts. And she doesn’t have any real dietary restrictions.”
She turned her focus to the stream of water sluicing over river rock a few feet away and asked, “Have I done something to offend you?”
“Hell, no!” Her head swung his way at the exuberance of his reply and their gazes met for the first time since he’d appeared. Met and held.
“What’s wrong?”
“For the first time in my life I really, really want something I can’t have.”
An odd statement coming from someone who’d grown up so poor he couldn’t complete his education. Who’d been a working man when most boys were still kids.
“What do you want that you can’t have?”
Their gazes were still locked and his vivid blue eyes were cooking up her insides.
“You.”
Throat dry, she asked, “Why can’t you have me?”
He broke eye contact, and Addy tensed. Something was definitely wrong.
He’d heard about her. Her mind filled in the blanks he was leaving.
Somehow her cover had been broken. He knew she’d been lying to him. And he wasn’t going to forgive her.
She didn’t blame him.
“I got a phone call on the way home tonight....”
Someone had called him to tell him about her? Who? Nonnie? The older woman was as sharp as they came. And spent more time on the internet than Addy did.
But what could Nonnie have found? There were no pictures of her on the internet. Nothing to tie her to her practice in Colorado. She’d searched for herself on Google, just to be sure, after Will and Sheriff Richards had both told her that they’d performed their own internet searches.
She didn’t know what to say. And as a lawyer, she knew that the best defense was silence.
It wasn’t as if she could explain. The reasons for her silence were still valid. Intact. No matter what Will Parsons had done, or who he’d become. Until she had a chance to speak with him, or prove that he’d actually done something criminal, until she told him that she was done, then she was under personal oath to him.
Even if the whole town found out who she was, she still couldn’t
tell them why she’d pretended to be someone else.
“It was from Ella.”
She stared. “Ella?” He’d heard from his ex-girlfriend? Had Mark told Ella about Adele? Was the woman jealous? Had she set out to find everything she could about the woman who was stealing Mark away from her? And...
No.
Wrapping her arms around her middle, Addy looked away from the man who’d grown to mean far too much to her in such a short span of time. She wasn’t thinking rationally.
Mark’s unusual silence spoke of a huge upset, but it didn’t have to do with her.
That’s when she remembered the house. She’d doubted Nonnie’s assurance that an entire town would keep her secret from her grandson. Nonnie must not have accounted for Mark’s ex-girlfriend.
But why would the sale of the house mean that he couldn’t have Addy?
Unless he’d confronted Nonnie already, and his grandmother had told him that Addy knew about the sale.
It could appear that she’d chosen to be loyal to Nonnie over Mark....
Feeling like a kid in the principal’s office, but with the need deeply ingrained to have all the facts before speaking, she asked, “What did Ella say, Mark?”
“I...” She was looking at him and he turned back to her. “I have a question to ask you first, if I may.”
The evening air was balmy. She was sweating. “Of course.”
“In your opinion, if you told someone something that you meant at the time, are you beholden to the promise in the future?”
She frowned, but also welcomed the reprieve from her self-castigation. “Is this a rhetorical question?”
“For now.”
It was a testimony to the state of her weakness for this man that she was so eager to accept the conversation at face value. “I think that depends on what you told and to whom. I mean, there’s no way we can be accountable to everything we’ve ever said to everyone we’ve ever known. People change. Situations change. But if, say, you told someone in the past that you’d pay them back a loan, then yes, in my opinion, in the future you are beholden to that promise.”
“I asked Ella to marry me.”
“Tonight?”
“No.”
“You mean the time you already told me about? Before you moved to Shelter Valley?”
“Yes.”
“She turned you down.”
“She wants to take that back.”
“She wants to marry you?” No! She’d given Mark up. She couldn’t just waltz back in and lay claim to him. He was Addy’s now.
Oh, God.
“Yes.” An unequivocal yes.
“Do you want to marry her?”
That was what this was about? Mark was getting back with his ex and felt badly for what he was doing to Addy? This wasn’t about something she’d done?
“No.”
Oh. Well, then... “You can’t possibly think that you’re beholden to a question asked in another place, in another time, Mark.”
Maybe, technically, she shouldn’t be the one discussing this with him. She had a definite conflict of interest.
“She turned you down. That ended the extent of the offer.” In every legal aspect. But Mark was a man of honor, which was why Addy was so drawn to him.
“I told her that I’d be back.”
“Back to Bierly. Did you promise to hold the offer of marriage open? Or say that you wouldn’t see anyone else?”
“No.”
Addy’s shoulders relaxed while her lower body warmed in an entirely good way. “And you’re sure you don’t want to marry her?”
He looked her straight in the eye.
“Absolutely.”
A smile started from deep inside of her and slowly infused its way through her being, driving Addy to act without thinking. Taking hold of his arm where it rested on the chair only a foot away from hers, she stood and leaned over him, planting her lips on his.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SWEET HEAVEN. Mark’s body hardened and his mind shut down as his arms closed around the woman, settling her on his lap. She fit as if she was made for him. And not just body to body.
Her taste, her warmth, the tiny purring sound she made...this was what Hollywood movies were made about.
Like the rest of his life in Shelter Valley, the kiss was more than anything he’d ever experienced. Ever imagined.
Addy wrapped her arms all the way around his neck, pulling his mouth more fully against hers, darting her tongue around his lips and inside. He had to have her.
The sensation was animalistic. Instinctive. He kissed her hard and fast, and soft and sweet. Escaping into her, into the world they’d somehow created out of two chairs and a slab of cement.
Time didn’t exist. Place had no meaning. There was Addy. And there was him. As she clung to him, he moved his hands up and down her back, her shape taking form in his palms, becoming a memory he would never lose. He was learning her, feeling her, because he had to know her in every way.
She wasn’t wearing a bra.
He was hard enough to explode and he tightened some more. She was unfettered. For him. The invitation beckoned him beyond rational thought. With one hand supporting her back, he slid his other hand between them, running it beneath her blouse and up her side to the bottom of the swell taunting him. And then slowly up, feeling the softness, the heaviness, of her femininity until he finally reached her nipple. It was hard. He teased it with his fingers and his mouth ached to taste it.
Addy moaned. And moved, opening herself up more fully to him. “Please, Mark...”
Please, Mark. Words he’d heard earlier that night. They’d jabbed and left a wound.
Pulling his mouth away from Addy’s, Mark stood and placed her back in her chair. “I can’t,” he said, his back to her as he stared into the darkness of the yard and willed his body under control. He wasn’t turning around until he could trust himself to resist the temptation of the moments of pure bliss that Addy was offering him.
But they’d only be moments, she’d said so herself. She couldn’t promise anything more than the moment.
And he couldn’t give her anything more.
“I’m sorry.”
He swung around. “For what?”
Shrugging, she motioned toward his empty chair. “Coming on to you like that. I shouldn’t have... I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never behaved like that before.”
With his hands in his pockets holding the fabric of his shorts away from his erection, Mark walked out into the yard and then turned to face her. “Don’t be sorry,” he said, confusion and disappointment giving the words more passion than he’d intended. “Ever. For that,” he added. “That was the best... It was a kiss I’ll never forget.”
“But you’re going to marry Ella, aren’t you?”
He had to tell her about the baby. He was an honest man. And had never known honor to cost so much.
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t. Not unless you love her.”
“You know how I feel about love.”
“Right, you don’t believe in it.”
“In the beginning people mistake lust for love. Kind of like the excitement and thrill of getting a new big-screen TV.” He sounded like a moron. “And then the newness wears off and all that’s left is disillusionment and disappointment. It’s far better to be realistic. To look life head-on, see what’s really there, and make the best of it.”
&nb
sp; “I don’t agree.”
He couldn’t help that. You couldn’t change what a lifetime of living had taught you.
“Love is something unseen. Something that exists whether you acknowledge it or not. Whether you welcome it or not.” She sounded pretty sure of herself.
“You know this, how?”
“There’s no proof, Mark. Unless you look at people, at their actions, their choices. Love is evident in them.”
“I meant, personally. You live alone. By your own admission, you’ve never been in a serious relationship. So how do you know?” Her own parents certainly had not been a good example of love.
“I loved Gran. My mother loved my father. And I know that love is the power that holds people together after the newness wears off. It’s the need to be together no matter what comes your way. It’s growing and changing together through life’s challenges. Love is what lets a man look at his wife naked after twenty years of marriage and still find her beautiful. It’s what lets an old woman look at her wrinkled and hunched husband and still want only him right by her side.”
She lived alone. Always had. “How do you know?” She sounded like a dreamer. And he saw no evidence in her life to prove any different.
“I just do.”
“So you think that if I don’t feel this love for Ella I shouldn’t marry her even though I gave her my word I wouldn’t desert her?”
“I think that if you don’t love her, it’s not fair to her or to yourself to marry her. Now is the time to acknowledge that the relationship doesn’t offer you what you need—not after you’re married.”
“How do you know it wouldn’t offer me what I need?” He’d been with Ella a lot longer than he’d known Addy. Ella knew Mark Heber. And until he’d kidded himself that he could suddenly have a brand-new life, until he’d let Nonnie convince him that they could be something they weren’t, he’d been completely content to marry Ella.
Addy joined him on the grass, placing herself directly in front of him until their noses were almost touching. “I know because of what just happened over there,” she said. He couldn’t look back at the patio. “If Ella had what it will take to keep you faithful to her for the rest of your lives, then you wouldn’t have been able to respond to me like that.”
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