“If I don’t remain faithful, that is my fault, not the fault of the woman I’m with. It’s a product of my own character. Something lacking within me. And I can assure you, when I marry, I will be faithful.”
“I don’t doubt that, and to an extent it’s a reflection of who you are. But don’t you see, Mark? If you marry Ella knowing that you don’t want to—and you’ve already admitted you don’t want to—then, in essence, you’re lying to her. If it’s any marriage at all, at some point she’s going to sense that she doesn’t do it for you.”
I won’t be good enough for you anymore. Ella’s words from that night at the lake came back to him. He’d denied her claim at the time. And he’d been certain he knew what he was talking about.
He hadn’t met Addy yet.
“I don’t know a woman who’d be happy knowing her husband didn’t want to marry her, knowing that she didn’t have his whole heart. She’d spend her whole life feeling like she wasn’t good enough.”
“You don’t understand.” But he wanted the out she was handing him. So badly he almost threw thirty years of right living to the side and took it.
“It’s not fair to Ella, either, marrying her when you don’t want to. You’re robbing her of any chance of finding a man who’d adore her enough to still find her beautiful after twenty years of marriage.”
Do you love me? Ella had asked right before breaking up with him. He’d said yes because he loved her as much as he’d ever loved anyone besides Nonnie.
He’d loved Ella as much as he thought it possible to love anyone.
Maybe he still did. His mind had the thought and his entire being revolted against it. He wasn’t in love with Ella. At the moment, he wasn’t even all that fond of her.
The way he felt about Ella was nothing compared to the way he felt about Addy.
The thought made him despicable.
And it wasn’t fair to Ella at all. Addy was right about one thing. He couldn’t marry Ella under false pretenses.
He had to tell her that he didn’t want to marry her.
Addy stepped closer, lifting her face to his. And Mark looked deeply into the eyes of the woman who’d stolen a part of him without his even knowing what she was about.
“Ella’s pregnant.”
* * *
ADDY WOKE UP in a bad mood the next morning. She didn’t want to be in Shelter Valley. She didn’t want to know if Will Parsons was guilty of discrimination or nepotism. And she most certainly did not want Mark Heber to marry Ella from Bierly.
Thirty seconds after she opened her eyes she was on her feet. She was going to stay in Shelter Valley until her job there was done. She was going to do everything she could to either protect Will Parsons from wrongful accusation or prepare him for any defense he might need—though if he was guilty, she would be turning over her research to another attorney of his choosing.
And she was going to be the friend to Mark Heber that she’d told him she would be. In her shock the night before, she hadn’t been able to put her heart back into the safe compartment where she’d kept it since the night her mother and brother died. She’d told him that she’d be around whenever he needed her. That, since they were two ships passing in the night, she’d be a good sounding board as he sorted through the choices he had to make.
Truth was, she hadn’t been able to turn her back on him. She cared too much.
Not that caring was going to do her a damn bit of good. Mark knew her as Adele, not as Adrianna. There was no way he’d ever forgive her once he found out about her deception.
There was no possible future for the two of them.
But she cared. So much that her involvement with Mark wasn’t about what he could give to her—it wasn’t about the future. He needed a friend now. And for whatever reason, he’d chosen her. She had something that he wanted. Or needed.
And she had to give it to him.
Which was why, when he knocked on her door just after ten that morning, telling her that Nonnie had gone down for a nap and asking if he could come in, she opened her door wider and stepped back.
“You do your homework at the kitchen table.” He nodded toward the computer and folders there, making her nervous. Her work for Will was done mostly on the computer and the evidence she was collecting was in secure folders, but she’d been collecting hard copy files, too.
“Yeah,” she said, and added, “I can hear the fountain better from there.”
Mark nodded again, obviously distracted.
“Did you get any sleep?”
He’d gone inside just a few minutes after delivering his bombshell.
“Very little.”
She hadn’t slept a lot, either.
Mark stood in the middle of her living room, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, stretching the fabric of his jeans across his groin.
She wished she knew what to do for him. “You have to work today?”
“No. I told Nonnie I’d take her for a drive. She wants to see some town called Tortilla Flat. It’s about an hour from Phoenix, straight up the mountain. One of the ladies who visited this week told her about it. Apparently the views on the way up are incredible.” There was no enthusiasm in his tone.
Or on his face, either.
“It will be good for her to get out.”
“You want to come along?”
“I have homework to do here.” She motioned toward the laptop.
“If I hadn’t told you that Ella was pregnant would you have come?”
Honesty, Adele. “Yes.”
He dropped to the edge of her sofa, legs spread, elbows on his knees and hands clasped.
“I have to ask you something.”
“Okay.” Addy sat, too. In the chair perpendicular to him. She couldn’t get too close to him. “If Nonnie’s blood pressure hadn’t dropped, if we’d gone out that night, would you have made love with me?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t take sex lightly.”
“No.”
“It’s logical to conclude, then, that I mean something to you.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her. She looked back. His struggle was palpable. And she knew what she had to do.
“It wouldn’t have gone anywhere, Mark. Even if we’d made love...”
“I know you think that, but—”
Shaking her head, she cut him off. “I don’t just think it. I know it.”
His grin had her wanting to crawl into his lap and make the world go away. Forever if she could.
A day alone with Mark, becoming one with him, might be worth giving up a lifetime of what she had to go back to in Colorado.
Or Shelter Valley was getting to her worse than she knew. She wasn’t herself. Maybe her all-consuming attraction to this man was nothing more than a grown-up reaction to the memories the place stirred up. Memories of feeling alone and scared and clingy.
“You’ve got at least four years in Shelter Valley, Mark. I can’t stay here.”
“I know you talked about money issues...”
“There’s that and...this whole small-town thing. I miss the city.” It was lame, but it was the best she could do without jeopardizing her cover. She couldn’t have him thinking, even for a second, that Adele Kennedy would be around long-term.
Especially now that he had Ella’s situation to deal with, life decisions of his own to make.
“I’ll be staying until the end of the semester, bu
t that’s it,” she said, meaning every word. One semester of classes was enough to give her an idea about how various students were regarded and treated. She’d stay up all night for as many nights as it took to get through all the records and files and paperwork.
And then she had to get out of town before she lost every part of herself.
* * *
MARK SAT IN Addy’s living room, feeling her words as though they were nails in his coffin.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes wide and moist.
“It’s not as if I’m free, anyway.” He said the words aloud. Having just come off the second worst night of his life—the first being the night after he’d learned about Nonnie’s MS—he was prepared to face what he had to do.
“You’ve talked to Ella, then? Decided to marry her?” Addy’s voice was calm, collected.
“I haven’t talked to her, no. But I know that if she’s carrying my child, I will do what’s right by her. And the baby.”
“What’s right and marriage are not necessarily synonymous.”
In Bierly they were.
“You said ‘if.’ You think there’s a chance she’s lying to you?”
“Yeah. But I don’t put a lot of stock in the chance. More like wishful thinking.”
“More like you’re trying to save yourself from making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“I’m being greedy. Wanting more than I’ve been given.”
“It’s human nature to want more. Healthy to want more. It’s what keeps us working hard, contributing to society. Wanting more motivates us to get up every morning and do everything we can do to achieve our goals.”
“One of the first things I do in the morning when I get up is shave. That requires looking in the mirror.” He grinned at her. And wondered how he could be feeling so low and enjoying the moment at the same time.
Addy sat down on the other end of the couch. Close enough to touch.
“I paid a heavy price for my self-respect,” he told her. “I don’t negotiate with it.”
“Paid how?”
“When I first realized I was going to have to quit school to take care of Nonnie because her care was going to require more money than we had and I was going to have to go to work full-time, I was angry. Bitter.”
“Both understandable emotions. You were a sixteen-year-old kid with the world on your shoulders while most kids were worrying about what they were going to do to have fun in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Nonnie insisted that I don’t quit school, but back then she was really sick. She couldn’t stay out of bed for more than an hour. There was no way she could work. The co-pays were too much. She knew as well as I did that we weren’t going to make it unless I got a full-time job.”
He hung his head and then raised it again.
“I was also ashamed. Of Nonnie, my mother. Ashamed of who I was.” Something about this woman was making him crazy. Or right for the first time in his life. Hearing his thoughts out loud, for the first time ever, he had a second’s irrational thought that lightning might strike him down. “All my life I’d been trying to pretend that the town didn’t look down on us. That the kids at school didn’t make snide comments about us being white trash. I left the hospital the night that Nonnie was diagnosed and just kept on going. I didn’t look back. More to the point, I didn’t call. Nonnie was lying there in a hospital bed, unable to get up, let alone come after me, and I didn’t even call to let her know I was okay.”
“Where’d you go?”
“The woods at first. And then to Charleston. I had no cash, no food. I couldn’t get a real job because I was certain the cops were looking for me as a runaway. I slept wherever I could find shelter and stole what food I had to eat. Eventually, I went to the only place I knew where folks would be friendly, maybe help a guy out—a local bar. I was also looking for an underground card game. My friends and I had been playing poker in our basements for years and I thought I was pretty good.”
“No, Mark.” Addy looked stricken. He looked away.
Minutes passed. And Mark knew for certain what he’d realized the night before. You were who you were. You could move on. Move out. Move past. But the person you’d been, the things you’d seen and done, kept up with you.
“When my grandmother couldn’t reach me for a couple of days she checked herself out of the hospital and called a neighbor to come get her. She could barely walk but she was determined to find me.”
“How long did it take?”
“A couple of weeks.” He’d told himself that he’d had to leave. Nonnie had sacrificed everything for him. He couldn’t be more of a drain on her now that she was ill.
He’d told himself a lot of things. Most of them bogus.
“She’d have found me sooner, but she was afraid to report me missing, sure that they’d take me away, put me in the system. So while I was hiding from the cops, afraid they’d haul me in as a runaway, the cops weren’t even looking for me.”
“Nonnie still wanted you with her.”
The truth was he’d run because he’d been scared as hell that his grandmother wouldn’t want him anymore, that she’d turn him over to the authorities and he’d have no say what happened to him, or what direction his life would take.
So he’d taken his life in his own hands and flushed it down the toilet.
Or would have if she hadn’t found him.
“Thank God she knew me so well,” he said. “She hadn’t called the cops, but she’d told people she knew in the bar community about me in nearby cities. A couple of days after I’d hit that first bar in Charleston, someone spotted me and called Nonnie.”
“I’m guessing you slept in your own bed that night?”
“With a very sore hide.” And a sick soul. He’d run out on the one person who’d been there for him at her time of greatest need.
Nonnie had said she’d understood. She’d never blamed him. But he’d seen the sadness in her eyes.
“From that night on, I swore that I would not disappoint her, or myself, again. I am not like my parents. I don’t run. I face the music, no matter how loud or bad it gets.”
He’d learned that night to be grateful for what he had. And to spend his energy making the world around him better rather than always thinking about greener grass.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MARK WAS GOING to marry Ella. Addy was convinced, even if he wasn’t. And since he couldn’t leave Shelter Valley until he could either afford to pay back his scholarship, or until he graduated, he was going to be married, raising a kid, right on the other side of the wall from her.
There was no way she was going to live next door to a married man she had the hots for. That wasn’t good, even as things stood in the present.
Knowing he was going to be a father had in no way diminished how much she wanted Mark Heber for herself. And she had absolutely nothing to offer him but the one thing he hated most. Lies.
Over the next several days she did her homework, attended classes and plowed through the rest of the personnel files, stopping when she found an M she’d missed. Todd Moore. She was pretty sure she’d met him. As she remembered it, he and his wife, Martha, had been Will and Becca’s best friends.
And the Montford Board of Trustees, on recommendation from their president, Will Parsons had hired Todd as a professor of psychology straight out of college.
She perused the first couple of pages of the personnel file carefully
. Todd’s performance reviews were stellar. His professorial ratings in the top quarter.
And...
She read and then reread.
Todd had been terminated. By Will Parsons. For having an illicit affair with one of his students—a girl half his age.
Will had fired his best friend.
That was good.
And now she had to see who’d also applied for the psychology professorship that had been awarded, on Will’s recommendation, to Will’s best friend. Any one of those applicants could argue favoritism. And if they were bitter enough...
She visited Nonnie every day—always when she was certain that Mark wasn’t home—and she stayed inside at night.
And on Friday morning, when she got out of the shower, she pulled on a pair of black leggings, something she usually wore under her exercise shorts, and a thigh-length blouse, belted it at the waist with black leather and finished the outfit with black wedged sandals. She kept her hair down, curled it and put on twice the makeup she usually wore.
Before leaving the house, she doused herself in perfume. And then she darted to her car.
She left botany class fifteen minutes early, too, checking to make certain Mark wasn’t leaning against the building outside before hurrying back to her car and driving over to the performing arts center for the drama club meeting.
She sat at the front of the theater, right beneath the eye of Matt Sheffield, who was standing in front of them on the stage. When they broke up into small groups to role-play, she made certain that she was in the professor’s group. And she stayed after the meeting, following him into the sound room under the guise of working on a theater article for the school newspaper.
She stood close to him. Too close. He backed up. She moved forward, touching his thigh with her hand.
He excused her from the drama club.
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