“My rent is prepaid through the end of the year.”
“Can you sublet it? It’s prohibited in my contract.”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at him, but her eyes seemed almost vacant. He felt like he was seeing a stranger.
“You aren’t drinking your wine.”
Picking up her glass, she sipped and said, “You aren’t drinking yours, either.”
“I want to know what’s going on.”
To her credit, she didn’t immediately assure him that everything was fine. She didn’t say anything, which wasn’t like her.
“Is it the nightmares? Did you have a bad night last night?”
Or had something else happened to her? A crime that merited calling the sheriff? Dear God, had she been raped?
Shaking her head, she smiled. Sort of. Her entire expression looked...broken. “I haven’t had a nightmare in over a week. I’m out here tonight because I have to speak with you about something.”
“Addy, whatever is wrong, we can deal with it.” Did he sound as lovesick as he felt?
How did a guy who didn’t believe in love feel lovesick?
“I know we haven’t known each other long, but I think you’ll agree that we’ve got something between us.”
He held her gaze, and she nodded.
Feeling like he’d won a battle in a war he hadn’t yet been drafted for, he marched onward, as any good soldier would do. “I’m not the type of guy who shies away from trouble,” he told her. “If nothing else, I’m your friend. I’ll do whatever I can to help you in any way I can. I just need to know what’s bothering you.”
“Would you please quit being so damned nice?” It was her voice, in a tone he’d never heard.
Her eyes glistened and Mark didn’t want to hear any more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ADDY COULD DEAL with her own pain. She’d survived being nearly burned alive by her father. Survived listening to Ely’s screams—and then the silence as her brother died. Survived losing her mother. And knowing that her father had set them all on fire.
She had no idea how to deal with knowing she’d caused someone else pain—someone she loved. If nothing else, this moment was teaching her something very clear about herself. She was nothing like her father.
“At least tell me this...” Mark’s gaze was shadowed, but his concern was obvious as he turned toward her.
“What?”
“Did something happen to you today? Were you...molested in any way?”
“No! Of course not. I’d have told you...”
She stopped when she realized she’d pretty much admitted that she was withholding information from him.
Mark stood.
“Where are you going?”
Leaving his nearly full glass of wine on the table, he motioned toward his side of the duplex they’d shared for such a short time. In some ways that time seemed like forever.
A forever that she wanted more than anything else in life.
“I’ve got homework to do.”
“Please, stay.”
Watching her, his hands in his pockets, Mark didn’t move—either to leave, or to sit.
“Please,” she said again. She owed him this. Now. Before a new day dawned and he heard about it from someone else.
He sat. And her heart was more his than ever. His and shattering at the same time.
“I’m sorry for...” Everything. So, so sorry. “My mood,” she finished lamely. She wasn’t ready. How did one prepare to obliterate someone’s faith in them?
She had no plan. As hard as she’d tried to figure out the best way to do this, the right way to handle the quagmire her life had become, she’d come up empty. It was the case of her life and she had no winning argument.
It didn’t matter how she attempted to explain herself, hearing the words in her mind, they just sounded like excuses.
He sat a mere foot away from her. She could smell his musky cologne and wondered if he’d put it on just for her.
“You said you have something to tell me.”
Yes. And she still didn’t have the words. The way. She didn’t know how to minimize his pain. How to make things right.
* * *
A PHONE RANG in the distance.
“That’s my cell,” Addy said, setting down her glass as she jumped up. “I have to get it.”
At ten o’clock at night? The call lasted less than five minutes. One look at Addy’s face as she came back outside and he knew that something had gone wrong.
Really wrong.
* * *
WILL HAD RECEIVED another threat. She’d called Greg Richards once and hung up, letting him know that Susan Farley had not met Montford’s entrance standards. She hadn’t expected to hear back from him.
Hadn’t even known it was him when she’d heard her prepaid cell phone ring. She’d never had a call on the thing.
She hadn’t recognized the number on the caller display when she’d run inside to get the phone.
But she’d answered because only Will and the sheriff knew the number.
Greg had purchased a prepaid cell, as well. Just in case.
The latest letter had arrived at Will’s home. In his personal mail. There was no return address. It had a Phoenix postmark and was typed on the same generic letterhead. It, too, stated that Will should be liquefying his assets as he’d soon be ordered to pay a large sum of money.
Who the orders would be coming from was unclear. Ordered by an extortionist? Or by the courts?
The new letter had arrived on the same day Addy had met with Greg and turned over the list of names she’d compiled. As though the person behind it knew she was closing in. To hear that there’d been another letter had been upsetting enough. But that hadn’t been the worst of Greg Richards’s news. He’d read to her the dates of all three letters, asking her to check them against the spreadsheets she’d compiled that afternoon—just in case anything popped.
Something had.
The date of the first letter coincided with the week Mark Heber had accepted Montford’s offer of admission.
She hadn’t shared the news with Greg Richards. Not tonight. Tomorrow was soon enough. And she hadn’t told the sheriff about the ten other people who’d been granted entrance into the university without qualifying to be there. He knew about Susan. That was all.
“I won’t be leaving this weekend,” she said, picking up her glass of wine as she took her seat next to Mark.
But he might be. Oh, not that weekend. But before the semester was out. Unless Addy could figure out a way to stop that from happening.
“You got a call about school this late at night?”
Another mistake. “I... Can we talk about this tomorrow?”
“Yes.” She tried to look away from the intensity in his gaze but didn’t have the strength. Or the will.
He’d once told her that emotions messing with thought was the cause behind poor choices. He’d said it one time when they’d been talking about Ella. Until now, Addy’s emotions had been so firmly under wrap that they’d never had the opportunity to interfere with her thought processes.
Will wanted her to stay in Shelter Valley. Greg agreed that, for now, it was in the best interests of the case to have Addy there.
And unbeknownst to both of them, Mark Heber’s scholarship had just become a major red flag lawsuit in her investigation.
“I... There’s so much I need to say, but right now I’m not at
liberty to do that and...”
So much for being trusted with an undercover assignment.
Or maybe it was just that this was Mark.
And she wanted him to know.
* * *
MARK DIDN’T WANT to go to bed alone. Not with the sight and smell and sound of the woman next door so firmly ingrained in him that he couldn’t walk away.
She was involved in something she wasn’t at liberty to talk about. And she’d suddenly decided not to even finish out the semester. That didn’t sound anything but bad.
He was losing her so quickly. Not that he’d ever expected permanence. They’d made that clear from the beginning. He’d just thought he’d have more time....
“I want to make love with you tonight.” He put it right out there.
She didn’t gasp or run away. She didn’t even slosh her wine over the side of her glass. She sipped slowly, watching him over the rim, and then said, “We were going to wait until we were both in a position to do it right.”
She hadn’t said no.
“That was before.”
“There’d be so much more potential for us to get hurt.”
“I don’t know about you, Addy, but my body’s hurting so much now I can’t possibly see how waiting any longer is going to do anything but hurt more.”
His mouth was dry and his penis was hard. “Making love will create a bond between us, a deeper bond. Maybe it’s what we need to hold us together through whatever lies ahead,” he said.
Her eyes filled up. “Your timing is... You say the most incredible things.”
“I could just be trying to justify it because I’m horny as hell.” Reaching for her hand, he held it lightly. “If I’m wrong, please say so, but I’m worried that tonight might be our only chance at the ‘future someday’ that we talked about. If we let this chance go, we might never find each other again.”
“And you think that if we make love, we will?”
“I don’t know, but it makes sense to me that we’d have a better chance at it.”
“You might hate me at some point in the near future.”
There was no chance of that.
“I seriously doubt it. But even if I did, then at least we’d have made a great memory.”
She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. The tears in her eyes and the smile on her face told him all he really needed to know.
* * *
ADDY DIDN’T HAVE a chance to think about the situation. She leaned in to kiss him without giving it any forethought. His lips had been there and they’d needed her lips on them.
And then only sensation existed. His mouth, larger than hers, covering hers, tenderly coaxing her lips apart. His tongue, touching her lips softly, inviting and waiting. Her tongue met his and she became someone new. Someone stronger. Bolder.
Someone who wasn’t ashamed to spread her legs and straddle his knee, to open herself up to whatever he had in mind for her.
She was moist and needy and reaching for him. Her nipples tingled, awaiting his touch, his mouth. She pictured him naked, above her, below her, and was shocked at the images she conjured up.
“Let’s go inside.” Her fingers were reaching for the bottom of his T-shirt, sliding underneath, absorbing the heat of his skin. “I want this off,” she added, excited by the unfamiliar raspiness in her tone. Expecting to be set on her feet, to stumble inside, Addy felt a rush as Mark stood, lifting her against him in one easy move, and carried her, still kissing her, to her back door. He slid that open somehow and the next thing she knew they were heading down the hall toward her room.
“Take this off,” she groaned, pulling at the hem of his shirt. The carpet caressed the bottoms of her feet as he set her down and she wiggled her toes, feeling the threads between them. She grasped at the thick pile with her toes. Holding on. And gasped at the first sight of Mark Heber’s chest.
He was not anything like the two guys she’d been with before. His chest was huge. Firm and hard and covered with thick black hair. His nipples were hard, prominent, urging her to lick them, suck on them.
She was ready to explode and he hadn’t even unbuckled his pants.
* * *
LYING WITH A WOMAN was not a new experience for Mark. Lying with one, on top of one, underneath one—he was good with all of that. Had been having relations since before he’d quit high school.
But there was no bed like Addy’s. No body like Addy’s.
He couldn’t touch her enough...couldn’t kiss her enough. He was ready to have his big moment and she was still fully dressed. He hadn’t been this turned on his first time out.
Or any time after that.
And as he slowed himself physically, lifting her shirt with hands that trembled, he knew that no matter what secrets she held, they wouldn’t be enough to make him hate her.
He loved her.
It was that simple. And that complicated.
That life-changing.
Adele Kennedy had turned a man who didn’t believe into a believer.
* * *
AS MUCH AS HE wanted to, Mark couldn’t spend the night in Addy’s bed. Tucking her in, he kissed her one last time as he gathered his clothes and quietly left her room. He had to be home to hear Nonnie get out of bed if he was going to beat her to the bacon.
Dropping his clothes in a pile on her dining chair, he stepped into his jeans, pulling them up over a penis already getting hard as he relived some particularly memorable moments from the hours that had just changed his life yet again. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, letting it fall over the fly of his pants rather than tucking it in, and dropped the cell phone that kept him connected to Nonnie at all times in the back pocket that, in his teens, would have held a pack of cigarettes.
He’d been young and foolish once.
He’d paid a heavy price.
And he’d come out a man he could live with.
A man who was willing to pay whatever price he and Addy would have to pay to get to that future they’d talked about.
He’d been right. Making love with her had strengthened their bond. Making love had glued him to her for as long as she wanted him there.
He was halfway to the sliding glass door when he turned back. He couldn’t just go without letting her know that the night had been about far more for him than just sex. He couldn’t leave without communicating to her that she could count on him. No matter what. He’d leave her a note.
Her table was laden with folders and papers, pens and pencils. And her opened laptop computer.
He couldn’t find a blank piece of paper so he reached for the legal pad next to the computer, intending to rip a page from the back.
He’d have done so easily, without reading a word of what she’d written, if his eye hadn’t caught something he recognized as belonging to him.
Looking back, he saw that he hadn’t been mistaken. It was right there. In handwritten script—Mark Heber. His name.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A SOUND FROM the kitchen woke her. Sitting straight up in bed, Addy listened. And realized she was naked. She didn’t sleep naked.
Was someone in her house?
Shifting to pull the covers up over her breasts, her nipples came in contact with the sheet and felt...sore.
In an instant she remembered everything. The little bit of wine she’d had to drink could not be blamed for the wanton behavior she’d exhibited the night before.
&nbs
p; Only love could have so transformed her.
Another shuffle from the other room had her tingling all over again. Mark was still there. Getting something to drink? Using the bathroom? She wanted him to come back to bed. Quickly.
Glancing at the clock, she calculated that they’d have another three hours together before either of them would need to leave.
Three hours before life caught up with them. She didn’t want to waste a minute of that time being alone.
Out of bed before she’d completed the thought, Addy pulled on the light cotton robe she kept hanging on the hook on the back of her bedroom door and hurried down the hall toward the light at the end of it, belting her robe as she walked.
He’d turned on a light? Or had they left it on when they’d gone to bed?
Whatever she’d been expecting to see when she reached the kitchen fled from Addy’s mind as she saw what was waiting for her.
Mark stood, staring at her, a sheaf of papers in his hand.
And, too late, she remembered that she’d been working before she’d gone outside the night before. She’d pulled more papers out to refer to during the phone call from Greg Richards.
“You’re researching me.” His tone was not fully accusatory. There was question there, as well, and Addy scrambled for words.
How much did he know? How much time did she have?
What did she have to say to keep him believing in her?
“This looks like some kind of background check.” Not something she’d have thought of, but it could appear that way, she supposed.
“You’ve got my GED scores here. They’re circled in red.”
When one was being accused, the best defense was silence until the accuser spilled everything he knew and the conclusions he’d drawn.
“I had to get home in case Nonnie woke up and needed me. I was going to leave you a note.”
She believed him.
And was in no position to lay blame in any case. She’d known, going in, that she was the bad guy here. She couldn’t blame Mark for anything. No matter what happened from here on out.
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