It's Never too Late

“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?