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“Old biddy Buchanan?”
“That woman was old when she was young,” Mark said, attacking his potato with the same gusto he’d shown his rattlesnake. “She hated kids. Any of us happened to laugh or raise our voices anywhere near her yard and she’d be out there telling us to shut up. She put up fences around all of her flower beds, too, afraid one of us might stumble and fall off the sidewalk and trample them. Never put them around her yard, though. No, that would have meant she’d have no reason to yell at us.”
“Maybe she was sick. Or lonely. Or in pain.”
“She was a pain.” He grinned. “I don’t know about lonely, but she wasn’t sick. She was just mean. Even Nonnie said so.”
“So Jimmy put a jug of rotten eggs in her yard.”
“No, it was Jimmy’s idea.”
She was smiling again. So much it hurt her face. “You did it.”
“Yep.”
“What did Nonnie do to you that time?” She’d already heard about his punishment for skinny-dipping in the lake during a Bible school outing. He hadn’t been in Bible school. He’d just been around the bend in the lake when the kids who were in Bible school had shown up. His grandmother had made him wash his own clothes, by hand, for a month—giving him an awareness of the importance of having clothes, and being clean. And of keeping clean clothes on.
“Every meal for a week she put a hunk of bread with Limburger cheese spread on it on my plate. I had to eat it before she’d serve me anything else.”
“That stuff stinks!”
But the memory didn’t seem to be affecting his appetite at all. “Yeah, well, what you might not know is that it stinks more the older it gets and it takes three months for the stuff to age enough to be creamy and spreadable.”
One look at the scrunched-up, little-boy expression on that handsome, masculine face and Addy was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes.
* * *
“WHERE DID ELLA fit in to all this?” Their plates had been cleared away. Mark was having a cup of coffee, and Addy was still nursing the raspberry iced tea she’d had with dinner.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who’d won Mark’s loyalty, if not his heart.
Had Ella fit right in with Mark’s wild side? Addy had never been the kind of girl who’d been turned on by bad boys...
“Ella came later,” he said. “I liked another girl, but her parents were strict, and then I quit school and we rarely saw each other.”
It was the first time Mark had intimated that life in Bierly might not have been as small-town idyllic for him as he preferred to let on. She’d heard about white-trash remarks from Nonnie. About Mark being shunned by the “uppity” folks until it came time to need a favor.
Seeing Mark from a different perspective, as, say, the parents of a young girl might have seen him—the son of an alcoholic mother and being raised by the local barmaid—Addy wondered just how hard he’d had it growing up. As far as parents were concerned, Mark’s quitting school had probably sealed his reputation as a loser that nice girls would be warned to stay away from.
Tears threatened and Addy shook herself. What was the matter with her? Mark was only a friend. Someone she hardly knew and wouldn’t know for long. Besides, he could take care of himself. Had come out the other end just fine.
Better than fine. As Mark stood to move his chair so a large man seated at the table behind them could get out, his denim-encased thighs were directly in Addy’s line of vision. Thighs that came so perfectly together at his fly.
Her lower body tingled and she swallowed. Glanced outside.
She was losing it.
* * *
HE’D TOLD HER they were going to dinner as friends. He’d given her his word and meant to keep it.
She’d been up front about the fact that she didn’t want a relationship. Neither did he.
But as he drove back to Shelter Valley with Addy sitting at his side, Mark was hard and horny—and not sure what to do about, either. Addy was hardly the first woman who’d ridden in his truck. Ella had ridden right where Addy was sitting almost every day for the past two years. He’d never found the experience particularly sexy.
The thought of Addy’s butt against his leather was doing him in.
Like he was that kid fresh off the farm again. Instead of a thirty-year-old mature man who’d been responsible for others since he was sixteen years old.
