Christmas in Whitehorn (18 page)

She was a woman who had given up everything she'd ever known to take care of her brother. With no experience, she'd survived in a hostile world. Then he'd come along and had accused her of being a criminal because that was a whole lot easier than thinking she might be a pretty terrific person that he was in danger of falling for.

He wanted to take his accusations back. He wanted a second chance. Not because he had any expectations, but because someone like Darcy didn't show up in a guy's life very often. She'd wanted to be his friend. He'd never considered that much of an honor, but he'd been wrong.

He swore under his breath. He couldn't make it right, but he could explain. He owed her that. He knew she would still walk away – she might be softhearted, but she wasn't stupid. She wouldn't trust him with a second chance.

*

After dropping off the rest of her baked goods, Darcy pulled in front of her apartment. Something large and dark sat on her front steps. As her headlights swept across the duplex, she saw the large, dark something
move
. Mark?

She set the parking brake,
then
turned off the engine. No. He couldn't be here. It was cold and the snow was due to start up any second.

"Are you crazy?" she asked as she climbed out of her car. "What are you doing? You're supposed to be keeping your leg elevated."

"Would you believe I ran out of ice? I thought maybe if I stuck my foot in snow it would do the same thing."

She pulled her coat closer around her body. The cold burned her skin and her eyes. As she approached the porch, she saw Mark was huddled on the top step. He had his bad foot buried in snow. She didn't want to think about how much it would have hurt him to pull on a boot, even though he hadn't fastened it. She refused to feel sorry for him.

"Why are you here?" she asked, stopping in front of him.

Instead of answering, he held out several thin boxes. "A peace offering," he said.
"Christmas lights.
I can't put them up right now, but maybe by midweek." He hesitated. "I know you're a sucker for Christmas."

"Apparently I'm a sucker for a lot of things."

He nodded. "At the risk of you leaving me out here in the snow to freeze to death, I'm going to ask you to invite me in."

His boldness stunned her. "Why would I do that? So you can say more terrible things about me? What do you want to accuse me of now? Has there been a murder in town? Am I the prime suspect?"

He gazed at her. "I want to apologize and explain."

"No explanation is necessary. Besides, you couldn't possibly come up with a story good enough."

Something flickered in his eyes.
Something dark and painful.
Something that made her heartache ease slightly and her resolve waver.

"Actually, I could," he told her. "Let me try. Darcy. I know what I did was awful. I'm really sorry. You didn't deserve my accusations, but they're made and now I would like to explain them."

She didn't want to hear what he had to say. Yet she couldn't bring herself to deny him.

"Once a sucker, always a sucker," she muttered as she bent low to help him to his feet. "This had better be good."

Chapter Eleven

D
arcy helped Mark to her sofa,
then
eased him out of his coat. She ignored the feel of his body so close to hers. No way was she still attracted to the man.

She also ignored the three boxes of outdoor lights he'd brought her, along with the fact that he couldn't have just gone out and bought them today.
Which meant he'd had them for some time.
As she doubted that he'd planned on putting them up at his place – the man didn't even own dishes, let alone Christmas decorations – he must have bought them for her.
Which meant he'd been thinking of her in a positive way.
Which did
not
begin to make up for all he'd accused her of today.

"How's your ankle?" she asked grudgingly as she took off her coat.

"Sore," he admitted.

She hung up both their coats,
then
returned to the sofa. After sitting on the coffee table, she reached for his boot and eased it off his injured foot. She could feel the heat from the swelling.

"You shouldn't have come over," she told him. "You didn't even use your crutches."

"I thought they might slip in the snow."

The man was impossible. "You could have phoned in your explanation."

"You would have hung up on me."

That much was true, she thought, almost wishing he wasn't here now. Part of her didn't want to hear his explanation. For one thing, she doubted it would be enough to convince her that he was anything but the bad guy in this. For another, she didn't want to give him a chance to trick her into starting to like him again.

She eased his sock-clad foot onto a small throw pillow. "Don't think I'm going to let you off the hook easily," she told him. "I'm angry and hurt and I have no intention of forgiving you."

"I know. That's not why I'm here. I want you to know why it happened, but I don't expect anything else to change."

She glared at him, but he didn't try to justify his position more. She rose. "I hate that I feel compelled to offer you something to eat. Did you finish the spaghetti?"

"Most of it."

She sighed,
then
headed for the kitchen. After the loss of her parents, she'd been surprised to find out that she was something of a caretaker. She enjoyed giving to people. If money and space weren't an issue, not to mention her long workdays, she would fill her place with homeless dogs and cats. Even now, when she should want to rip out Mark's heart, she couldn't help fixing hot chocolate and piling cookies on a plate.

She returned to the living room and set the tray on the sofa next to him, then grabbed a mug for herself and retreated to a chair across the room.

"Start talking," she said, hoping she sounded furious. Unfortunately, her rage and indignation seemed to have faded some, leaving her feeling only empty and sad.

Twenty-four hours ago, she would have been dying to tell him about her new contract at the Hip Hop. Of course, then he hadn't known about Dirk, so he wouldn't have understood why it was so important for her to earn money. Now he knew about Dirk, but they weren't friends anymore.

Her chest tightened at the thought. Not friends.
Funny how in just a few weeks Mark had become an important part of her life.
Initially she'd had a crush on him but, as she'd gotten to know him, she'd found herself liking him for the man he was, not just who she imagined him to be.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
"For thinking badly of you.
When I knew you had a secret in your life, I assumed the worst."

She glared at him over her mug. "You could have asked."

"Agreed."
He took a sip of the hot chocolate. "Thank you for telling me about your brother. I wish it had happened under other circumstances."

She shifted her gaze to stare at the wall behind him. "I stopped telling people a long time ago. I got tired of being disappointed by people I liked."

"I don't think I would have disappointed you about that."

She wanted to believe that was true but had her doubts. "Maybe not, but you disappointed me about other things."

"I know. Looking back, I don't understand how I could have thought those things about you. You're a good person, one of the best people I know."

She returned her attention to him, trying not to notice how green his eyes looked in the lamplight or how the shape of his mouth made her remember how
good
it had been between them.

"You're stalling," she said. "Do you actually have something to tell me, or was this all a smoke screen?"

He drew in a deep breath. "You're right. I don't want to tell you this, because it's going to change the way you think about me."

"It's not going to get worse than how it is now."

"I hope you're right."

For the first time since inviting him inside, Darcy felt a shiver of apprehension. While she didn't doubt Mark thought he had a great reason for thinking so badly of her, she didn't expect to be impressed. But now, looking at the haunted expression in his eyes, she began to wonder.

"After college I left here for
New York
," he said. "I was accepted into the
New York
police department. My goal had always been to make detective. When I was sixteen and still in high school, I worked part-time for old Scott Riley who ran a sleazy little detective agency here in town. The work was mostly finding out if a spouse was having an affair, but occasionally there was a great case."

"And this is interesting how?" Darcy asked with more temper than she felt. She didn't want to get sucked into Mark's past. What did it have to do with her?

"I'm getting to the point," he said. "But it's going to take me a minute."

She rose and crossed to the sofa, where she grabbed two cookies before returning to her chair. She nibbled on the first one. Maybe the sugar would take the edge off, she thought.

"My career skyrocketed right away," he continued. "I worked long hours, but I loved it. I got involved in a couple of high-profile crimes and worked with some great detectives. I learned a lot and when the time came, they put in a good word for me. So there I was, in
New York
, living my dream. The only down side was my personal life."

Darcy forced herself to swallow her mouthful of cookies, but she suddenly felt sick inside. "I don't think I want to hear this."

"Sorry, but it's the only story I know." He shifted on the sofa. "I dated a lot, but I never felt anything. I mean I liked some of them fine, but there wasn't any spark."

Darcy suddenly found it difficult to look at the sofa where she and Mark had about set each other on fire.

"I wanted to get married," he said. "I wanted kids, a family, but it wasn't happening. By the time I'd been a detective for two years, I was starting to have second thoughts about my career choice. I saw a side to people I didn't like. Once I got transferred to homicide, I figured there wasn't any humanity left in the world. I know it sounds stupid, but I thought I could feel my soul drying up. One day it was going to shrivel up and blow away. And then I met Sylvia."

Darcy froze. She shouldn't have been surprised, she told herself. She'd known from the minute Mark had mentioned the woman's death that she'd been important to him. She put down the remaining cookie and her hot chocolate. Her stomach felt queasy.

"We lived next door to each other," he said, not looking at her, as he proceeded to tell her about meeting the woman he'd wanted to marry.

Darcy listened, though every word was torture. Her face burned and her mouth went dry. She'd been right before – she didn't want to hear this story. But she also couldn't bring herself to stop him. Maybe it was like driving by an accident. She didn't want to look but she couldn't help herself.

"Did you marry her?" she asked without thinking. Had Mark been married before? She'd never considered that a possibility.

"No. I never even proposed, although I did buy a ring. I never gave it to her."

"Why?" She spoke past the pain, which wasn't very easy.

He shrugged. "I wanted to get to know her better. I wanted to be sure. Intellectually I knew I was running on hormones." He took a drink of his hot chocolate. "About two months into the relationship, I got a frantic call from her. I was at work. It was late. I think I was doing paperwork, I don't re- member. She sounded hysterical as she begged me to come home. When I got there, I found a dead man in her kitchen."

Darcy blinked. She'd braced herself for several different possibilities, but that wasn't one of them. "Someone had tried to kill her?"

"No. It took me a while to get any information out of her. At first she said the guy was an intruder but it turns out he was her husband."

Darcy couldn't believe it. "She was married?"

He nodded. "It took me by surprise, too. She said that she'd been separated for a long time and that she'd wanted to tell me but was afraid it would change things be-
tween
us. I was too shocked to know what to think. She said they hadn't spoken in weeks. She'd been out shopping and had returned to find him dead in her kitchen. She didn't know what to do."

"I can't blame her." Darcy knew a dead body in her house would leave her pretty hysterical, too.

"I should have known," he continued quietly. "The fact that she hadn't told me about being married was a big red flag, but I thought I loved her so I ignored it."

Darcy tried not to mind that Mark had been so willing to believe the best of Sylvia but think the worst of her.

"I called the precinct," he said. "I knew the guys working the murder. I couldn't get involved because I knew Sylvia, but I was kept advised of what was going on. At first they weren't sure, but then one day the detectives on the case brought me in for a private conversation. It seems that the evidence pointed to the fact that Sylvia had killed her husband herself."