The Liar by Roberts Nora

Author:Roberts, Nora [Roberts, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

16

She stopped at the head of the short lane that led back to the old Tripplehorn place, freshened her lip gloss, took a critical look in the visor mirror.

All right, no more dark circles, and not all the color in her face came from the little pot of cream blush her grandmother had urged her to sample.

Her hair, windblown as it was, added a casual touch. Wasn’t it best to stay casual? she asked herself.

And took a breath.

She hadn’t been on a date—a real one, and whatever she’d said, this was a bona fide date—since she’d flown off to Vegas with Richard, to get married.

Or so she’d believed.

She’d dated plenty before that, of course, she reminded herself, through high school and into college. But it was all so vague and blurry with the enormity of the in between the then and now.

And he was fixing her dinner, which made it a sort of serious date, didn’t it? She made herself think through the enormity, back to the blur. She couldn’t think of a single time a man had fixed her dinner.

Maybe it didn’t make it serious. Maybe once you got past the high school and college years, it was just something people, adult people, did now and then.

And she was making far too much of it either way.

She made the turn, bumped her way down the narrow drive—obviously something he hadn’t bothered to fix yet—then just stopped the car again and looked.

She’d always loved the charm of the old place, the way it tucked into the green, spread a bit toward a sheltered stream.

She only found it more charming now.

He’d cleaned up the exterior, and what a difference. She thought he’d likely power-washed the old stone—repointed it, too, so it stood in various shades of brown and gold on its roll of a rise among the trees.

And he put in spanking new windows, added a set of doors in place of the broken windows on what she assumed must be the master bedroom due to the addition of a covered porch with bronze-colored iron rails.

He’d left most of the wonderful old trees, the maples and oaks, their green deepening toward that deep summer shade, and put in a couple of dogwoods, bloomed off now and still tenderly green. Clearing out the scrub and weeds along the foundation had to have been hard, sweaty, even miserable work. Whatever time he’d put in had paid off as young azaleas and rhododendrons swept color at the stone’s skirts, while older ones, wild ones, splashed more back in the green shadows.

He was doing some sort of terracing on the far side, following the rise of the land with partially finished stone walls that mimicked the tones of the house. She imagined it finished, and filled with native shrubs and flowers.

Too charmed to be nervous now, she left her van beside his truck, gathered the potted mountain laurel she’d picked up as a host gift and walked to the wide front porch.

She admired the set

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