"I suppose this is the secret you've been keeping that puts a shadow in your expression every time Philadelphia is mentioned."
He sounded so much thesame. So calm and unruffled that her emotions overflowed.
"It isn't!" she burst out. She sat up suddenly, and he rocked back to keep their heads from bumping.
She tried to scramble to her feet, but her muscles gave way. She cursed the weakness as she settled onto the huge rock.
Adam remained where he was, kneeling in the grass, giving her the position of power. For once, his expression was totally inscrutable. She couldn't read him at all.
The man pushed and hepushed. She'd asked him to wait by the horses and he'd refused.
He'd stumbled on one of the two things that shamed her most. And now—
"You won't be content until you have all my secrets, will you?" She scrubbed her face with the sleeve of her shirt, stemming her tears by sheer force of will.
Adam simply waited, unspeaking, looking up at her from the grass.
"Take it, then," she said bitterly. "I was adopted by my Pa when I was born. And a good thing, too, because it seems my birth family would've been content to throw me away, no matter who or what would take me."
He shook his head, uncomprehending.
So she began from the beginning. "My pa was a bricklayer's apprentice. He worked on a project next to a girls' finishing school, and though he'd never said one word to any of the students there, my birth mother claimed they'd..." She couldn't quite say the words and made a gesture she hoped would suffice. "When her parents confronted Pa, he lost his job and the credibility he'd begun to build for himself. My birth grandparents paid him off to take me away quietly. So that mymother"—she snarled the word—"could still have a society marriage. They had to have known that he wasn't my real father." She shook her head, tears pressing against the back of her throat. "He could've been anyone. A monster. A thief. And they gave me over to him anyway."
It had been the best thing that ever could've happened to her. Pa had grown up on the streets, abandoned by his own family. It had made him determined that every child had worth. He'd fought judgments from neighbors, the unyielding Wyoming weather, and his own self-worth to give the children he'd accepted as his own a good life.
"I confronted them in Philadelphia three years ago," she told Adam, who was still listening with rapt attention. "My birth grandparents. The man who'd thrown me away looked right into my face and said, 'I have no granddaughter.'"
The words still stung, though she'd done her best to stuff the memories and the accompanying pain away in a dark and tiny corner of her heart.
It was still enough to take her breath away.
She had no more words anyway. Now he knew everything.
"So Philadelphia has broken your heart," he said quietly.
She looked sharply at him. "I don't break." Though tears threatened, stinging the back of her nose.
"Philadelphia is a large city," he finally said, though his eyes were hooded. "I doubt you would ever see them—"
"My birth family could be your next-door neighbors. God knows they had enough money to erase my birth completely. They are just the kind of people who'd move in the same circles you do."
It didn't bear thinking about. This could never work.
And yet Adam remained on his knees, that stubborn tilt of his chin showing he wasn't willing to give an inch, even now that he understood.
"The kind of people who attend fancy parties," she said with a flutter of her hand in her lap. "The kind who would take one look at your new country wife and then act as if I didn't exist. Or worse, start whispers so that then everyone in your acquaintance knows—"
"I don't care!" He sprang up from the ground. "If you think for one moment that I care about the opinions of anyone who doesn't really know you"—he expelled a frustrated breath—"you'd be wrong. I could throttle your family for making a little girl and then a young woman feel abandoned." He ran both hands through his hair, his hat forgotten on the grass. "I care about you, Breanna. I can't help but admire the woman you've become. You've overcome so much and you haven't let yourself become bitter."
She stood as he spoke. He was being ridiculous. She'd told him everything, and he still didn't understand.
"I can't go back with you—"
He stepped right up to her. Maybe it was the fierce light in his eyes, or maybe she was still weak from her seizure, but she wobbled on her feet. His hands came to her waist.
"I'm falling in love…"
She couldn't let him say it.
