He said nothing. He frowned faintly, as nonplussed and uncertain as if she’d just uttered a word in Turkish.
She craved to know and yet feared to know. But she knew she would have to ask, because if she didn’t, it would seem as though it mattered.
“So what have you been up to, Mac?”
She kept the words as offhand and neutral as possible. She didn’t want him to think she cared in the least.
“What have I been up to for the past decade and a half?” he said ironically. “Oh, nothing much.”
The whole world pretty much knew what became of his dad, so he probably assumed he didn’t have to fill her in on that.
His answer was limned in a faint bitterness.
That was the moment she was certain Mac had no idea why she’d disappeared that day. She’d always wondered.
If he’d suffered, that was as it should be.
And she sure as hell wasn’t going to illuminate him now.
So they’d established there wasn’t going to be any sharing.
“So what brings you back here, Mac? Are you the Phantom of Devil’s Leap?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing. Kind of off the beaten path of any given nature walk. And it’s private property.”
“Yes.Myprivate property.”
His whole body went rigid as a fence post. “Come again?”
She rocked her hips a little and fished the keys out of her pocket and dangled them. “I bought the house this morning at auction.”
He stared at those dangling keys, transfixed. “Youbought the house?”
“Yes.”
Another wordless moment ticked by.
“Youbought it.”
“Did you drink away the intervening years, Mac? Yes. I bought. The house.”
His silence suggested he was struggling mightily to process this.
“So you’re the...” He pressed his lips together over the colorfully profane word he genuinely wanted to use, though the emotion with which he would have delivered it rather throbbed in the air. “...who bought this house out from under me.”
I’ll be damned, Avalon thought.Karma might be a bitch, but turns out she has a sense of irony, too.He must have sent that guy in the suit. Who looked like a very expensive lawyer.
“You know... that guy in the suit went as white as his dress shirt when I outbid him. Or rather... I guess I mean when I outbid... you.”
She locked eyes with him.
She wanted to raise one eyebrow like a cartoon villain. She was pretty sure that would hurt, though, so she didn’t attempt it.
Mac’s eyes narrowed.
And then he shook his head to and fro, sorrowfully, almost paternally. “Avalon. You paidwaytoo much.”
“Or... maybe you just didn’t have enough money to outbid me?” She suggested this sweetly, oh so gently, with a sympathetic tilt of the head.
