Free It Started with a House... by Helen R. Myers Page A

list.”
    â€œMarshall…”
    â€œI know, I know, but if I let you hang up, you’ll have time to think and I can’t see how that will work in my favor. At least consider stopping by after you’re done at your mother’s tomorrow? You saw the condition ofthis place. Doesn’t that trigger any sympathy for my predicament?”
    â€œNone.” But she couldn’t stop a smile from entering her voice. “Let me sleep on it, okay?”
    â€œAnd how are you going to be able to do that? I won’t.”
    â€œI’m hanging up now,” she said softly. “Goodnight.”
    After drying her hair, she tried to catch up on e-mails and paperwork, but she also paced around the house. She’d bought the modest white-brick home located on a maple-lined street near the library and city hall, not long after she’d gotten into real estate and started to have regular success. Adam had never been in this house. She’d bought it with her first year’s earnings when she began at another agency. But his photographs were scattered around the house, and she spoke to them—or sighed at them—regularly. Tonight, she could barely bring herself to acknowledge they were there.
    Her mother was one issue—a headache that she’d been dealing with all of her life. This situation with Marshall was an even bigger problem for her. It wasn’t natural to feel guilt about what had happened tonight. She was single and free to date. So was Marshall. In her mind, she’d betrayed no law of man or God. And yet Adam still owned her heart. With that reality, how could she have let another man make love to her?
    Call it what it was—sex. That’s all.
    She shivered, disliking the coldness of the term and wrapped her arms tighter around herself despite the warm robe. It wasn’t fair to her or Marshall. Maybe she couldn’t call it love, but try as she might, she couldn’t deny that she had feelings for him, and he apparently did for her.It was grief and loneliness that had brought them to this and that wasn’t anything to be ashamed about. So why couldn’t she just accept that she was transitioning?
    Maybe because that would mean letting go of all she had left of Adam—her sorrow. Marshall didn’t seem to be having this problem. He was flirting and ready to openly pursue her.
    â€œMen are definitely different,” she said to the empty room.
    Â 
    At church the next day, she half expected to see Marshall in the congregation, but then he never asked what church she belonged to and there were several in town and over a hundred in their county. Her mother and Bart were present, though, and her mother was looking happy and approving since Genevieve finally had called her last night and invited herself to lunch.
    After services, she was a half hour behind them since she had to put up her robe and lingered to catch up with friends. When she let herself into the house, she almost stopped in her tracks to see Bart handing Marshall a scotch and water, while her mother, holding a glass of cabernet, stood by, beaming even more than she had in church.
    â€œHere she is,” Sydney all but sang. “Pour her a glass of wine, Bart. Gigi, isn’t it wonderful that I could talk Marshall into making it a foursome for lunch?”
    Closing the door gave her a chance to quell the return of frustration with her mother’s underhanded ways, as well to ride out that first startling skip in her pulse at seeing Marshall. And drat the man, he was also looking at her as though reliving every second of last nightdespite his fixed smile. She dropped her keys into the sage-green clutch bag that matched her linen sheath and heels and placed it on the entryway table.
    â€œWonderful,” she said dryly. Not only had her mother known inviting him would save her from a scolding, but she could watch the two of them interact like a lab technician observing