Crazy Thing Called Love

by Molly O'Keefe

  Praise for

  Molly O’Keefe’s Crooked Creek Novels

  Can’t Buy Me Love

  “Readers should clear their schedules before they pick up O’Keefe’s latest—a fast-paced, funny and touching book that is ‘unputdownable.’ Her story is a roller-coaster ride of tragedy and comedy that is matched in power by believable and sympathetic characters who leap off the pages. Best of all, this is just the beginning of a new series.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “From the beginning we see Tara’s stainless steel loyalty and her capacity for caring, as well as Luc’s overweening sense of responsibility and punishing self-discipline.… Watching them fall for each other is excruciatingly enjoyable.… Can’t Buy Me Love is the rare kind of book that both challenges the genre’s limits and reaffirms its most fundamental appeal.”

  —Dear Author

  “Can’t Buy Me Love is an unexpectedly rich family-centered love story, with mature and sexy characters and interweaving subplots that keep you turning the pages as fast as you can read. I really enjoyed it. It’s also got some of the most smooth and compelling sequel bait I’ve ever swallowed.”

  —Read React Review

  “If you love strong characters, bad guys trying to make good things go sour, and a steamy romance that keeps you guessing about just how two people are going to overcome their own angsts to come together where they belong, then I highly recommend Can’t Buy Me Love by Molly O’Keefe. You won’t be disappointed.”

  —Unwrapping Romance

  “A stunning contemporary romance … One of the most memorable books I’ve read in a long time.”

  —DEIRDRE MARTIN,

  New York Times bestselling author

  “Molly O’Keefe is a unique, not-to-be-missed voice in romantic fiction.… An automatic must-read!”

  —SUSAN ANDERSEN,

  New York Times bestselling author

  Can’t Hurry Love

  “Using humor and heartrending emotion, O’Keefe writes characters who leap off the page. Their flaws and foibles make for an emotional story filled with tension, redemption and laughter. While this novel is not a direct continuation of the first in the series, it makes the reading richer and more interesting to devour the books in order. Readers should keep their eyes peeled for the third book and make room on their keeper shelves for this sparkling fresh series.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Have you ever read a book that seeped into your soul while you read it, leaving you feeling both destroyed and elated when you finished? Can’t Hurry Love was that book for me.”

  —Reader, I Created Him

  “Can’t Hurry Love is special. It’s that book that ten years from now you will still be recommending to everyone because it is undeniably great!”

  —Joyfully Reviewed

  “An emotion-packed read, Can’t Hurry Love … is a witty, passionate contemporary romance that will capture your interest from the very beginning.”

  —Romance Junkies

  Crazy Thing Called Love is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2013 by Molly Fader

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53370-8

  Cover design : Lynn Andreozzi

  Cover photograph © George Kerrigan

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  Maddy was going to beg. She’d start with an apology. Heartfelt, of course. Desperate mostly.

  But after the fight last night she was scared that they were past apologies. She and Billy were already way past reason. Compromise was long gone.

  Which left her with begging.

  I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want a divorce. We can do this. I know we can. I …

  She put her head against the door, feeling through the wood the bass line of the music being played in his hotel room.

  I’ll go back on the road with you.

  Resentment sizzled through her, burning holes in her purpose. Other professional hockey players didn’t need their wives to babysit them. To keep them out of hot tubs with strippers. Away from bar fights and the mercenary puck bunnies.

  But that seemed to be exactly what Billy needed. Two years ago he was a second-round draft pick, the bright young homegrown star of the Pittsburgh Pit Bulls. Eight months ago he was finally called up from the minors and he’d promptly lost his mind with the excitement.

  But her husband was a twenty-two-year-old enforcer with a temper, a slap shot that could dent metal, a whole bunch of cash, and no clue how to handle the world he’d been thrust into.

  He was easy pickings for puck bunnies.

  I’m not his mother, she thought bitterly. But she was his wife and maybe … sometimes being a wife meant being a mother, too.

  Dad had died three months ago, and Mom was selling the house to move down to Florida with Aunt Lisa, so there was nothing keeping her in Pittsburgh full time anymore. She could travel with Billy.

  Some wives did that. It wouldn’t be weird. Or exhausting. Or boring.

  What about college? She asked herself because she was the only one who still remembered that she used to have her own plans and dreams before Billy’s career and then Dad’s sickness had taken over everything. She was twenty years old, had been married for two years, and sometimes it felt like her life was over.

  What about journalism school?

  Stop, she told herself. She lifted her head from the door.

  You married him, honey, her mom had told her. Now you gotta try living with him.

  She loved Billy Wilkins. Down to her bones, she loved him, which was the only reason she was outside his hotel room in Detroit. Ready to beg, if that’s what it took.

  Enough, she told herself, and knocked on the hotel room door.

  “Just leave it outside,” Billy’s voice called out. The Pit Bulls had lost tonight, she’d heard it on the radio in the cab she took from the airport.

  He was going to be prickly.

  She closed her eyes and prayed for strength. “Billy,” she called back. “It’s me.”

  Almost immediately, the door was yanked open and Billy stood in front of her. His thick brown hair was damp from the shower and curling at the ends. He was shirtless, th
e muscles of his chest and shoulders bathed in low lamplight from the room behind him.

  And it was all there, everything he felt was on his face. His surprise. His love. His joy—in her—it illuminated him, the hallway, her entire world. He’d been looking at her like this since they were kids, and she felt an answering spark inside her.

  They could do this. They could make it work. It was worth fighting for. They were worth fighting for.

  The relief was profound and her heart threw itself wide open.

  But he closed right down, no doubt remembering every awful thing she had said to him the night before. A chill rolled off of him, and he lifted the beer bottle he was holding to his lips.

  Where the scar pulled his mouth into a terrible sneer.

  The sight of him—his scar, his body, his virile strength barely restrained—rippled through her, as it always had. As it always would.

  Maybe she would have been able to walk away if she didn’t want him so badly.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Can I come in?”

  He pulled the door a little closer to his body.

  That would be a no.

  “You’re going to make me do this in the hallway?” She tried to make it a joke, but he just stared at her. Immutable.

  Right. On with the begging.

  “I’m sorry for those things I said. I was mad. Hurt.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s my turn now. And screw your apology, Maddy.” He stepped backward as if to shut the door, but she reached out her hand, nearly touching him. They both froze.

  “Don’t, Billy. Please. Let’s talk. I’ll come back on the road—”

  He blinked. His eyes flared and the sneer spread briefly into a smile. “You will?”

  A bittersweet happiness flooded her. It wasn’t perfect, but what was?

  “Yeah,” she said. “I miss you.”

  “Oh my God, baby. I miss you so much, I—” He reached for her.

  “Billy?” a voice called from the hotel room behind them.

  A female voice.

  A woman in a hot pink dress slunk toward the doorway, glowing malevolently in the shadows.

  “What are you doing out here?” the woman asked, her voice strangled by the breasts pushed up to her throat.

  Bittersweet happiness curdled to a bitter rage. And right at that moment Maddy hated Billy more than she’d ever loved him. It was a terrible rending, from which there was no going back.

  Hating him like that changed her on a molecular level.

  And the pain … the pain was shocking. She couldn’t see or breathe. She couldn’t think. Her whole landscape was pain.

  “Maddy,” Billy said, blocking her view of the bitch in the pink dress. “It’s a party.”

  “Yeah? For two?” The words spilled from numb lips.

  “No,” the stupid stupid woman said. “My friend is here, too. Are you delivering the champagne?”

  “Gary and Ben are coming over,” he said quickly, acting like she was a fool for imagining the worst. A fool for doubting him.

  Well, she wasn’t going to be his fool anymore.

  Speechless, she shoved him as hard as she could. Punched him. And then again. Both hands. Wanting to pull his heart out through his chest. Wanting to take out his eyes.

  He grabbed her hands, his brown eyes slicing through her skin to the muscle and sinew of her.

  Look at what you’ve become, she thought, horrified by her violence.

  “You said you were leaving.” There was an apology in his voice but there was pride there, too. He was the star athlete who didn’t have to explain his shit to anyone. Not even his wife.

  “And I am, asshole,” she snapped. “Enjoy your whore.”

  “Hey!” the woman cried, but Maddy ignored her, stomping down the hallway. She was sweating under her winter coat and shock and nerves made her sick to her stomach. Her hands shook as she pressed them to her lips.

  What was she going to do? Where would she go? She had nothing outside of what Billy had bought for her. She had no money of her own. No car. No home.

  How did I get here?

  A soundless sob broke out of her throat and she held her fingers to her mouth to push the despair back.

  Think, Maddy. Think.

  Billy grabbed her elbow by the elevator and she jerked herself sideways out of his grasp. Barefoot and shirtless, in his black athletic shorts, he was the tide just before a storm—barely contained.

  “Don’t touch me!” she cried. “You never get to touch me again.”

  “Come on, Maddy. You know these things are nothing.”

  “Do you really believe that?” she asked, searching his face for the boy she’d known because this Billy was a stranger to her right now. “Or are you just hoping I’ll believe that?”

  “You’re overreacting!”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

  “Come on, forget about that.” He threw his arms out, as if he were a magician pulling a screen between them, making the woman in the pink dress and his final betrayal disappear. “You came here to make this work. So let’s do it. We’ll make it work. You … you wanted to go see a counselor. We can do that.”

  He was months too late. And suddenly her anger deflated, leaving her wounded and bleeding. And tired. So damn tired she couldn’t fight anymore. “There’s no fixing this, Billy.”

  “Don’t say that. We—”

  “No. No, we’re broken. All the way.”

  “We made promises!”

  “Promises?” She jabbed her finger down the hallway. “She wasn’t in any promise I made.”

  “You know nothing happened.”

  “I don’t know that, Billy. And I feel like a fool taking your word for it!”

  “You’re not a fool.” He tried to touch her and she smacked away his hand. “You’re my family, Maddy.”

  “And what are you to me?”

  He flinched at her words, but she couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t help hurting him. This is what they’d come to. Every conversation was a fight, a chance to hurt the other. “I can’t keep giving you everything you need and get nothing in return. Nothing.”

  It was unfair, she knew, it’s not like anyone had shown him how to be a family. Without her, he’d probably slide back into the dark hole his sisters lived in.

  Not your problem anymore.

  But it was still hard. They would eat him alive, his sisters.

  “Once the season’s over—”

  “How many times have I heard that? No, Billy. You … you just absorb me. You need me and you suck me in until there’s nothing left for me. You always have. I don’t believe you anymore. I have no more faith in us. I have nothing.”

  “Yeah?” He was getting angry, his default position, all his doors closing. They’d start yelling just like his parents had. It was so ugly, so not the way she’d thought their life would be.

  I will never be in this place again, she promised herself as Billy yelled, “That new house in Ben Avon Heights? The clothes? The car? That’s nothing?”

  “I don’t want things. I don’t want money. Why can’t you see that? I want you and I’ve lost you. I’ve lost me. I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered, dry-eyed and hollow. “This sport is turning you into someone I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit—”

  “No. It’s not. Just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean it’s bullshit. And being married to you is turning me into someone I don’t know. I can’t do it anymore, Billy. I just can’t.”

  Maybe because she wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying and trying to hurt him, he finally got the message.

  His face, so handsome, so very dear to her—despite the scar, or maybe because of it—crumpled.

  “Please,” he whispered. He begged. If her heart weren’t already cracked, she might actually have felt something.

  But she looked at the boy she’d loved since she was thirteen and felt nothing.

  There was a God�
��the proof was that when she pushed the button the elevator doors opened immediately, and she stepped in.

  Don’t look, she told herself, staring at the white salt stains on her boots. But as the elevator door started to close, she looked up and saw her husband, all alone. Nearly naked. Tears in his eyes.

  But he wasn’t fighting. And she knew, right then, that it was over.

  Really over.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And the doors closed between them.

  Fourteen years later

  Billy Wilkins sat on the bench, bone dry. He might as well have been wearing slippers. A freaking robe. All he could do was sit there and watch as the second-rate team he’d been traded to blew their shot at the play-offs.

  If the coaches weren’t going to play him, all of it was totally useless—the skates, the pads, the stick in his hand—worthless. Just like him.

  “Pull Leserd!” he shouted over the screaming in the Bendor Arena. “He’s done. That’s the fourth goal he’s let in in five minutes.”

  But Coach Hornsby wasn’t listening. He never listened to what Billy yelled during the games. Hornsby wouldn’t even look at him, much less reply.

  But that was Coach Hornsby. Stubborn, righteous, and probably deaf.

  Billy waved off the water bottle one of the trainers offered him. No need to hydrate. He hadn’t even broken a sweat tonight.

  And what was worse, worse than the dry pads, the clear visor, the body he’d recuperated back into prime shape only to have it sit unused on the bench, was that he didn’t care. He didn’t care that the coach didn’t listen to him. Didn’t care that the kid in the net was totally overwhelmed and the Mavericks’ rally to get into the play-offs was going to die a pitiful death right here. Right now.

  “If you stopped being an asshole, he might listen to you,” said Jan Fforde, their injured starting goalie, his consonants blunted by his Swedish accent.

  “Not much chance of that.” Whether Billy was talking about being an asshole or their coach listening to him, he wasn’t sure. Being an asshole was his way of life: it was why hockey teams had been paying his way for over sixteen years. The sport needed assholes and Billy was the best. Used to be anyway.

  Until he landed in Dallas, with a coach who preached respect and integrity.

  Someone should tell Hornsby that respect and integrity didn’t win games. Didn’t turn momentum. A good fight did that. Let Billy get out there and drop gloves with that big Renegade center, Churov, and then the game would turn around. The crowd that was booing them would cheer.