Maddie shrugged and watched Darla’s big behind disappear into the crowd. “Can’t really say.” She looked back up into the face of the man who made her broken heart pound in her throat. “Please tell me you aren’t dating Darla.”
“Jealous?”
No, she was angry. Angry that he didn’t love her. Angry that she would always love him. Angry that a part of her wanted to throw herself on his chest like some desperate high school girl and beg him to love her. “Are you shitting me? Jealous of a low-exception dumb-ass? If you want to make me jealous, start dating someone with half a brain and a modicum of class.”
His gaze narrowed. “At least she isn’t running around pretending to be someone she’s not.”
Yes, she was. She was running around pretending she was a size ten, but Maddie chose not to point that out in a crowded park because she did have a modicum of class.
Just above the noise surrounding them he said, “Not everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie.”
“How would you know? You don’t ever stick around long enough to get to know anyone.”
“You think you know me so well.”
“I do know you. Probably better than any other woman, and I’d be willing to bet that I’m the only woman you’ve ever really known.”
Slowly he shook his head. “I don’t know you.”
She looked into his mirrored sunglasses and said, “Yes, you do, Mick.”
“Knowing your favorite sexual position is not what I call knowing you.”
He wanted to reduce what had been between them to just sex. It might have started out that way, but it had become so much more. At least to her. She took a step forward and raised onto the balls of her feet. He was so close she could feel the heat of his skin through his shirt and hers. So close she was sure he could feel her pounding heart as she said next to his ear, “You know more than whether I like it on top or bottom. You know more than the smell of my skin or the taste of me in your mouth.” She closed her eyes and added, “You know me. You just can’t handle who I am.” Without another word she turned on her heels and left him standing there. She couldn’t say that her first encounter with him had gone well, but at least he was going to be thinking about her after she was gone.
Instead of getting the hell out of the park and getting home to avoid seeing Mick again, she forced herself to take her time. She’d been down for a few weeks, but she was better now, stronger than her broken heart. She paused at the Mad Hatter stand and stopped at the Spoon Man booth. Mr. Spoon Man sold everything from jewelry to clocks out of spoons, and Maddie bought a chime she thought would sound nice on the back deck.
She put the chime in the cat carrier and made her way out of the park. But like the pull of a magnet on a paper clip, her gaze was drawn to the beer garden and the man who stood at the entrance. Only this time Mick wasn’t with Darla. Tanya King, with her little body and little clothes, stood in front of him, and his head was bent forward slightly as he listened to her every word. Her hand rested on his chest, and the corners of his mouth turned up as he smiled at something she said.
He didn’t appear to be thinking about Maddie at all, and suddenly she didn’t feel stronger than her broken heart.
Through the lenses of his sunglasses, Mick watched Maddie as she crossed the street and left the park. His gaze slid down her back to her butt. The memory of her legs around his waist and his hands on her behind flashed across his brain whether he wanted to remember or not. And he didn’t. Hardly a day passed without something reminding him of Maddie. His truck. His boat. His bar. He couldn’t walk into Mort’s without remembering the night she’d arrived at his back door wearing a trench coat and one of his ties between her beautiful bare breasts. He’d like to believe that it had just been about sex with her, but she’d been right about that. It had been more than the smell of her skin and the taste of her in his mouth. At odd random moments he’d wonder where she was and if she’d gone to Boise for her friend’s wedding. Or he’d remember her laugh, the sound of her voice and her smart mouth.
Are you shitting me? Jealous of a low-exception dumb-ass? If you want to make me jealous, start dating someone with half a brain and a modicum of class, she’d said, as if there were a chance in hell he’d ever date Darla. He hadn’t had sex since that last night with Maddie, but he wasn’t hard up. He’d never been that hard up.
You know more than whether I like it on top or bottom. You know more than the smell of my skin or the taste of me in your mouth. Seeing her and smelling the scent of her skin, the urge to feel her against his chest once again, had been overwhelming, and for a fraction of one unguarded second, he’d actually raised his hands to pull her closer. Thank God he had stopped himself before he’d touched her.
You just can’t handle who I am. She was right about that. She was a liar who’d used her body to get him to talk about the past, and he’d fallen for it.
Darla wasn’t the only dumb-ass.
Maddie disappeared across the street and his gaze returned to Tanya. She was talking about…something.
“My new trainer is brutal, but he gets results.”
Oh, yeah. Tanya’s exercise. No doubt about it, Tanya had a good body. Too bad her hand on his chest wasn’t doing much for his body. He needed a distraction. His efforts to forget about Maddie, to put her out of his head and not think about her, were clearly not working.
Maybe Tanya was exactly what he needed.
Chapter 18
The night before Clare’s wedding, the four friends got together at Maddie’s house in Boise. They sat in Maddie’s living room in front of a big fireplace made of river rock. The house in Boise was furnished in brown and beige tones, and moments earlier Maddie had cracked open a bottle of Moлt. The four women raised their champagne glasses and toasted Clare’s future happiness with her fiancй Sebastian Vaughan.
A little over a year ago, all four women had been single. Now Lucy was married and Clare was about to get married. Adele continued to believe she was cursed with bad dates, and Maddie had fallen in love and gotten her heart broken. Adele was the only one out of the four whose life hadn’t drastically changed. Although Maddie had yet to confide to her friends about her feelings for Mick. This was Clare’s night. Not a pity party for Maddie. It had been a week since she’d seen Mick in the park with Tanya, and the image still made her sick.
“My mother has invited half of Boise to the wedding. She has been in her…” Clare paused and leaned to the left to look behind Maddie’s chair. “There’s a cat in your house.”
Maddie turned around and looked at Snowball, flagrantly disregarding the rules as she climbed up the satin drapes. Maddie clapped her hands and stood. “Snowball.” The cat looked over at Maddie and dropped to the floor.
“Do you know that cat?” Adele asked.
“I kind of adopted it.”
“Kind of?”
Lucy leaned forward. “You hate cats.”
“I know.”
Clare covered her lips with two fingers. “You named your cat Snowball. That’s so cute.”
“So unlike you,” Lucy added.
Adele tilted her head to one side and looked concerned. “Are you all right? You go away for a few months and come back with a cat. What else have you been doing up there in Truly that we don’t know about?”
Maddie lifted her glass and finished off the champagne. “Nothing.”
Lucy raised a suspicious brow. “How’s the book?”
“Actually, it’s going fairly well,” she answered truthfully. “I’m a little over halfway finished.” The next half was going to be the rough part. The part where she would have to write about the night her mother died.
“How’s Mick Hennessy?” Adele asked.
Maddie rose and moved to the coffee table. “I don’t know.” She poured herself more champagne. “He won’t talk to me.”
“Did you finally tell him who you really are?”
Maddie nodded and refilled her friends’ glasses. “Yes, I to
ld him, and he didn’t take it very well.”
“At least you didn’t sleep with him.”
Maddie looked away and took a drink from her glass.
“Oh, my God!” Clare gasped. “You fell off the wagon with Mick Hennessy?”
Maddie shrugged and took her seat. “I couldn’t help myself.”
Adele nodded. “He’s hot.”
“A lot of men are hot.” Lucy took a sip as she studied Maddie. Her brows shot up her forehead. “You’re in love with him.”
“It doesn’t matter. He hates me.”
Clare, the most kindhearted of the four, said, “I’m sure that’s not true. No one can hate you.”
That was so blatantly untrue, Maddie couldn’t help a smile, while Lucy coughed on her champagne.
Adele sat back and laughed. “Maddie Jones got a cat and fell in love. Hell has officially frozen over.”
The day after Clare’s wedding, Maddie packed up her cat and headed to Truly. The wedding had been beautiful, of course. And at the reception, Maddie had partied and danced the night away. Several of the men she’d danced with had been good-looking and single, and she wondered if she’d ever get to a point in her life when she would not compare every man she met to Mick Hennessy.
She spent the rest of September writing and reliving the days before her mother’s death. She inserted parts of interviews and diary entries, including the very last:
My baby will turn six next year and will go to first grade. I can’t believe how big she is. I wish I could give her more. Maybe I can. Loch said that he loves me. I’ve heard that before. He says he’s going to leave his wife and be with me. He says he doesn’t love Rose, and he’s going to tell her that he doesn’t want to live with her anymore. I’ve heard that before too. I want to believe him. No, I do believe him!! I just hope he isn’t lying. I know he loves his children. He talks about them a lot. He worries that when he tells his wife he wants a divorce his kids will have to witness a big scene. He’s afraid she’ll throw things or do something really crazy like start his car on fire. I worry that she will hurt Loch and I told him so. He just laughed and said Rose would never hurt anyone.
The hardest part of the book hadn’t been reliving the death of her mother moment by moment, as she’d always thought. That had been hard, to be sure, but the most difficult part had been writing the end and saying good-bye. In writing the book, she realized that she’d never said good-bye to her mother. Never had any sort of closure. Now she did, and it felt as if one part of her life had ended.
When she was through with the book, it was mid-October and she was physically and emotionally drained. She fell into bed and slept for almost twenty hours. When she woke, she felt as if a thorn had been taken from her chest. A thorn that she’d never even known was embedded there. She was free from the past and she hadn’t even known she’d needed freeing.
Maddie fed Snowball, then jumped in the shower. Her cat had yet to sleep in the bed Maddie had bought for her. She liked the video, and the carrier not at all. Maddie had given up on any sort of rules. Snowball liked to spend most of her time lying on the windowsill or in Maddie’s lap.
Maddie washed her hair and scrubbed her body with watermelon-scented sugar scrub and wondered what she was going to do with her life. Which was such an odd question, really, when she thought about it. Until she’d finished the book, she hadn’t realized how much of her life had been wrapped up in the past. It had dictated her future without her even knowing it.
Maybe she’d take a vacation. Someplace warm. Just pack a swimsuit and a pair of flip-flops and hit a nice beach. Maybe Adele needed a break from her cycle of cursed dating.
As Maddie toweled herself dry, she thought of Mick. She was thirty-four, and he was her first real love. She would always love him even though he could never love her back. But perhaps there was something she could do for him. She could give him the same gift that she’d given herself.
Mick’s gaze rose from the bottle in his hand to the woman walking in the front door. He set the Corona on the bar and watched her as she moved between the tables. Mort’s was slow, even for a Monday night.
Her hair curled about her shoulders like the first time he’d seen her, and she wore a black bulky sweater that hid the wonders of her body. She carried a box beneath one arm. He hadn’t seen her since Founders Day when she’d told him that he couldn’t handle the truth about her. She’d been right. He couldn’t, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t missed her every damn day. Didn’t mean that his gaze didn’t drink up everything about her. Trying to forget about her hadn’t worked. Nothing had worked.
Above Trace Adkins on the jukebox, she said, “Hello, Mick.” Her voice poured through him like warmed brandy.
“Maddie.”
“May I talk to you somewhere private?”
He wondered if she’d come to tell him good-bye and how he’d feel about that. He nodded and the two of them moved to his office. Her shoulder touched his, adding need to the warm mix spreading across his flesh. He wanted Maddie Jones. Wanted her like he was starving, wanted to jump on her and eat her up. She shut the door, and the urge got stronger. He moved behind his desk, as far away from her as possible. “Maybe you should leave the—”
“Please let me talk,” she interrupted and held up a hand. “I have something to say and then I’ll leave.” She swallowed hard and stared directly into his eyes. “The first time I recall being afraid, I was five. I’m not talking about Halloween and boogeyman afraid. I am talking sick-to-my-stomach afraid.
“A sheriff ’s deputy woke me up to tell me my great-aunt was coming to get me and that my mother was dead. I didn’t understand what had happened. I didn’t understand why my mother had gone away, but I knew she was never coming back. I cried so hard I threw up all over the backseat of my great-aunt Martha’s Cadillac.”
He remembered that night too. Remembered the backseat of the cop car and Meg sobbing beside him. What was the point of remembering?
“When I met you,” she continued, “I didn’t expect to like you, but I did. I certainly didn’t expect to like you so much that I ended up in bed with you, but I did. I didn’t expect to fall in love with you, but I did that too. From the beginning, I knew I should have told you who I was. I knew I should have told you a hundred different times. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I also knew that I’d lose you if I did. I knew when I told you, you’d leave and never come back. And that’s what happened.”
She set a Xerox copier-paper box on his desk. “I want you to have this. It’s the book I moved here to write, and I want you to read it. Please.” She looked down at the box. “The disk is with it, and I’ve deleted it from my computer. This is the only copy. Do what you want with both. Throw them away, run over them with your truck, or have a bonfire. It’s up to you.”
She looked back at him. Her brown eyes steady, calm. “I hope that someday you can forgive me. Not because I personally need your forgiveness. I don’t. But I’ve learned something in the past few months, and that is just because you refuse to acknowledge something, refuse to look at it or think about it, doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it doesn’t affect you and the choices you make in your life.”
She licked her lips. “I forgive your mother. Not because the Bible tells me I should forgive. I guess I’m not that good a Christian, because I’m just not that magnanimous. I forgive her because, in forgiving her, I am free of all the anger and bitterness of the past, and that is what I want for you too.
“I’ve thought about what I’ve done since I moved to Truly, and I’m sorry that I hurt you, Mick. But I’m not sorry that I met you and fell in love with you. Loving you has broken my heart and caused me pain, but it made me a better person. I love you, Mick, and I hope that someday you find someone you can love. You deserve more in life than a string of women you don’t really care about and who don’t care all that much for you. Loving you taught me that. It taught me how it feels to love a man, and I hope that someday I can find som
eone who will love me the way that you can’t. Because I deserve more than a string of men who don’t really care about me.” Her gaze moved over his face, then returned to his eyes. “I came here tonight to give you the book and because I wanted to say good-bye.”
“You’re leaving?” He didn’t have to wonder how he’d feel about her good-bye.
“Yes. I have to.”
Her leaving was best, no matter that it felt like she was reaching into his chest and ripping out his heart all over again. “When?”
She shrugged and walked to the door. “I don’t know. Soon.” She looked over her shoulder one last time and said, “Good-bye, Mick. Have a good life.” Then she was gone and he was left with the scent of her skin in the air and a big emptiness in his chest. The red sweater she’d worn the night she’d come into his office wearing a white halter dress still hung on a hook behind the door. He knew that it still smelled like strawberries.
He sat in his chair and leaned his head back. He thought of old drunk Reuben Sawyer spending three decades sitting on a barstool, sad and pathetic and unable to move beyond the pain of losing his wife. Mick wasn’t that pathetic, but he understood old Reuben in a way that he never had before he’d loved Maddie Jones. He hadn’t picked up the bottle. He owned two bars and knew where that path led, but he had gotten into a fight or two. A few days before he’d seen Maddie in the park, he’d kicked the Finley boys out of Mort’s. Usually he called the cops to deal with assorted assholes and numb nuts, but that night he’d taken on both Scoot and Wes. No one had ever accused the Finley boys of being smart, but they were fighters, and it had taken both Mick and his bartender to shove them out into the alley, where a knock-down free-for-all had ensued. The kind Mick hadn’t enjoyed since high school.
Mick raked his fingers through the sides of his hair and sat forward. Since the night he’d found out who Maddie really was, he’d been in hell and he didn’t know how to get out. His life seemed to be one miserable day after another. He thought things would get better, but his life wasn’t heading in the direction of better, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Maddie was who she was, and he was Mick Hennessy, and no matter how much he loved her, real life wasn’t a made-for-TV movie on that women’s channel Meg liked to watch.
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