everything seemed so unbalanced.
He’d followed her home and she’d taken his hand and led him into the bedroom. He’d kissed her in all those places he’d said he’d been thinking about. He set every nerve ending in her body on fire, and she knew she should feel bad about being with him again. It was wrong of her, but being with him felt too good to feel really bad.
“Meow.”
Snowball wove a figure eight between her feet and she looked down at her cat. How had her life come to this? She had a cat in her house and a Hennessy in her bed.
She set her cup on the counter and moved to the pantry to grab a bag of kitten food. A dead mouse lay on the floor and Snowball sniffed its tail. She’d moved the poison the night she’d decided to keep Snowball, but that didn’t mean the mouse hadn’t eaten the bait. “Don’t eat that or you’ll get sick.” She grabbed Snowball and carried her into the laundry room. Snowball purred and butted her head against Maddie’s chin. “And I know for a fact you did not sleep in your bed. I found white fur on my office chair.” She set the kitten in her Amazon box and poured food onto a little dish. “I do not want to walk around with white fur on my butt.” Snowball jumped out of her box and attacked her food as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Last night as Mick had walked from the bathroom, a smug, satisfied smile tilting one corner of his lips, the kitten had stalked him across the carpet and attacked his leg.
“What the hell?” he’d yelped and danced around as Snowball had dashed back under the bed. “I can’t believe I wasted money buying that damn thing a collar.”
Maddie had laughed and patted the bed next to her. “Come here so I can make you feel better after the big bad cat attack.”
He’d moved to the bed and pulled her up so she knelt before him. “I’m going to make you pay for laughing at me.” And he had. All night long, and when she’d woken this morning, she was alone. Again. She would have liked to have woken and seen his face, his blue eyes looking at her, all sleepy and sated, but it was better this way. Better to keep a distance even though they’d shared a night as physically close as two people could possibly get.
While Snowball chowed, Maddie picked up the mouse with a paper towel and carried it to the garbage outside. She called a local veterinarian and made Snowball an appointment for the first week in August. Her low-carb granola bars had teeth marks on the outside of the box, but the bars looked okay. As she took a bite, her doorbell rang.
Through the peephole she gazed at Mick, standing on her porch, looking showered and shaved and relaxed in a pair of Levi’s and an untucked striped shirt over a wife beater. She ignored the little tumble in her stomach and opened the door.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked as a knowing little smile brought out his dimples.
She opened the door wide and he stepped in side. “I think it was around three when I finally passed out.”
“It was three-thirty.” He walked past her and she shut the door behind him. “Where’s your cat?” he asked as they moved into the living room.
“Eating breakfast. Are you scared of a little kitty?”
“Of that Tasmanian furball?” He made a rude scoffing sound and pulled a little stuffed mouse from the front pocket of his jeans. “I got her some catnip to mellow her out.” He tossed it on the coffee table. “What are your plans?”
She planned to work. “Why?”
“I thought we could drive to Redfish Lake and get a bite to eat.”
“Like in a date?”
“Sure.” He reached for the terrycloth belt and pulled her toward him. “Why not?”
Because they weren’t dating. They shouldn’t even be having sex. Dating couldn’t happen no matter how her stomach tumbled or her skin tingled.
“I’m hungry and I thought you might be hungry too.” He dipped his head and kissed the side of her neck.
She moved her head to one side. She did have to eat, though. “Why Redfish Lake?”
“Because they have a good restaurant in the lodge there, and I want to spend the whole day with you.” He kissed the side of her throat. “Say yes.”
“I’ll need to get dressed.” She pulled her belt from his grasp and turned away. As she entered her bedroom she called out, “How far is Redfish Lake?”
“About an hour and a half,” he answered from the doorway.
She hadn’t expected him to follow her and she looked over at him as she grabbed a pair of underwear from a drawer. He leaned against the doorframe, and his eyes watched her, moving with her hands as she pulled up a pair of pink silky panties. His gaze felt very intimate. More intimate than when he kissed the insides of her thighs and his eyes turned that certain sexy blue. Intimate like they were a couple and it was normal for him to watch her dress. Like this relationship was more than it really was and more than it was ever going to be. As if there were a chance at tomorrows and the day afters. She raised her brows up her forehead. “Do you mind?”
“You’re not going to get all modest, are you? Not after last night.” She continued to stare at him until he sighed and pushed away from the doorframe. “All right. I’ll go get your cat stoned.”
She watched him leave and tried not to think about tomorrow or the days after and things that could never be. She dressed quickly in a pink cotton sundress. She pulled her hair back in a claw and gazed in the mirror as she put on a little mascara and lip gloss.
In the harsh light of day, with her sexual desire sated and her emotions tightly under control, she knew she had to tell him she was Madeline Jones. He deserved to know.
The thought of telling him cramped her stomach and she wondered if he really had to be told at all. Last night she might not have been real tactful when she’d brought up other women. She’d obviously made him mad, but the fact was, Mick Hennessy was no more a one-woman man than his father had been. Or his grandfather. Even if he wasn’t seeing anyone else right now, he would get tired of Maddie. He’d move on sooner or later, so why tell him today?
If anything, she should clear up her mortifying outburst last night. She wasn’t a woman who got all weepy and cried on a man’s neck. Perhaps she hadn’t broken down like some women were apt to do, but for her, it was a loss of control that embarrassed her. Even twelve hours later.
A half hour into their drive to Redfish, she decided to clear it up. “Sorry about last night,” she said above the country music filling the cab of Mick’s truck.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about. You got a little loud, but I like that about you.” He grinned and glanced at her through the lenses of his blue mirrored sunglasses before returning his gaze to the road. “Sometimes I don’t always understand everything you say, but you sound real sexy while you’re saying it.”
Somehow she suspected they weren’t talking about the same thing. “I was talking about getting all emotional at Hennessy’s.”
“Oh.” His thumb tapped against the steering wheel, keeping time to a song about a woman liking chrome. “Don’t worry about it.”
She wished she could take his advice, but it wasn’t that easy for her. “There are just certain girls I’ve never wanted to be. One of them is the emotional girl who cries all the time.”
“I don’t think you’re an emotional girl.” Air from the vents touched the dark hair about his forehead. “What are the other girls?”
“What?”
“You said there are girls you never wanted to be.” Without taking his eyes from the road, he turned off the CD player and spoke into the sud denly silent cab. “One is the emotional girl. What are the others?”
