“Oh.” She counted them off on her fingers. “I don’t ever want to be the stupid girl. Nor the get-drunk-and-slutty girl. The stalker girl or the butt girl.”
He looked over at her. “The butt girl?”
“Don’t make me explain it to you.”
He returned his gaze to the road and smiled. “Then you’re not talking about a girl with a big butt.”
“No.”
“Oh, so I guess I don’t ever…”
“Forget it.”
He laughed. “Some women say they like it.”
“Uh-huh. Some women say they like to be paddled, but I’ll never know the pleasure of either.”
Mick reached across the center console and took her hand. “What about being tied to a bed?”
She shrugged. “I kind of like that.”
He brought her hand to his mouth and smiled against her skin. “I guess I know what we’re doing after I get off work.”
Maddie laughed and turned her attention to the scenery. To the pines and thick brush and the South Fork of the Payette River. Idaho might grow famous potatoes, but it also had spectacular wilderness areas.
At the lodge, they sat at a table that looked out at the blue-green water of Redfish Lake and at the snow-covered peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains. They ate lunch and talked about the people in Truly. She told him about her friends, and about Lucy’s wedding last year and Clare’s impending nuptials. They talked about everything from the weather to world events, sports to the latest West Nile virus outbreaks.
They talked about almost everything but the reason she moved to Truly. By tacit agreement they avoided talking about the book she was writing and about the night his mother had killed two people and then herself.
The day was relaxing and fun, and during those rare moments when Maddie looked into his eyes, her conscience reminded her that he would not be with her if he knew who she really was. She shoved it down and ignored it. She turned a deaf ear, and by the ride home, she’d buried her conscience so deep, it was just a faint whisper that was easily ignored.
Chapter 14
After he got off work that night, Mick showed up on Maddie’s doorstep with silk neckties in one hand and another catnip mouse in the other. While he tied Maddie’s wrists, Snowball batted the mouse around, then later flagrantly disregarded the rules and passed out in Maddie’s office chair. Disregarding the rules was becoming a bad habit for Snowball. Just as Mick Hennessy was becoming a habit for Maddie. A habit she was eventually going to have to break, but there was a problem. Maddie liked spending time with him, in and out of bed, and that created another problem. She wasn’t getting a lot of work done. She hadn’t finished her notes or completed the timeline, and she really needed to do that before she sat down to write Chapter Two. She needed to remember why she was in Truly and get to work. No more dropping everything to have a good time with Mick, but when he called the next night and asked her to meet him at Mort’s after he closed for the night, she didn’t think twice. At twelve-thirty, she knocked on the back door wearing a red trench coat, four-inch pumps, and one of Mick’s blue neckties nestled between her bare breasts.
“Like the tie,” Mick said as he opened her coat.
“I thought I’d return it.”
He put his hands on her bare waist and brought her against his chest. “There’s something about you, Maddie,” he said as he looked into her eyes. “Something more than the way you make love. Something that makes me think about you when I’m pouring drinks or watching Travis strike out in T-ball.”
She put her arms around his neck and her nipples brushed the front of his polo shirt. Against her pelvis, he was enormous and ready. This was the part where she should tell him that she thought about him too, but she couldn’t. Not because it wasn’t true. It was true, but it was best to keep things platonic until he moved on.
Instead of talking, she brought his mouth down to hers and her hand slid to the front of his pants. What had started as a one-night stand had turned into more nights. He wanted to see more of her. She wanted to see more of him, but it wasn’t love. She did not love Mick, but she liked him a whole lot. Especially when he laid her on his bar and, between the bottles of alcohol, she caught glimpses in the mirror of his long hard body moving, driving, pushing her toward a release that curled her toes inside her pumps.
It was sex. Just sex. Ironically, the kind of relationship she’d waited four years to find. Nothing more, and if she were to ever forget that fact, she had only to remind herself that while she knew his body intimately, she didn’t even know his home phone number or where he lived. Mick might say that there was something about her, but whatever that something was, it wasn’t enough to want her in his life.
The morning of Snowball’s vet appointment, Maddie packed up her kitten and drove into town. August was the hottest month of summer, and the weatherman predicted that the valley would heat up to a scorching ninety-three degrees.
Maddie sat in an examination room and watched as veterinarian John Tannasee checked out her kitten. John was a tall man with hard muscles beneath his lab coat and a Tom Selleck moustache. His voice was so deep it sounded as if it came from his feet. He gently looked in Snowball’s ears and then checked her bottom, determining that Snowball was indeed a girl. He took her temperature and gave her a clean bill of health.
“Her heterochromia doesn’t appear to affect her vision.” He scratched her between the ears and pointed out her other genetic defect. “And her malocculusion isn’t so bad that it will affect her eating.”
Maddie understood what he’d meant by heterochromia, but, “Malocculusion?”
“Your cat has an overbite.”
Maddie had never heard of such a thing in a cat and didn’t quite believe it until he tipped the kitten’s head back and showed her Snowball’s upper jaw was a bit longer than the bottom. For some strange reason, the kitten’s oral affliction made Maddie kind of like Snowball.
“She’s bucktoothed,” Maddie said in astonishment. “She’s a hillbilly.” She made a follow-up appointment to get Snowball spayed so that she couldn’t produce any more big-headed hillbilly cats, then she and Snowball drove to the grocery store.
“Behave,” she warned her kitten as she pulled into the D-Lite Grocery Store’s parking lot.
“Meow.”
“Behave and maybe I’ll get some Whisker Lickin’s.” She groaned as she got out of the car and locked the door. Had she just said Whisker Lickin’s? She was embarrassed for herself. As she moved across the parking lot, she wondered if she was destined to become one of those women who doted on their cats and told boring cat stories to people who didn’t give a flying crap.
Once inside the grocery store, she loaded up on chicken breasts, salad, and Diet Coke. She couldn’t find Whisker Lickin’s, so she tossed in Pounce Caribbean Catch. She wheeled her cart to the front of the store and register five. A clerk by the name of Francine scanned the Pounce while Maddie dug around in her purse.
“How old’s your cat?”
Maddie looked up and into Francine’s long face surrounded by eighties
