“No. It’s not bad at all. Maybe you’ll change your mind when you recover emotionally, but if you don’t, then that’s fine too. You should enjoy your freedom. Do something just for you. Something you want. You went too long without being able to do that because you were tied to Josh. Be free for a little while. Why shouldn’t you?”
Madeline smiled and shook her head. “Well, the honest answer to that is I’m always brooding over consequences. What if I do what I want and then it turns out to be a mistake?”
“Isn’t that what freedom means? If you’re free to choose, then sometimes you’ll choose wrong. But somehow I doubt that something you really want to do is going to be that wrong. So what if it’s a little reckless? You’ve never let yourself be reckless.”
“Yeah.” Madeline’s heart had started to pound as she mentally moved closer to a decision. Ria was smart and generous and knew her as well as anyone in the world. She wouldn’t advise her to do something stupid. So maybe she was right. Maybe she was allowed to throw off the shackles of responsibility and good sense for a little while.
Maybe she was allowed to do what she wanted for once in her life.
Even if what she wanted was screwing the sheriff.
“So what are you thinking?” Ria asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You have something in mind. Something you want to do. Is it so bad you can’t tell me?”
“It’s not bad. At least I don’t think so. It just feels... I don’t know... private. For now.” Madeline licked her lips. She didn’t normally keep secrets from Ria and Skye, and she felt kind of bad about doing so now. She was almost tempted to admit it, but something kept holding her back.
“Okay. I get it. You’ll tell us when you’re ready.” Ria’s dark eyes were sincere. “If it’s something you want to do, don’t hold back just because you’re afraid. You deserve good things, Madeline. So let yourself have them.”
For no good reason, Madeline’s throat tightened with emotion. “Thanks,” she managed to say.
She did want this. She wanted to have sex with Ken. She wanted to really bad.
And she could no longer think of enough good excuses not to.
She chatted with Ria a little longer, and together they talked through the last part of the poem she needed to finish. After she’d written it down, she left the shop and started walking through the downtown streets until she’d reached the oldest residential neighborhood in town.
Several blocks down was a brick ranch house with a big yard and a one-car attached garage. It was Ken’s house. His garage door was open, and his pickup truck was parked inside.
He was home.
She didn’t know what had prompted her to do something so crazy, but she was here at his house at just after noon on a random Saturday.
And she was going to ask him if he wanted to have sex.
KEN WAS WORKING ON cleaning up one of the flower beds in his backyard. The previous homeowner had filled it with ferns that grew like crazy every spring, overflowing the bed and ending up everywhere, and he was tired of trying to keep up with them. But digging up fern bulbs was a losing prospect. Every time he thought he’d gotten all of them, a new round would appear out of nowhere.
He’d had a lot of excess energy this week after his hot evening with Madeline on Tuesday, so he’d woken up restless and jittery. Since he couldn’t go pounding on her door this morning and asking her again for hot sex, he committed to getting the rest of the fern bulbs out of that damned bed before they started popping up everywhere again in the spring.
It was a warm, sunny day for autumn, and after a couple of hours, he was hot and sweaty and covered with dirt. His head was still full of erotic visions of Madeline with hot eyes, flushed cheeks, tousled hair. No clothes. So he kept working, hoping he’d eventually be too tired for lustful thoughts.
Marlowe, his black lab, had been keeping him company during the morning, rooting around in the dirt and chasing away birds and squirrels. But a certain kind of barking indicated that a person must have arrived, so Ken straightened up and looked around. Marlowe had run around to the front of the house through the open fence gate.
Ken followed him. It was probably Katie. She sometimes stopped by on Saturdays so the girls could say hi on the weekends when they weren’t staying with him.
Before he’d gotten around the corner to the front yard, Marlowe returned with happy yaps and twirls, followed by Madeline.
Madeline.
She was wearing jeans and a simple white shirt. Her hair was loose and her eyes were downcast.
Ken’s heart gave a ridiculous lurch at the sight of her. He pulled to a stop and stared, unable to move or say anything for a moment.
“Hey,” she said, darting a quick glance up at him. “Sorry to just stop by.”
“You’re sorry?” He almost choked on the words. “Why are you sorry? I was just thinking about you.”
“You were?” Her face and shoulders relaxed. She’d reached him now. Marlowe was running circles around them, thrilled with the unexpected visitor.
“Yes. I didn’t think... I wasn’t sure you’d want to...” He was almost never tongue-tied like this. He had no idea what had gotten into him.
She gave a little giggle and dropped her eyes again. Her eyelashes were thick. Her pink cheeks were delectable. “I wasn’t sure either, but then I... I don’t know. I wanted to do something... just for me.”
His heart gave another crazy lurch. He had to breathe a few times before he’d tempered his excitement enough to say in something close to his normal laid-back tone, “Well, if the something you want to do
