“I said, maybe.”
Knowing when not to push something, Addison changed the subject. “Come on. I’ll show you around upstairs.”
She helped me grab my things from my trunk, and we walked up the sturdy but creaky staircase to the apartment above her office.
She unlocked the dead bolt and handed me the key. “It’s not big, but you won’t be here long.”
“I remember from when I was here last time.” I grabbed on to the door and shook it to test how sturdy it was. Even with a dead bolt, doors could be broken.
She set my stuff down by the door. “I left a lot of things here when Maddox and I bought our own place.” She pointed toward the kitchen. “There are dishes in the cupboard, and I put some essentials in the fridge. You’ll probably have to go shopping though.”
“I’ll do that this afternoon while you’re at work.”
She pointed to the couch. “I left the couch, but I took my TV. But I assume you have your laptop in case you want to watch anything.”
“TV? What’s that?” I joked and patted the bag hanging on my shoulder. “My computer is right here. And I’m fine without a television. I barely have time to watch anything other than the news I turn on while I’m getting ready in the morning.”
“Tell me about it.” She gestured toward the bathroom. “I put clean towels in the bathroom along with the basic toiletries. I figured you’d probably bring a lot of your own stuff.”
I nodded.
She turned her attention to the bedroom. “I left my bed and all my bedroom furniture when I moved. Maddox insisted we get a king-size bed, and mine is only a queen. I was going to eventually bring it over for a guest room, but then both boys were born, and we ran out of bedrooms. So, here it stays.” She put her hand on my arm. “I put on fresh sheets this morning.”
“Thank you.”
I set my laptop bag down on her kitchen table and turned around. I pointed to the wall behind me. “I don’t remember that window being there.”
Addison looked. “Oh, I used to have a big bookcase in front of the window because it has a direct line of sight into that room, where Tommy is staying. These buildings were built very close together, so I put the bookcase there when I first moved in because I didn’t want my previous neighbors looking in and catching me naked or something. The bookcase was there so long that I forgot about the window until I moved the bookcase to the new house.” She tapped her chin and said to herself, “Why didn’t I remember that when Maddox moved in? I could have spied on him.”
“Addison.”
“What?”
“You can’t spy on someone even if he is now your husband.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was kidding.”
“No, you weren’t.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I wasn’t.” She walked over to the small pane of glass. “You honestly can’t see much anyway, but you still might want to put up a towel or something.”
I walked up behind her. I could barely make out furniture in the apartment next door, to the point that I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Addison turned around. “I’ll leave, so you can get situated.” She looked at her watch. “We’re grilling out at our house for dinner, so you should have plenty of time to unpack and go to the store.”
“What time should I come over?”
“Maddox will probably pick the boys up from day care at five, so around then.”
“I’ll be there.”
She put her hand on my arm. “But no earlier, okay?”
I laughed. “Okay.” I liked being early to everything.
“I’m serious,” she said with a smile because she knew I was always punctual.
I put an X over my heart. “I promise.”
5
Tommy
After lunch, I walked over to Maddox and Addison’s place because their town was that small. It took me a good twenty minutes, but it wasn’t worth having Maddox come and pick me up.
When I got there, I walked around to the backyard and pulled out my earbuds. When Maddox had said he was keeping me busy while I was in town, he’d meant it. His house was old, and while he had already updated a lot of things upstairs, his basement still gave off a dungeon vibe with half of it unfinished. Before we started on the inside though, we were going to make the tiny windows into full-sized ones, so they would bring in more light. We would also make them big enough that someone could crawl out of them if there was a fire.
Maddox looked up from his work and rested his arm on the shovel he’d just been using. “Hey, Addison told me you apologized to Olivia.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. It was the right thing to do.”
I waited for him to add that I had come on to her and canceled out any apology I had given.
“Thanks. It was going to be a long week if you and Olivia were butting heads the whole time. It makes things easier on Addison and me.”
Interesting. So, Olivia hadn’t told Addison that I’d offered to have sex with her.
Or Addison hadn’t told Maddox that.
Nah. Addison totally would have told her husband. Those two hardly kept anything from each other.
Which meant I needed to file this information away for later.
“It’s the least I could do. I was pretty rude to her. I don’t know what came over me.”
Maddox laughed. “I do.”
I picked up the other shovel. “Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”
He wiped off a bead of sweat from his forehead. “You were just being you. You always speak your mind. It’s one of the things I like about you.”
“Yeah, it worked well when we were active duty.” When we had been out in the field, there hadn’t been time to tiptoe around things. When issues arose, they needed to be dealt with immediately. “But being a civilian now, I might need to
