AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Holy shit, that woke everything up.
I was so shocked, my eyes were still wide open when the door opened again and she sauntered out, treating me to a view that made me gasp.
“Morning,” she said sweetly, rounding the bed again and crawling in beside me, cuddling right back up behind me.
“Holy shit, Madelyn,” was all I could say for a long moment. “You sure do know how to wake a man up.”
She chuckled behind me, her nose pressed between my shoulder blades, and she kissed me again through my t-shirt. “I love Bailey, but this is much better.”
Telling me, woman.
By the time I worked up the courage to roll to face her, she was lying on her side facing me, a hand tucked under her cheek. The blanket covered all the parts I was really interested in seeing, but the vision was seared into my memory as it was.
I reached out and tapped a fingertip against the pronounced white scar beneath her collarbone, in the soft tissue between her chest and her arm.
“Sniper fire,” she said matter-of-factly, then pointed to another scar on the underside of her arm.
“Total?” I asked quietly and she screwed up her face in concentration.
“Five bullet wounds, two mystery scars–probably flak–two knife wounds, and you already saw the spot where I opened myself up on the rocks.”
I really wanted to see that scar again, especially now, to trace it with my lips and tongue.
Like she read my mind, she slipped her fingers under the sheet and pulled it all the way down to her hip. “And one kayak paddle, of course,” she said with a small smile.
The last thing I needed to do was lie there and stare at her, but I couldn’t help myself. It was the vision I’d entertained for almost as long as I could remember, and I had no doubt my brain would resurrect this moment again and again as I laid in my bed alone at night.
“I’d like to meet her,” I said suddenly, surprised that was the thing to come out of my mouth, and a huge smile stretched across her face. She knew what I meant.
“I’d like you to meet her too. I was planning to go again today if you’d like to come with me.”
Lying in bed with a naked woman I’d sworn not to touch, asking to meet the infant she wanted to adopt without me…that was the beginning of the end.
11
Madelyn
Maybeitshouldhaveembarrassed me that Adam didn’t readily respond to my bold overture. There had been only a handful of times in my life I’d gone after a man I wanted, and I’d never been turned down, but I’d never wanted anyone the way I wanted Adam and to think of him rejecting me was one of the scariest things I could imagine.
Adam’s response to me had been at odds with his words, considering what I felt when he rolled up behind me during the night, and he’d grunted in his sleep when I wriggled against him.
Adam Beckman was the unicorn in fairy tales: gorgeous, honorable, hard working, humble and protective. And damn it, if I couldn’t seduce him into being mine, I was going to have to find some other way. The problem was that I wasn’t sure therewasanother way. He seemed like the sort who didn’t play.
I fed him breakfast and he made coffee, then I rode with him to his place. He showered while I laid on my back in the living room and let Lucy terrorize me. She was tiny and adorable, a miniature terror who let out a squeaky, attention-seeking meow every time Adam walked into the room.
“I get it, girlfriend,” I said gently to her after he’d set her down and hurried off to the bathroom to shower. “He makesallthe girls that crazy.”
The little black cat wore herself out dive bombing my feet and finally she stretched out across my stomach, where I lay in the ray of sunshine shining down through the large window.
“You two are a pretty picture.”
My eyes snapped back open. I must have fallen asleep again, because Adam stood in the opening that led to the kitchen. There was the sweetest smile on his face, his wet hair pulled back into a knot secured by an elastic.
Something had changed between us. There was a new current of gentle understanding running between us, something that felt like a communication that didn’t require words. It was something sweet, like we’d been in tune with one another for years and for a moment I wondered if we had. Maybe we’d finally gotten out of our own way and unblocked something, a frequency of sorts.
I didn’t have to direct Adam to the facility. He was even more familiar with the town than I was, and that it was across the parking lot from the church we’d both attended most of our lives made it pretty easy for him to find.
Sister Theresa Grace was the one to buzz us through that morning. She looked like she’d had something sour for breakfast, an unpleasant almost-scowl on her face that seemed to be her natural expression. But I tell you what, the instant she saw Adam standing behind me that scowl dropped right off her face: slid down her chin and disappeared.
