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There was still some kibble in the bottom and Lucy wasn’t a real picky eater, so I left it, but I freshened up her water before I drew a glass for myself and pulled out a chair at the small kitchen table. My brain was still reeling from running into the last person I ever expected to see in Watertown again, and I needed to take a few moments to sort my thoughts and gain some perspective.
Madelyn VanBuren was distressingly hot. Likemove over Satan, because I’m headed straight to hell for the thoughts I’m havinghot.
I remembered the little girl: too tall for her age, gangly, all arms and legs. Her mom always gave her at-home haircuts that left her bangs a little too short, and her teeth had been too big for her face until she was about fourteen or so. But around that age the little tomboy I knew started growing out her hair. She got into makeup just a little bit, and the first time I saw her in a skirt rather than gym shorts or overalls, I just about passed out. Which was wrong in my opinion. Because not only was Mads my best friend’s little sister–which practically made hermylittle sister–she was alsowaytoo young for me.
It’s funny, how a five-year age gap means everything when you’re nineteen but nothing when you’re coming up on forty-five. Perspective, I guess. Life experiences seem to shrink those gaps for the right person when the time is right.
I huffed at myself in irritation and pushed up from the table, making Lucy jump down with an irritated little chirp as she hit the floor.
Madelyn was in town temporarily. Running into her and spending the evening talking, laughing and letting her tease me had been an unexpected bright spot in what had become the fairly dull routine of my life.
The guy she was talking about taking the job with…I hadn’t served directly with Katsaros, but I knew of him thanks to my friend Lincoln. His security company had been going through some rapid growth according to Harlowe. She was the inside track on that one, since Aaron had just started working for him. As far as I knew, Katsaros was a pretty stand-up guy. Careful, honorable, but possibly connected.
I put myself through a hot shower and gave my long hair a little extra conditioner, since it was such a hit with the ladies. They could never wait to get their hands into the straight black hair that had been a gift from my mother–about the only thing she left me with, if I gave it any thought. With the exception of my dark hair and eyes and slightly olive skin, I looked exactly like my father: same nose, same smile, same shoulders the width of a football field.
Dad came from hearty German stock, to hear him tell it, and even in his early seventies he was in pretty exemplary shape. The ladies still flocked to him like he was a high school quarterback and his ready, easy smile probably broke more hearts than he’d ever meant to.
Mom broke his heart when she up and died in some parking lot altercation at the casino. Her friend had gotten her a job there and she worked late nights, serving drinks to men who had no business looking at her the way they did. My dad told me that more than once he arrived to pick her up at the end of her shift and had to take a few teeth out of one guy or another who’d tried to follow her out of the building.
Mom was a knockout. I touched the framed photo I kept of her and my dad, sitting on the nightstand next to my bed. She was where my Onandaga blood came from, and though she hadn’t been around to raise me, Dad saw to it that I was really immersed in her heritage.
I became friends with Steve VanBuren at the beginning of my junior year of high school. He didn’t make fun of me when I told him I wouldn’t be attending any weekend sporting events, because sometimes I had tribal events instead.
He didn’t call me half-breed or pull my long hair, and not once did he make fun of the way I dressed.
Dad tried, he really did, but I grew like a weed and by the time I turned seventeen, during that junior year of high school, I hit 6’3”. I went through such a rapid growth spurt, in fact, it probably looked like I was wearing a toddler’s clothes for a while.
My dad was hopeless when it came to noticing things like that and he and my stepmom didn’t have a lot of extra money, so Steve dragged me along with him to a thrift shop one day and tossed twenty bucks at me, claiming it had fallen out of my pocket in his car. I knew that was a lie, but I gave him a tight nod and joined him in digging through an enormous stack of jeans.
Steve’s family wasn’t wealthy, but they had more money than we did. I worked a lot of odd jobs after school, trying to help out where I could, but we were definitely what most people would have called theWrong Side of the Trackspeople.
Both Steve and I went to the local community college and in order to pay for the loans I took out, I joined the Army and Steve followed. He said if I was going to go get my ass blown off in a sandbox somewhere, he was going to be there to patch me up.
He did, too. More than once.
It was getting late and I tapped out a quick text to my dad, letting him know I was free the next couple days if he wanted to have dinner or watch a game together. Chances were good my stepmom was eager to get him out of the house, homebody that he was.
Lucy sauntered into the room about five minutes after I crawled in bed, hopping up on my chest, her standard spot. She rattled with her affectionate purr and I warned her I’d be rolling in about fifteen minutes, since I was a side sleeper. But until then she was content to sit on my chest and knead her paws into the soft sweatshirt I wore to bed.
Yeah, the cat…she was the closest thing I had to a woman in my bed. My own fault, too. I’d gotten too damn hung up the last couple years on a woman I couldn’t have and honestly, together we’d have been a disaster. But that had been enough to keep me from looking for anything even so much as just casual, though I wasn’t really bragging when I said I got more than enough attention. I was a chick magnet to hear Steve tell it, which he thought was hilarious, especially since none of them ever seemed to “stick,” as he put it.
Drifting off to sleep, I let my mind wander back to the evening spent with a beautiful woman. Madelyn had no idea how gorgeous she was, or what she did to men. She was confident, her movements sure and graceful, the biggest fucking turn-on ever.
She was funny and smart, experienced, capable of witty conversation and had endless crazy stories–genuinely wild, hair-raising ones. She was a woman who’d already lived areallife, one that had shaped the incredible person she’d become.
I’ll confess that as I fell asleep, I didn’t want to think about her intelligence or her sense of humor. Instead, I drifted off to the way it felt to hug her, when she’d folded into my arms and her face tucked into my neck.
Thank God she’d be moving soon for work, because if she stayed I was going to have a real problem. Madelyn VanBuren didn’t know it, but I’d been in love with her for most of my life.
3
Madelyn
Itwasthree-thirtyinthe morning when Teagan started screaming at the top of her lungs, and even though I was up one floor and on the opposite side of the house, old Victorians weren’t exactly built with soundproofing in mind.
Rolling over, I grunted when I saw the time on my phone and since it took a solid twenty minutes for Kennedy to get Teagan to stop wailing, I read through my emails and looked at real estate in the Ithaca area, just to get out ahead of things. If my interview with Scott Katsaros went well I expected to relocate quickly, as it seemed likely I’d be assigned to one of his teams that operated overseas. Sure, his operatives lived stateside, but I had a feeling my rent payment would be for a pricey storage unit, since it was unlikely I’d be home for long stretches of time, at least at first.
Next I goofed around for a while on social media. That was how my fingers typed inAdam Beckman, and I spent the next hour drooling over the few photos he had on Facebook. Which was ridiculous. Adam was even more untouchable now than he’d been when I was a teenager. I’d heard at one point he was married, but he certainly hadn’t acted like it tonight and I hadn’t seen a wedding band on his finger.
