Chapter Twenty-Eight
Madden and Eve didn’t go to sleep until three in the morning.
They were having too much fun.
To Madden’s everlasting shock, Eve found crackers that weren’t expired in the cabinet and paired them with marmalade from
the fridge. They sat in the center of his bed with Eve in a borrowed T-shirt that said “Protect Your Nuts” and depicted a
catcher in position behind the plate—a birthday gift from Elton, obviously. Madden himself was bare-chested in sweatpants
with a fresh ice pack wrapped onto his shoulder and he sat, stupefied by his own luck, as the most beautiful woman on the
planet knifed the sticky orange substance onto crackers and fed them into his mouth, his bedroom feeling less like a temporary
crash zone and more like a haven for the first time.
He’d half expected Eve to clam up after they had sex, too much vulnerability on display for one night. Thank god she hadn’t.
With her hair in disarray and her face free of makeup, she fucking glowed, her smile coming so easy that his conviction that
Eve should be with him—and out of Cumberland, kids and all—only grew by the minute. And there was no chance he’d say that
out loud and risk shattering the perfect evening, but damn, his bones were feeling it. How the hell was he going to let her
leave in the morning?
“I know you stumbled into baseball by accident. After all, I was there the day it happened.” She flashed him a half smile. “Before that, what did you want to be when you grew up? When you were little, I mean.”
“A grocery bagger.”
Her laughter said his answer had caught her off guard and the rare lightness of the sound made him dizzy. “For the money or
the apron?”
“The gossip,” Madden scoffed, as if that should have been obvious. “My first memories are my mum taking me to the shops and
finding out everyone’s business from the man who bagged the ingredients for supper. Mr. Leary was petty as sin and everyone
knew it, too, but they continued to tell him their secrets in exchange for somebody else’s. I thought he was more powerful
than the president of Ireland.”
Her eyes were wide as saucers. “Do you remember any of the gossip? What was the best/worst thing you heard?”
“I once found out two of my primary school teachers were shagging and I pretended to be sick the next day, I was so anxious
about seeing them.” Watching Eve giggle into the crook of her elbow, Madden couldn’t control his smile. “The little bits of
hearsay were the best, though. Like the two elderly men in the neighborhood feuding because they supported rival rugby teams.
One of them tipped over the other’s grocery cart right there in the store—this is all coming from Mr. Leary, mind you, so
it could be an exaggeration—but anyway, the man felt so ashamed about knocking over the cart, they had to call a priest down
to the shops to absolve him. They still went back to feuding the next day, but it was smaller things, like sniffing aggressively
at each other in the pub.”
“Not the aggressive sniffing,” Eve gasped, her eyes sparkling with tears of mirth. “Do you think Mr. Leary is still there?”
“I don’t know,” Madden said honestly. “If not, I hope at the very least they retired his apron.”
Eve sat looking content for a moment. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be Vanna White. You know, the lady who turns the letters
on Wheel of Fortune. Not because of the gowns, although I coveted that wardrobe.” Eve shrugged. “But mainly because she was always smiling. I
thought she had to be the happiest woman alive. She really only had to smile for half an hour a day, though. I didn’t grasp
that until I was older and I think it only made me envy her more.”
Madden wanted desperately to pull Eve into his lap and hold her, because he didn’t know the right words for the revelations
she was bestowing on him, like little glimpses into the place she’d always been so cautious to allow anyone, even him, but
he wanted to keep her relaxed. Free of pressure. Laughing. If this spell was broken in the morning, he wanted her to remember
she was happy here with him. “Eve.”
“Yeah?”
“I adore you, but it would have killed you to smile even for thirty minutes a day.”
She was eating a cracker when he said it and she had to cover her mouth to keep it from ejecting along with her laugh. “They
call me Vanna Spite.”
His deep rumble filled the room. “Frowns not gowns.”
“Stop,” she wheezed. “Game show dreams: dashed.”
“Something tells me you’ll recover from the disappointment,” he said dryly.
She grinned at him so long his chest started to hurt. “Were you hazed as a freshman on your college baseball team?”
Madden didn’t bother trying to hide how happy it made him to have her curious. About him. To be showing it so openly. “I was, but not in any horrifying or illegal ways. Dirty jockstrap in my locker. Vaseline in my glove. Things like that.”
“Boys are so weird. Did you haze the freshmen, too, when you became an upperclassman?”
“That’s not really my style, love.”
“I know.” Eve paused in the middle of putting marmalade on a cracker to study Madden under her lashes, before continuing.
“They probably idolized you.”
He squinted at her, genuinely curious. “Why would they idolize me?”
“Because you have a moral code and nothing shakes it. You’re solid and unwavering and good. I can imagine you in the locker
room, sighing heavily and letting everyone else spin out.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I had to wait three days to marry my wife? I got so impatient I called my teammates overpaid
egomaniacs and got a right cross for my trouble?”
She leaned forward to feed him a cracker and he bit in while looking her in the eye and smelling his soap on her skin, deciding
he’d never been treated to a finer meal. “Even the calmest among us has a breaking point,” she said quietly, sitting back
with flushed skin, probably due to the fact that he couldn’t hide his wonder and appreciation.
Eve thought nothing shook him? Madden wanted to bring up the fight he’d almost gotten into a week earlier with that son of
a bitch who’d suggested she make house calls, but he didn’t want to remind her of that. Even thinking about it made his scalp
prickle with anger, so he could only imagine how the memory would make her feel. “You don’t lose your cool very easily, either,
Eve. What’s your breaking point?”
A beat of silence passed while she chewed a cracker. “Apart from a threat to the kids, I don’t think there’s anything that could make me show that I’m at a breaking point.” She wet her lips. “But that wouldn’t mean I’m not cracking on the inside.” She paused. “That
doesn’t mean I haven’t cracked a million times on the inside.”
“You can show me the cracks anytime you need.” Not reaching for her in that instant sent a ripple of pain through his shoulder,
he tensed so quickly. “I’ll hold you together until you can manage it yourself.”
Eve’s smile was a little bittersweet. “You might not realize it, but I’ve shown them to you more than anyone over the years.
Probably because you showed me your own.”
For the first time that night, she withdrew slightly, as if realizing she’d revealed too much, gathering up the box of crackers
and the plate holding the knife and marmalade, walking across the bed on her knees to set everything on his side table. “I
think it’s time to switch to heat on your shoulder. They gave you that heating pad at the hospital, right?” Madden struggled
for a moment with letting Eve care for him, but ultimately dipped his chin. She said, “I’ll grab it. Do you want another ibuprofen?”
“No, love.”
She stood at the foot of the bed now, looking so sweet and unguarded in his oversize shirt and bare feet, the urge to wrap
his protection around her was growing. “Do you want anything at all?” she asked.
Madden shook his head no, but that was a lie.
He just didn’t recognize it until Eve had left the room and the life, the magic, left along with her.
Maybe it was the strange quality of the day, but he was suddenly in need of proof that Eve being there wasn’t all in his imagination.
He stood abruptly, unwrapping the plastic holding the ice pack on his shoulder, letting it drop as he followed her into the living room, his stride slowing when he saw she was sitting cross-legged in the dark, going through the hospital bag.
Not a fantasy. Real.
He leaned against the wall outside the bathroom and watched her, the moonlight turning her hair silver, highlighting the curve
of her cheek.
I can’t believe that’s my wife.
The combination of lust and idolization was a potent one. It made his heart feel like a big, unwieldy thing, while his body
primed itself. Made his breath short and coldcocked him with yearning. Just by looking at her. She’d probably never know the
extent of how deep his obsession with her ran, would she? How could he even begin to describe it to her?
He couldn’t.
His body ached to show her, though.
And so when Eve padded back in the direction of the bedroom, Madden intercepted her in the dark. Swallowing her gasp, he continued
the thorough assault of her lips, her tongue, and her neck in the hallway, framing her face in his hands, worshipping her
with slanted strokes of her mouth as they stumbled, his back meeting the wall first, before he surged forward to the other
side of the hallway, taking her mouth like she’d signed over ownership with a signature on a dotted line. Pressing her to
the wall this time.
“I lied. I do want something.”
“I only need one guess what it is,” she said, whimpering when he reached beneath the T-shirt to hold her bare pussy in his
hand, her whole body liquefying between him and the wall.
“Can we fuck again, Eve?”
His bluntness made her thighs cinch shut around his hand, trembling. “Y-yes. Yes.”