Rachel Gibson: Tangled Up In You

“I used to believe that until tonight. If you are anything in the sack like your mother, then I get why my dad was ready to walk out the door and leave us for her. You Jones women drop your clothes and the Hennessy men get stupid.”

“Wait!” Maddie interrupted him and held up one hand. “Your dad was going to leave? For my mother?” Her mother had been right about Loch.

“Yeah. I just found out. Guess you have something to put in your book.” He smiled, but it wasn’t pleasant. “I’m just like my dad, and you’re just like your mother.”

“I am nothing like my mother, and you are nothing like your father. When I look at you, I just see you. That’s how I fell in love with you.”

“It doesn’t matter what you see, because when I look at you, I don’t know who you are.” He stood. “You aren’t the woman I thought you were. When I look at you now, I feel sick that I fucked the waitress’s daughter.”

Maddie’s hands clenched into fists. “Her name was Alice and she was my mother.”

“I don’t really give a shit.”

“I know you don’t.” She stormed out of the room and into her office, only to return a few moments later with a file and photograph. “This was her.” She held up the old framed picture. “Look at her. She was twenty-four and beautiful and had her whole life ahead of her. She was flighty and immature and made horrible choices in her young life. Especially when it came to men.” She pulled the crime scene photo from the files. “But she didn’t deserve this.”

“Jesus.” Mick turned his head away.

Maddie dropped everything onto the dresser. “Your family did this to her and to me. The least you could do is say her goddamn name when you talk about her!”

Mick looked at her, his brows lowered over his beautiful eyes. “I’ve spent most of my life not talking or thinking about her. I’m going to spend the rest of it not thinking about you.” He reached for his wallet on her bed, then walked out of the room.

Above the sound of her beating heart, Maddie heard the front door slam and she flinched. That had gone worse than she’d imagined. She’d thought he’d be angry, but disgusted? That had hit like a punch to the stomach.

She walked to the front door and, through the peephole, watched his truck pull out of her driveway. She locked the deadbolt and leaned her back against the solid door. The tears she’d refused to shed filled her eyes. A sound she almost didn’t recognize as coming from her broke past the emotion in her chest. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, she slid down until her butt hit the floor.

“Meow.”

Snowball climbed into her lap and scaled the front of her robe. Her tiny pink tongue licked the tears from Maddie’s numb cheek.

How was it possible to hurt so much but feel absolutely hollow inside?

Meg raised her fingers to her temples and pushed, like she had as a kid. “She shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.” The ends of her pink robe flapped about her ankles as she paced her small kitchen. It was nine a.m. and luckily her day off work. Travis had spent the night with Pete and was blissfully unaware of the turmoil brewing within his home.

“She shouldn’t be allowed to live here,” Meg ranted. “Our lives were fine until she showed up. She’s just like her mother. Moving to town and messing up our lives.”

After Mick had left Maddie’s house, he’d gone back to work and tried to ignore the anger and chaos in his soul. After the bar closed, he stayed and worked on business. He looked over his bank records and wrote out payroll checks. He checked inventory and made notes on what he needed to order, and after the clock struck eight, he drove to his sister’s.

“Someone should do something.”

Mick set his coffee on the old oak table where he’d eaten dinner as a kid and sat in a chair. “Tell me you’re not going to do anything.”

She stopped and looked over at him. “Like what? What can I do?”

“Promise you won’t go anywhere near her.”

“What is it you think I’m going to do?”

He simply looked at her, and she seemed to deflate before his eyes.

“I’m not like Mom. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

No, just herself. “Promise,” he insisted.

“Fine. If it will make you feel better. I promise that I’m not going to burn her house down.” She laughed quietly and sat in the chair next to him.

“That’s not funny, Meg.”

“Maybe not, but no one got hurt that night, Mick.”

Only because he’d shown up in time to pull her out of their farmhouse the night she’d torched it. She’d always insisted that she hadn’t been trying to kill herself. To this day, he wasn’t sure he believed her.

“I’m not crazy, you know.”

“I know,” he said automatically.

She shook her head. “No, you don’t. Sometimes you look at me and I think you see Mom.”

That was so close to the truth that he didn’t even bother denying it. “I just think that sometimes your emotions are over the top.”

“To you they are, but there is a big difference between being an emotional person who rants and raves as opposed to a person who takes a gun and kills herself or anyone else.”

He thought calling her outbursts “being an emotional person” an understatement, but he didn’t want to argue. He stood and walked to the sink. “I’m tired and going home,” he said and poured his coffee down the drain.

“Get some sleep,” his sister ordered.

He grabbed his keys off the kitchen table and Meg rose to hug him good-bye.

“Thanks for coming by and telling me everything.”

He hadn’t told Meg everything. He hadn’t mentioned that he’d had sex with Maddie, nor that he’d fallen for her. “Tell Travis I’ll come by tomorrow morning and take him fishing.”

“He’ll like that.” She rose and walked him to the door. “You’ve been so busy with work lately that you boys haven’t had much time together.”

He’d been busy, but mostly busy chasing after Maddie Dupree. No. Maddie Jones.

“Take a shower,” she called after him as he made his way to his truck. “You look like crap.”

Which he figured was perfect, since he felt like crap. He jumped in his truck and ten minutes later he stood in his bedroom, wondering how his life had gone to complete hell.

He pulled his shirt over his head and caught a scent of Maddie. Last night she’d smelled like coconut and lime and this morning was the first time since he’d met her that he didn’t want to bury his face in her neck. No, he wanted to wring her neck.

He tossed the shirt in the laundry basket in his closet and took off his shoes. Standing in her kitchen last night, realizing who she was, had hit him like a blow to the side of the head. If that hadn’t been good enough for her, she’d held up the bloody photo of her mother, which finished him off with a roundhouse kick to the gut. She’d beat the hell out of him and he’d gone down for the count.

He took off his shoes and undressed. He was a fool. For the first time in his life, he’d truly fallen hard for a woman. So hard it ate at his chest like acid. Only she wasn’t who she’d led him to believe she was. She was Maddie Jones. Daughter of his father’s last girlfriend. It didn’t matter that she didn’t see Loch when she looked at him or that she looked nothing like her mother. It really didn’t matter that she’d lied to him, or at least not as much as knowing who she really was mattered. He’d spent most of his life fighting to free himself from the past, only to fall for a woman deeply tangled up in it.

Mick walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Evidently he was more like Loch than he’d ever thought, and that just pissed him off. From almost the beginning, he’d known there was something about Maddie. Something that drew him in. He hadn’t known what it was and couldn’t have even guessed. Now he understood, and it sat in his gut like hot lead. He understood that it was the same single-minded attraction his father must have felt for her mother. The same fascination that made him want to see her smile, watch her laugh, and listen to her whisper his name as he gave her pleasure. The same sort of calm his father must have felt when he was near her mother. As if everything else dropped away and his vision cleared, and he saw what he wanted even before he knew he’d wanted anything.