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“What about your grandparents?” Rocco asked, his hands tracing invisible patterns on Maddie’s back, and even through her clothes, that soft contact made her heart race.
“They didn’t know how bad it was. Mom made it seem like a game at first, an exciting adventure like we were in our own ‘hero’s quest’ story. But it got worse and worse. Sometimes we barely had enough food to eat—though she always managed to get bottles of liquor,” Maddie winced. “She had a heap of boyfriends.” Maddie swallowed past a lump in her throat. “Sound familiar?”
His eyes ran over her face—how could either of them fail to see the similarities? Except…Maddie’s situation had been different, in some vital ways. She hadn’t been safe. She hadn’t been a part of a broader family. And there had never been close to enough money. “Some of them were…”
Rocco stopped swaying, and his hands stopped moving. The silence almost seemed to shake the air. “Go on,” he encouraged, his voice tight.
“Creepy,” she admitted.
“Creepy, how?”
“Like they’d want to talk to me after mom had passed out.”
“Did anyone ever touch you, Maddie?”
Her eyes widened as she glanced up at him, before shaking her head. “But there was one who would talk to me about stuff. Grown-up stuff.” She bit into her lower lip, still remembering how ashamed she’d been, how heavy the guilt had felt.
“What did your mother do?”
“I didn’t tell her. I was so scared that I’d done something wrong, that I’d somehow encouraged it.”
“Oh, Maddie.” He dropped his head, pressing a kiss to her brow. “Of course you didn’t.”
“I know that now. But as a child, it’s hard to navigate anything like that. I just wanted my mom to be happy. I wanted us to settle down somewhere. I wanted a garden,” she whispered. “And not just my stupid citrus tree.” Her laugh was hollow, tinged with pain for the little girl she’d been.
“This is why you were raised by your grandparents?”
“Well, yes. More or less. The last boyfriend got her into this weird cult. She was his fourth bride or something. They wanted me to live with them, but it was pretty clear that I would be expected to follow the lifestyle of their commune—I was terrified. I asked to go spend the summer with grandma and grandpa, talked them into letting me on account of their having just gotten married, and how nice the privacy would be.”
Rocco was very quiet.
“And when I got to Jack’s, I just refused to leave. I begged mom to follow after me, to leave the cult, but she wouldn’t. She was happy; she said that if I loved her, I’d have been happy for her, and I would have stayed.” Maddie sucked in a sharp breath. “Jack and Lorraine never asked questions, but eventually bits and pieces came out. They understood, and they loved me; they let me stay. They gave me a garden,” she added, only aware that she was crying when Rocco lifted a finger and wiped a tear from her cheek. “They let me plant whatever I wanted, to spend time out there digging, losing myself in the beauty of flowers and life and nourishing the soil. Of putting down roots.”
“As you had never been able to,” he murmured, kissing her brow once more. “Poor, poor Maddie.”
“Don’t do that,” she whispered. “Don’t pity me.”
“Pity you? How can I not, cara? But I also admire you. I admire the strength it took to run from that situation, to keep yourself safe, to know that you deserved better.”
She dropped her head forward, his words a balm she hadn’t known she needed.
“I think you are…quite impressive.”
It was an almost business-like compliment and yet it landed, with all the precision of an arrow, right in the very center of her being, and she knew, somehow, that it would never dislodge itself from that spot.
He hadn’t meant to spend the night but waking up beside Maddie as the early morning sun filtered in through her hotel window, he had to admit, he wasn’t sorry. He wasn’t sorry for any of it. Meeting her, indulging himself in this passion, getting to know her. There was an intimacy that came from their conversations that only seemed to deepen how much he wanted her, so he was burning with a need that he delighted in relieving—often. Insatiably. Made all the better by how equally she wanted him. In the night, she’d reached for him, half-asleep, groggy, their limbs entwined from earlier lovemaking, their bodies sated, until they weren’t. Until they touched and kissed and stirred fires to life that had been extinguished. She straddled him and rocked her hips and arched her back while he drove into her, his fingers holding her low on his body, his mouth finding her breasts and tormenting her sensitive flesh, his whole body energized by this raw, vital desire.
And now it was morning, and when he flipped onto his side it was to see Maddie, fast asleep, her beautiful face so relaxed and innocent. Her lips were parted, her lashes so thick and dark against her cheeks, like two crescent moons. He wanted to reach for her even then, to touch her, and kiss her awake, but she just looked so peaceful, and she would naturally be quite exhausted.
He knew she planned to wake early to start work—and it was just dawn. He would leave her to sleep a little while longer and see her again later.
But first, he would look. Just a moment longer. Her features were so beautiful. Awake, she was animated and full of fire, like the first time they’d met, when she’d yelled at him like the personification of a hurricane. She was always in motion, expression, speaking, laughing, hands moving, features shifting. But in rest, like this, he could really see her. The beautiful, placid Maddie, and also, beyond the woman he’d made love to all night, the whole of her. The experiences that had shaped her, that had made her vulnerable as a child, when she should have known safety and security. The experiences that had taught her to be wary, and untrusting, that had taught her to keep everyone—even the adults she was supposed to rely on—at arm’s length.
It explained so much about her.
From their very first meeting, he’d felt steel in her, a backbone of absolute iron, that was intractable, unbreakable. She was tough. A woman who’d once been a scrappy kid, close to being a street kid, he thought with a shifting in his belly, a sense of anger for the unknown woman who had been unable to care for Maddie.
His father had turned to alcohol too, but they had always been cared for. There had been housekeepers and nannies and elite private schools which they were ferried to by private drivers in comfortable cars. He had never known hunger, and he had never felt the kind of insecurity that must come from not knowing if you would have a bed for the night.
