Carter glances away and then meets my eyes. All hints of admiration for Madeleine are gone, replaced with his cop-on-duty expression. “It’s no problem. I’ll pick up the other officer on my way to the park and then he can drive Madeleine’s car to your house. Shouldn’t take us long now that the rain has finally let up.”
“Thank you, Carter,” Madeleine says, releasing my arm so she can give him a quick hug. “Seriously, I owe you.”
…
I assume Madeleine and I will have some time to talk in the car on the way to my house, but there isn’t a spare second. Once she plugs in her cell phone and turns it on, she’s bombarded with message after message. She spends every minute in the car and the first half hour at my house returning phone calls and assuring everyone that she and Mouse are all right.
When I come down from my shower, she glances up from the kitchen table with an exasperated expression. “Daisy and Lucas are about to arrive. I tried to tell them everything was okay, but Daisy insisted.”
I nod, trying not to let my disappointment show. “I don’t blame her. They were both worried about you.”
She opens her mouth to say something and then shakes her head and looks down. Mouse is at her feet. He’s been at her side since her arrival, when she flung her arms around him and cried. He licked her face and wagged his tail, just as happy to be reunited.
“Would it be okay if I showered really quick?”
I snap back to the present. “Of course. C’mon, I’ll show you where the towels are.”
She’s still a mess from last night, but it’s nothing a quick shower can’t fix. I put together the bits and pieces of what happened from her phone calls with other people—the rain, the mud, the tires spinning until she was stuck overnight. Carter found her this morning and now here she is, in my bathroom, waiting for me to leave before she tugs her tank top overhead.
It’s silly. We’ve had sex. I’ve seen her bare body from head to toe. I know she has a little freckle on her left breast, right at the top.
“Adam?” She’s smiling and her cheeks, though streaked with mud, are the lightest shade of pink.
I reach down to kiss her just as a car pulls up into the driveway.
“Oh! I bet that’s Daisy,” she says when my mouth is barely an inch from hers.
I sigh and stand, giving us both some space.
“I’ll stall them while you shower.”
She bites her lip. “Are you sure? I can wait and shower later.”
I laugh. “Madeleine, no offense, but you sort of stink. Now I’ll go get you some small dish towels to dry off with.”
She bats me out of the bathroom and closes the door. The lock clicks into the place, and then I hear her voice calling out for me.
“Adam?”
I press back against the door. “Yeah?”
“I just…Thanks for going to my apartment to check on me last night. Daisy said it was you who initiated the whole search. If you hadn’t come, I’d probably still be stuck out there.”
It strikes me as odd that we’re having this conversation with a door between us, but then, Madeleine and I still haven’t had time to put our relationship back on course. Maybe this is all she can muster. I press my forehead to the door and close my eyes, enjoying this moment for what it is.CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENMADELEINEThe last twelve hours have been an utter disaster, and though I’d love nothing more than to crawl into Adam’s bed and sleep the day away, we seem to have initiated a full-on party.
“Hey, they don’t call it a search party for nothing,” Daisy says, clinking her coffee with mine.
I resist the urge to roll my eyes.
By the time I finished with my shower, she and Lucas were downstairs at the dining table, spreading out the food they’d picked up on the way over: donuts and kolaches, cinnamon rolls and mini muffins. Adam was filling them in on the missing details from last night, and I’d barely loaded up a cinnamon roll on my plate when Carter and a fellow officer pulled into the driveway with my car.
If possible, the hunk of junk looks even worse than it did last night, as if I had taken it mudding on some country back-roads. The duct-taped mirror on the passenger side is still somehow clinging on for dear life, but the steam rising from the hood is pretty hard to ignore.
“I hate to say it, Daisy, but this car just might be toast,” Carter says, popping the hood. Plumes of steam rise up, and Adam shoots me a knowing glare.
“Yeah, I actually had plans to get it looked at this morning, but obviously I’ve been busy with other things.”