Crazy Thing Called Love (7 page)

“Feel free,” he told Ruth, “but I’ll warn you. I’m like Prince Charming compared to them.”

Maddy laughed, once through her nose. Practically a snort.

“Well, then that will be interesting, won’t it?” Ruth said, brightly. But it was hardly convincing. Ruth clearly wasn’t used to being “bright.” “We’ll also talk to your teammates and friends in order to lay the groundwork for the makeover. For the second episode, we’ll bring in a tailor. A manners expert—”

“Fine.” He agreed quickly, a slap shot they weren’t expecting. “Is there something I have to sign?”

“Let her finish,” Maddy said. “You should know what you’re signing up for.”

“I get the gist.”

“I don’t think you do,” Maddy shot back.

“Let them finish,” Victor said, leaning forward as tensions were getting stranger in the room.

“As I said,” Ruth cleared her throat, glancing sideways at Maddy, “we’ve got a tailor—”

“I understand.”

“No,” Maddy said. “I don’t think you do.”

Silence echoed. People leaned back in their seats.

“We’re going to talk to your
family
, Billy.” She arched an eyebrow but he didn’t even flinch. “We will get your
friends and teammates to tell us what a barbarian you are. How you can’t dress and you act like a buffoon in social situations. How all you’re good for is fighting.” She paused, waiting for a reaction and even though he felt blood rise up in his neck, making the skin itch under his collar, he didn’t give her an inch.

Her eyes narrowed and she leaned over the table. “And about that tailor. It will be a man—probably flamboyantly gay, because how funny will it be to watch the hockey bruiser get uncomfortable when the gay tailor flirts and measures his inseam.”

“Madelyn—” Ruth said, but Maddy cut the woman down with a glance.

“Oh, Ruth, don’t for a minute pretend you have any motive but making good television.” Ruth was silent, looking sideways at the dude in the Darth Vader shirt, who simply shrugged. Maddy was melting down. The girl he knew was emerging, her hands sweeping the air in front of her, sarcasm dripping from every word. This was the street fighter inside her and no one in this room knew it but him.

Smiling to egg her on, he sat back and watched the show.

She stood, her chair screeching across the floor behind her.

“And the very best television you can make for us, Billy, is letting us rub your nose in your barbarianism. Letting us poke at you and laugh at you, letting us, in fact, get one million viewers to laugh at you. At what an animal you are. Letting us trot you out like a trained ape. And then when we try to clean you up and it fails—which it will, spectacularly!—we’re going to need you to just take it, Billy. You can’t fight. You can’t walk away. You can’t just leave when things get hard.”

Silence boomed through the room.

“Madelyn?” Ruth said, louder and sharper this time,
and Maddy’s mouth clicked shut. Everyone, her colleagues and her boss, were looking at her as if she’d turned into a werewolf.

And she knew it. Hives broke out on her neck and she lifted a hand as if she could feel them. Could hide them.

Too late he had doubts.
This is how you’re going to use your second chance? Driving her nuts like this? You think it will endear you to her?

This was a mistake. Once again he hadn’t thought his shit out and she was paying the price.

“Perfect,” Victor said. “That’s exactly the kind of situation Billy needs.”

“Needs?” Billy asked.

“Yeah, you need to prove that you aren’t just a fighter. That you have a sense of humor.”

“I don’t.”

Victor laughed. “See right there, very funny.”

“Victor—”

“We’re in.”

“Excellent. So are we.” The station manager leaned across the table and shook Victor’s hand and then Billy’s.

Maddy straightened, a tall goddess, her thin, manicured hands in fists, the blotches like wounds on her neck. “Welcome aboard, Billy,” she said, calm once more. “It will be a pleasure having you on the show. Excuse me, but I have to get some work done for next week.”

Everyone took a big sigh of relief when she left the room.

The producer in the stupid shirt droned on and on about new sponsors. National and local. The room seemed to buzz, and Ruth was suddenly animated, and almost pretty. But Billy’s eyes were fixed on the spot where Maddy had stood, the blue of her dress seared into his brain.

Finally, Victor pushed to his feet, his phone in his
hand. “Let’s go get some lunch,” he said, not looking up from whatever crucial business was happening on his phone.

Billy had done it, he was back in her life. Now he had to make sure he didn’t mess it up the second time around.

Madelyn drove slowly
down Mulberry Lane, trying to find house numbers on the mansions that were set back from the street.

Having a research team at her disposal was a helpful perk, particularly when she wanted to find the addresses and phone numbers of people who didn’t want to be found.

And in the suburbs, apparently addresses were a big secret. Lots of famous rich Dallasites were out here and for a minute she couldn’t believe that Billy Wilkins had landed in this green suburban neighborhood. Preston Hollow was a long way from 12 Spruce on the Hill in Pittsburgh.

She checked the address on her BlackBerry and looked back up at the discreet numbers on the side of the giant garage attached to a glass and stone mansion.

The flower beds were empty but the grass was green and lush despite the spring heat.

This was Billy’s house.

Getting Billy to back out of the show at this point was an impossibility. The station manager had sent a congratulatory fruit basket to everyone in that meeting. Unheard of. Advertising, giveaways—it had all been set up nearly the minute she walked out of that conference room.

If Billy backed out, they’d all be in trouble.

So she was here to find out what his motives were for doing the show. Because her freak-out in the meeting had to be a one-off. Her reputation, cultivated and groomed like prize roses, required her to be generally emotionless. Other than interest, surprise, and pleasure, she was a blank slate.

Anger, righteous though it might be, was a card very rarely played. Outrage, resentment … people didn’t attach those emotions to her, so she couldn’t afford to show them.

Which meant she and Billy had to come to an understanding. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it her way—which meant they were strangers to each other.

She pulled down the passenger-side mirror and checked her lipstick, fluffed her hair. Camera-ready on a Sunday morning.

As she walked up the stone path to the front door, the muffled sound of music thrummed up from the ground. The glass window in the door rattled in its casing.

Billy still listened to his music like a teenager trying to piss someone off.

He’s never going to hear me
, she thought, but she pounded on the door anyway before ringing the doorbell. She waited a few moments and then rang again. Frustration mounted as she stood there, knocking like an idiot, getting angry on about twenty different levels.

Sweat gathered in her armpits and trickled down her sides under the light cotton of her peasant blouse. Her makeup was going to run in this heat.

Suddenly, the door burst open, that muffled bass line coalescing into a familiar Bruce Springsteen song.

“Where’s the damn fire?”

And there was Billy. Big, shirtless, and smooth. Sweat ran down the hills and valleys of his chest and shoulders, the ridged planes of his stomach, connecting the
dots of his freckles and the scars from at least a dozen different surgeries across his pale white skin.

She swallowed the gasp that rose up in her throat.

Between the sweat and the daylight and that skin, which he’d inherited from his Irish mother, Billy gleamed. He was marble in sunlight.

There weren’t a lot of people who could say they lived in their bodies the way Billy did. The way he always had. He wore his skin with the kind of confidence she’d never felt in her life.

Except with him
, she thought.
With him you felt like the most beautiful woman in the world
.

“Maddy?”

She pulled her eyes away from a bead of sweat navigating his collarbone and glared at him. “Could you turn down the music?” she yelled.

And put on some clothes?

“Yeah … ah …” He stepped back awkwardly, suddenly boyish. The moment collapsed upon itself and it wasn’t just now, it was twenty-eight years ago and she was going to her new friend Denise’s house for the first time and Denise’s big brother, eight to their six, had answered the door. Without a shirt over his concave little-boy chest.

And then it was summer and they were going to the pool and she was picking him up at his house in the car she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday, and he was eighteen and fresh from a World Junior Championship. He didn’t wear a shirt that whole summer.

And she was meeting him at the Rochester arena, her wedding band gleaming on her finger, his still hot body steaming in the cold air as he walked to her car.

“Put on a shirt,” she’d cried as he got into the car. “It’s freezing out!”

“I’m hot, baby,” he’d said, kissing her with cold lips.

She’d seen him like this countless times in her life,
shirtless and sweaty, and every time—every single time—the sight of him boomed through her, the echo touching everything visceral and sexual in her body.

Madelyn loved Billy Wilkins’ body.

And that wasn’t just in the past tense.

Oddly enough the realization did not cheer her up.

“You want to come in?” he asked, still yelling over the E Street Band.

“No. I want to stand out here and sweat.”

He smiled at her sarcasm, which was the opposite of her intention, and vanished down one of the hallways leading away from the foyer. And then, despite the wild dogs of her doubt and pride growling at her not to put one foot into Billy’s house, she stepped inside.

In front of her was a big and airy room, with a brown leather sectional on one wall and a giant television on the other. There were pictures on the walls, but she ignored those. She wasn’t interested in the memories Billy chose to treasure.

She did not step past the stone foyer, instead, she braced herself there and waited.

The music stopped and Billy came back down the dark hallway, toward her. Still no shirt, but he ran a towel over his head and down his face, leaving his silky brown hair a mess.

The past threatened to swamp her and she looked away. Focused instead on the view out of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the great room.

It was an ocean of green out there. Apparently he’d never heard of the water ban.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I was working out. Can I … can I get you something? Water? Beer?”

Beer. If he knew how long it had been since she’d had a beer, he’d probably die.

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” He threw the towel over his shoulder and
braced his hands on his waist, his fingers catching on the elastic waistband of his gray workout shorts. Briefly pulling it down over that thick ridge of muscle at his hips. She used to kiss that muscle. Test her teeth against it until he groaned.

She yanked her bag up higher on her shoulder. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry about that meeting,” he said.

That took her aback, made her recalculate her route.

“I didn’t mean for it to go that way.”

“Really? How did you think it was going to go?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think that far ahead.”

“Classic Billy. Tell me, why are you doing this show?”

“My image. You heard Victor—”

“Oh please, Billy. You don’t give a shit about your image. You never have.”

“A guy can’t change?”

“Not if he’s you.”

That grin, macabre and strange, pulled and twisted by the pink knot of his scar.

She knew there were millions of people in the world who believed the scar made him ugly. In her eyes, however, it was one of the most beautiful things about him. Maybe because she knew how he’d gotten it. She looked at that scar and remembered him leaning out the window, telling her everything was going to be fine.

“It’s been years, Maddy. I might surprise you.” He walked away, down the beige steps into the great room and then through it to the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her purse falling from her shoulder.

“Getting a beer,” he yelled back, out of sight. “Come on in.”

She stared at the carpet, the stacks of athletic shoes by the door, as if they were snakes waiting to bite.

The feel of her colleagues’ eyes—Ruth’s eyes—staring
at her with horror and fascination in that meeting had kept her up for three nights.

Like a knife at her back, the memory forced her to walk into his kitchen, even though everything in her gut told her to leave.

It was getting darker outside, the brilliant blue of the Texas sky bruising at the edges, and the kitchen was shadowed when she stomped into it. Billy sat at a round mahogany table, his body a muscled curl. He looked so brawny in his clothes, but naked he was sleek.