Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 96850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 484(@200wpm)___ 387(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 484(@200wpm)___ 387(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
“No, love.”
A full body wince from Eve. “I see.”
He rubbed her back to ease the distress. “The . . . his aggression was only ever focused on me. When I stayed in Rhode Island, I told myself I was taking the reason for his hatred away. It needed to be done. But . . .” He pulled her closer, his eyes closing of their own accord when she pressed her face into his neck. “For a long time, I felt like I’d quit, instead of fighting. Like I’d abandoned myself and who I am. My family. Hid across the ocean from a man who was the real coward. Hid behind the plate.”
“You were never hidden to me. To anyone.” She opened her mouth and closed it, emotional pain on her face. “You were an important addition to this place.”
His throat felt heavy. “Maybe I’ve slowly started to believe that. Hindsight has me realizing how much I tried to blend into the background here, the way I did back home.” He thought of the tension in the locker room throughout their week on the road. “I’m wanting to speak up more and more, though. What if . . . I have something worthwhile to say? Someone has to fix what’s broken with the team and that was never my job, my inclination before, but what if it is now?”
“Follow your instincts.” Eve nudged the side of his neck with her nose. “And if yours need more time to bake, then follow mine. Everything you say is worthwhile. Always has been. Always will be.”
Madden didn’t know how to express the wealth of gratitude spinning inside him, so he gave up a heavy exhale and tried to tell her with his eyes. “I didn’t come here planning to say all of this. It must be the rain. I think about home more when it rains.”
Eve took her time sitting up in his lap, rolling their foreheads and settling their mouths together, breathing in and out. With their lips holding that position, she lowered the straps of her tank top, pulling the garment down just enough to expose her firm set of tits with their pebbled nipples. Touching the tip of his tongue with her own, she lifted his hand and placed it on her bare breast. “Maybe next time it rains, you’ll think of me, instead.”
And then his mind went blessedly fucking blank.
Chapter Twenty
Eve didn’t consider herself a nurturing person. She valued those people tremendously. They were the volunteers helping during a natural disaster. They were the nurses who’d cleared up her confusion about asthma. They were kindergarten teachers and caretakers. On the flip side, she loved a few people very fiercely, if quietly, and didn’t count herself among the ranks of those who cared for others.
The impulse to soothe Madden in that moment was as foreign to her as holy matrimony. As foreign as having a husband walk through the door, give her a bouquet of perfect-for-her flowers, and ask how she’d been. All she could say was . . . Something strong and unrecognizable compelled her to expose herself physically to him, as if trading one vulnerability for the kind he’d shown.
Resting their lips together, she placed his warm, extralarge hand on her breast, heard his breath stutter at the contact, and licked the seam of his mouth, making the barest contact with his tongue, but, whoa mama, that was enough to send a roll of thunder all the way down to her sex and grip her flesh with anticipation.
“Hold on,” he said, the words muffled by their almost-kiss. “Let’s talk awhile more. I want to be sure this isn’t out of sympathy.”
“It’s not,” she gasped when his thumb brushed over her sensitive nipple.
“I don’t know why I told you all that now—”
“I’m glad you did.”
Intense blue eyes searched her face, as if for proof. “Why?”
“I like knowing things about you.” Okay, apparently, she was going for way more than physical vulnerability this morning. With their breaths picking up and blending, Eve couldn’t seem to remember why she shouldn’t say anything and everything on her mind. “I feel closer to you after you told me about your family. It’s not sympathy. It’s . . . intimacy.”
The brackets around his mouth softened just slightly. “You’re sure?”
Briefly separating their lips, Eve turned to straddle Madden, scrubbing her palms up and over his broad shoulders, beginning to feel drunk on the freedom she had to touch this man. Not Skylar’s crush. Just Madden. Her husband. A man she wanted to be honest with.
As much as she could, anyway.
“There might be a teeny tiny feeling of . . . wanting to soothe you because you had to talk about something that upset you. There might even be some . . . need to reward you for being honest with me.”