around the tangle of sheets. Her mind raced through a thousand possibilities of what her life would be like as Adam’s wife. Where would they live? Would her family accept him? Would the world accept her—a nobody—as the wife of a guitar legend? How often would she get to see him? Could she tag along with him on the road? Would she even want to? It seemed such an unsettled life, if fun. At least for a while. Would he change his mind about wanting children? Having kids was important to her. Having stability was important to her. As much as she loved him, could they forge a future together that satisfied them both? And how would she know the answer to any of these questions if she couldn’t get him to fucking talk to her?
Patience, understanding, and listening when he was finally ready to talk had worked with him before, but this situation wasn’t only about him. It was about her as well.
She growled in frustration and threw a pillow across the room. Her breath caught when she heard the door open.
He stood on the threshold for a long moment with the door wide open. Madison tucked the sheet around her bare hips and watched him, afraid to say anything because she was sure if she did, he’d leave.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
Odd that he’d ask. It was his hotel room.
“Of course.”
He approached the bed and stood at its edge. His gaze moved over her face, her bare shoulder, the curve of her hip beneath the sheet. He sucked in a breath and lifted his eyes to stare toward the window on the far side of the room.
After a moment of watching him and finding his expression entirely unreadable, she asked, “Are you ready to talk?”
He shook his head. “Still too . . . raw.”
“You might like what I have to say.”
“But I might not.”
He was such an unusual mix of strong and sensitive. She hadn’t realized that she had such power to hurt him. Since his mother had left, he hadn’t given anyone that amount of power over him. He’d trusted her with his heart, and she hadn’t been careful enough with it.
“Can I touch you?” she asked.
“If you don’t, I might very well die.”
Madison rose to kneel on the bed, the sheet falling to pool around her legs. She slid both hands up his T-shirt, drawing the soft fabric upward as her palms bumped over the hard contours of his muscular belly and chest. Impatient, he yanked the shirt off over his head and tossed it aside. She planted a row of gentle kisses down his belly, her fingers working at his fly as she made her way toward her final destination.
He groaned in pleasure as she took him into her mouth, sucking and kissing and licking his length until he was hard with excitement.
“Madison,” he whispered, his fingers threading through her hair and tilting her head back.
Lips pressed against his tip, she lifted her gaze to his.
“Tell me what I need to hear,” he said.
She wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say. She wanted to say she loved him, but was afraid he’d throw it back in her face, the way he had earlier.
“I want you,” she said.
He eased away and then tumbled her back onto the bed, covering her with his body, sinking his hips between her thighs.
“Close enough,” he said, claiming her with a solid thrust.
Chapter Thirteen
Adam knew that Madison needed time to think about his proposal, but he had never been a patient man.
“I know you’re against marrying me,” Adam said, idly trailing his fingertips back and forth over her bare shoulder. “But we could just move in together. Would that be a more reasonable next step?”
She was silent for so long, he lifted his head to see if she’d fallen asleep on him. He had taken her rather enthusiastically, glad that she still wanted to be with him on a physical level, even if she wasn’t sure about marriage. He found she wasn’t asleep though. She was staring wide-eyed at the wall.
“Madison?”
Her gaze met his.
“I don’t think I’m ready to take the next step,” she said. “Any next step.”
“Ever?”
She bit her lip and looked away. “I don’t know when I’ll be ready. I just lost my job and my life got complicated all of a sudden.”
Less complicated, he’d say, but apparently they saw eye to eye on little.
“I don’t think now is the right time to add more complications.”
So that was what he was to her, a complication? Did she seriously see him that way?
“Maybe we can go back to how it used to be,” she said. “You know, before we got serious.”
Realization hit him like a steel beam through the chest. “You don’t love me.” Even when he’d prompted her to say it earlier, she’d said she wanted him, not that she loved him. Had she ever loved him?
“Of course I do, Adam. I just think we were hasty in taking our relationship to the next level so quickly.”
A year was too quickly? He knew he’d reacted badly to her rejection of his out-of-the-blue proposal, but he hadn’t thought that it would make her fall out of love with him. The thought made his chest ache so badly that he rejected the idea immediately.
Maybe all she needed was time to sort things out. He shouldn’t have tried to sway her in his direction. He should have been patient. He should have behaved like a loving, understanding boyfriend instead of a selfish prick. This being good was really a challenge for him. It was so much easier to take what he wanted or find a new means of excitement to distract himself. But he didn’t want to give up on Madison. He loved her too much. So he was going to try to compromise even if it killed him. And it just might.
“I didn’t mean to blow up on you like that,” he said. “I know things are rocky for you right now, especially since you just lost your job. Take as much time as you need to sort things out, find a job, get your head on straight, and then we’ll go from there. Do what you need to do. I’ll wait.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Adam, I don’t want you to wait.”
Ouch. He winced as his heart panged.
“I want to be with you now,” she said. “I’m just not sure I’m ready for what comes next. Can’t we just have fun, make love, no pressure?”
He had to laugh at the irony. Less than two weeks ago, he hadn’t been ready to call her his girlfriend, and now he was set on her being his wife. He couldn’t go back to where they’d been. He’d leapt over the hurdle of fearing commitment and jumped straight into being all in. He wanted it all or he wanted nothing. He wouldn’t be able to go back to having a frivolous relationship where they hooked up—shared great sex, a few laughs, and what she’d consider a grand adventure—but ultimately parted without any promises. He couldn’t believe he’d actually liked that type of relationship, and he really couldn’t believe that she wanted to go back to it.
“So let me get this straight,” he said, hurt rapidly turning to anger. “You want to meet up every so often, get fucked properly, and then go on your merry little way?”
“You make it sound so negative. It worked just fine for over a year.”
“Just last week you were the one who said you had to have a commitment to stay in this relationship.”
“I do want a commitment,” she said. “I want to be your only hook-up. And you’ll be my only hook-up. It’s just that this . . . this is getting too serious too fast. I’m not ready.”
Hook-up? Was that all she wanted from him? He couldn’t believe what she was saying.
“You can’t have it both ways, Madison. You can’t have my utter devotion and treat me like I mean nothing to you.”
She captured his face between her hands. “Baby, you mean everything to me.”
He pushed her hands away and shook his head at her. “How can you say that?”
“It’s true.”
How could it be true? She didn’t want to marry him. Didn’t want to live with him. Hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if she requested he stay in a separate room tonight as soon as
she met her orgasm quota for the evening. He took a calming breath. He knew she wanted to reach a compromise. Or rather, she required that he relinquish everything he wanted just so he could keep her. But that wasn’t a compromise. That was her getting her way with no promises of the future he wanted, a full-out retreat from the direction they’d been heading. He didn’t like to be manipulated, but he definitely felt that he was a puppet and she was pulling his strings.
“You don’t have to agree to marry me, Madison,” he said, “but if you think I’m going to rush to Dallas every couple of weeks for the sole purpose of getting you off, it’s not going to happen. There are any number of women I can fuck whenever and wherever I need it. I can’t deny that our sex life is great, but it’s great because of how I feel about you, not because you’re especially good in bed.”
Her jaw dropped. Perhaps he should have worded that differently, but it was true. What made her special to him had absolutely nothing to do with sex. And what made sex great with Madison had absolutely everything to do with his emotional attachment to her. He’d assumed it was the same for her, but now he was almost positive that her so-called feelings had blossomed from sexual attraction and not the other way around. She liked him because he fucked her properly, not because they were compatible outside the bedroom. Why hadn’t he recognized that before?
“You can be such an ass,” she said indignantly and rolled out of bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Going back to Dallas.”
“You’re leaving.” It wasn’t a question; she was leaving. Without fighting for him. Just like his mother had done. But Madison wouldn’t do that to him, would she? They just had to work together to build a stronger relationship—slowly if that’s what she needed—but they could not take a step back. There was nothing but loneliness and bitterness behind him. Adam couldn’t go back. He could only move forward. Fuck, she’d been the one who’d taught him that.
Adam sat up in the center of the bed, the bed sheets crumpled in his lap and tangled around his legs. He watched Madison dress. Watched her shove her belongings into her suitcase. Watched her rip his heart out. What little he had left.
When she was all packed, she turned and stood near the edge of the bed, refusing to meet his eyes.
“You gave me something I thought I’d never have and now you’re going to take that away from me?” he said, surprised by how raw his voice sounded.
“I don’t want to leave, Adam. Say the word, and I’m back in your bed.”
In his bed. He didn’t want her in his goddamned bed. He wanted her in his life, every fucking facet of it. He glowered at her.
“Honestly, Adam, I don’t understand why you’re so mad. We can still be lovers. I just want to slow down.”
She didn’t want to slow down. She wanted someone to fuck her, not someone to love her.
“I just need one person in my corner, Madison. One person who believes me without fail. One person who believes in me. I thought that person was you.”
“I am that person, Adam,” she insisted.
He would have believed her yesterday, but now he wasn’t so sure. She stared at him as if she had a thousand things to say, but either couldn’t find the words or didn’t want to.
“What do you want from me?” he asked. He probably didn’t want the answer, but he’d rather know what he was dealing with and try to cope instead of being pulled in a dozen different directions. “Just tell me.”
“I wish I knew,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought I knew, but now I’m not sure. I need to figure this all out before I say something I’ll later regret.”
“Are you sure about anything?” he asked.
“I’m sure I’m happiest when I’m with you. We always have fun.”
She trailed her fingertips over his bare shoulder, and he realized that if he let her go, that touch would become a memory rather than being part of his reality.
“I’m sure you know how to please my body like no one else,” she said.
He waited for the words he longed to hear, but she didn’t say them. She wasn’t sure she loved him, that had to be what had her acting so emotionally closed off from him all of a sudden. Or maybe she was sure that she didn’t love him and simply wasn’t done using him for her amusement just yet.
“I see how this is,” he said, brushing her hand aside. “Instead of making a clean break, which would be better for both of us, you want to keep me hanging until you decide you’ve had enough of me. Why put off the inevitable?”
She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, a strangled breath escaping her parted lips. He’d reduced her to tears, and he frankly didn’t care.
“But I’ll never have enough, Adam. Don’t you know that I’m addicted to you?”
Addictions were never healthy. He was proof positive of that fact.
“And we both know the best way to break an addiction,” he said.
She nodded, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. “Quit cold turkey.”
Was she really leaving? Was he really telling her to go? What the fuck was wrong with him?
He wasn’t going to let her use him as she liked just so she could leave him later. That was what the fuck was wrong with him.
“You’re right,” she said after he’d glowered at her for a long, tense moment. “It’s best if I go now.”
She wasn’t going to fight for him? Not even a little? She’d given up on him that easily. Not that it surprised him—everyone in his life eventually gave up on him—but still it hurt. No, it fucking ached.
“Yeah,” he said.
He wanted to take her into his arms and kiss some sense into her. Wanted to force her to see reason and to love her unconditionally—the way he so desperately needed her to love him. Part of him wanted to back down and let her have what she wanted just so he could be with her in any capacity.
But he let her leave. He had to. Because the other part of him couldn’t back down. He needed to know that she would fight for him, would choose him. That she would push back against him and against all her doubts and simply say that she’d love him no matter what.
He was trying to be a better man and do the right thing, trying to be strong and stand up for what he believed in, trying to be rational and not driven by emotion or his libido.
God, acting like an adult fucking sucked.
“I’ll call you when I get it sorted out,” she said from the open door. “Please don’t give up on us just yet.”
Me? he thought. You’re the one who gave up.
But he said, “I’ll look forward to your call.”
And he knew he would, because nothing had changed about the way he felt about her. If anything, he loved her more for having the strength to walk away. Which made absolutely no fucking sense to him.
The door closed behind her with a punishing click. Adam flopped back on the mattress and buried his face under a pillow.
Go after her. Go after her, his reckless side demanded. Make her stay. If you have to steal her away and bind her to the fucking bed, make her stay.
Give her space, his rational side argued. Trust that she knows what she needs. She’ll end up hating you if you act like a stalker. If she really loves you, she’ll be back.
So he compromised. He’d give her a week to figure out her psychological bullshit and call him. If he didn’t hear from her by then, he’d go after her and convince her by whatever means necessary that they belonged together.
A week? his reckless side protested.
“Three days,” he said aloud and tossed the pillow aside so he could stare at the ceiling and figure out the words he’d need to say to win her over.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d stared at the ceiling or how many times he went over in his head where he’d gone wrong. He probably would have continued in the same vein all night if his cellphone hadn’t rung.
Having spent a lot of his evening staring at it and willing it to ring, he was surprised at the way he fumbled with the
blasted thing in his haste to answer.
The name Gabe in the caller ID registered in his jumbled mind, and his heart sank with disappointment. So Madison hadn’t come to her senses yet. At least he had someone to talk to.
“Yo,” he answered, hoping Gabe didn’t recognize the appalling