Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 78576 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78576 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
“Maddie, giving you an orgasm is hardly a hardship.”
She exhales sharply. “You’ve given me plenty of orgasms, Dave. Right now, you seem to need me. What can I do for you?”
I lie back down on my side. “You did it.”
“Damn it.” She moves away from me. “I will not be just a fuck to you. Talk to me. Let me help you.”
I roll over onto my back, cover my eyes with my arm. “I don’t want to lay this on you.”
“Lay it on me. Because if you don’t, this will be the last time you’ll lay me.”
I remove my arm from my eyes. “You’re so much more than a good lay, Maddie. I never meant for it to be more than that, but you are.”
She snuggles into my shoulder. “I’m glad for that. And I’m proving to you now that you’re not just a fuck to me, Dave. I don’t expect you to give me an orgasm when you’re clearly bothered.”
“God, you don’t know the half of it.”
“Tell me. Let me help.”
I look her straight in the eyes. “You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”
“Of course not.”
“It’s a lot of things, but the biggest one right now is that my uncle Joe is sick.”
She nods slowly. “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he gets better soon.”
I shake my head, feeling a lump forming in my throat. “You don’t understand. He has cancer. Brain cancer. A glioblastoma, which is pretty much a death sentence.”
She rolls away from me, sits up, slaps her hand over her mouth. “I’m so, so sorry, Dave.”
“You know the worst thing about it? I love my uncle, and I feel so awful for him and my aunt, but the first thing I thought was how glad I was that it wasn’t my own father.”
“That’s not bad,” she says.
“But it is. You’ve probably heard Brianna say this. All of our aunts and uncles are like parents to us. All of our cousins are like siblings to us. We’re that close, Maddie. Joe is the oldest Steel brother. The patriarch of our family. It’s like he’s the base of our house of cards, and without him, we’ll fall.”
“The Steels are built on a much more solid foundation than that,” Maddie says.
Are we though? She doesn’t know everything.
She knows about Wendy Madigan, about Lauren and Jack, and even Pat Lamone. That has all become common knowledge around town. She knows about Brittany Sheraton, that she’s under mental health care now.
She doesn’t know about the human trafficking. She doesn’t know about Dale and Donny and Uncle Talon. About what Wendy Madigan ultimately cost our family.
She doesn’t know about my grandfather, Bradford Steel, who wasn’t the pillar of society everyone thought he was. That we were raised to think he was.
And she sure as hell doesn’t know about the three rapists connected to our family—Theo Matthias, Larry Wade, and my own grandfather, Tom Simpson. Tom Simpson, who killed himself right in front of Uncle Joe twenty-five years ago. Took his own life rather than face the music for what he’d done. I have the blood of Larry Wade as well. He was the half brother of my maternal grandmother, Daphne Steel, who lived her own private hell inside her head because of him and the other two.
I sigh. “I pray you’re right.”
She bites her lip. “And you never know. Your uncle may just survive.”
“One percent of people, Maddie. One percent of people with this cancer survive for ten years.”
“Then there’s still hope.”
I roll over, facing away from her. “Maybe.”
“Dave, I am not going to let you go back to that place.” She grabs my shoulders and rolls me back toward her. “You know what everyone loves about you is your optimism, your jovial personality. After that plane almost crashed, I saw you lose that, and then I saw you regain it, now only to lose it again.” She places her hands on each side of my face. “You’re still you, Dave Simpson. You’re still you.”
She’s right, of course.
The family is going to need me more than ever now.
I pull her back into my arms, kiss her lips gently. “You’re something else. I think I could fall in love with you, Madeline Jolie Pike.”
I think I already have.
But she doesn’t push that subject any further, to my surprise. She simply snuggles into me, kissing my shoulder.
Chapter Eighteen
Maddie
I know better than to take Dave at his word at this moment. He’s in a weird place right now—the high of his release from the orgasm and the low of finding out his uncle is so ill have placed him in a strange emotional limbo.
I don’t know Jonah Steel well. My only connection to the Steels—before Callie, Rory, and Jesse got engaged to three of them—was the awesome foursome. All those hours I spent crying, feeling left out of their little Steel clique, and now Brianna is going to be my sister-in-law.