Crazy Thing Called Love by Molly O'Keefe Read Free Book Online Page B

needed.
    Inwardly, she reeled, the earth lost beneath her feet.
    Numb, she watched his eyes run down her body, takingin the purple sweater and the black slacks. Her straight hair.
    Obscenely, she was pleased that he wouldn’t see much of the girl he’d married in her appearance. She was a stranger to him. But he—with his broken nose, that terrible scar, and the forward-thrust jaw, daring all comers to take a swing—he was all too familiar.
    Wearing her indifference like a suit of armor, she tossed her water bottle onto the chair Ruth usually sat in.
    “You can’t be in here.”
    “I just wanted a chance to talk with you before the meeting.”
    She arched her eyebrow, fighting with super-human strength the desire to bite her thumbnail. “About what?”
    “Maddy …” he sighed, as if disappointed that she wouldn’t play along.
    That sigh’s effect on her composure was cataclysmic—the world went red. Her heart pounded behind her eyes and she wanted to push him through the wall.
    But, instead, because she was better than what he wanted her to be, because she’d worked too hard to succumb to the controlling influence of anger and hurt, because, damn it, he couldn’t do this shit to her anymore, she reached behind her and calmly opened the door.
    “I think you should leave. I’ll see you at the meeting.”
    He blinked, waiting as if she might change her mind.
    You will get nothing more from me
, she thought.
Not one more thing
.
    The words echoed in the room, echoed between them as if she’d screamed them.
    “I’m doing this show,” he said.
    She swallowed the growl lodged in her throat, where it joined—in the pit of her belly, where nothing ever vanished, where every slight and pain and injustice was kept and preserved—the millions of screams she’d swallowed during her short, disastrous marriage.
    “That’s your prerogative,” she said, managing to keep the sneer from her voice.
    Careful not to touch her, he slipped out the door.
    Billy sat in what had to be one of the messiest conference rooms—in the middle of the stupidest goddamned meeting he’d ever been in—waiting for his chance to fight.
    Victor sat beside him and Billy took some comfort in the man’s quiet, sharklike demeanor.
    The producer, wearing a Darth Vader T-shirt, kept grinning at Billy. He filled every gap in the conversation with questions about the fight at the end of the last game, like every other bloodthirsty hockey fan who met him on the street.
    Maddy sat at the head of the table, her hair slicked back in a tight ponytail, surrounded by newspapers and magazines and women without half her shine.
    She’d changed her clothes, taken off the pants and put on a blue dress that showed off how thin she was. She smiled at him, polite and removed, as if he were selling something cheap. And unwanted.
    But beneath that chill, she was bothered.
    She had to be. Right? Not that she’d seemed bothered in her office. But he had been … and he was now. Flop sweat, sticky and rank, ran down his sides in spite of the air-conditioning.
    Back when they were married she would have been screaming at him. Throwing plates, coming at him with curled fingernails. She’d be hurling insults, vicious and true.
    Somehow, she’d figured out how to curb all that. The ice queen at the top of the table didn’t look like she ever screamed, and she certainly didn’t look like she’d faced off against Kevin Dockrill in the cafeteria of SchelanyHigh School or destroyed every single CD in Billy’s extensive Bruce Springsteen collection.
    No, in fact, the woman sitting there looked kind of stupid. And like she barely gave a shit. She was pretty, sure—but she cultivated a certain emptiness. A cool distance.
    For a stark and stomach-spinning moment, she seemed like a stranger.
    Incredulous, he glanced at everyone else in the room to see if they bought this act of hers. And it didn’t seem like they found anything strange about that vapid empty smile