Petite Madeleine: Drew's Story (Meadows Shore Book 3) Read Free Page A

heart swelled.
    She handed him back his phone. “Drew, if we have dinner, it’s just dinner, okay?”
    No, it’s not okay with me, but I don’t think I’ve got a damn choice. “Of course.”
    “Good luck tonight.”
    He should have invited her to the game. They could have gone to dinner right from the ballpark. Now she had some wiggle room, an opportunity to blow him off. He pushed the thought out of his head, and walked the rest of the way to Camden Yards with a bounce in his step.
    Cassie. He’d found Cassie, and she wasn’t wearing a ring.

Chapter Two
     
    When she woke up this morning, Drew Harrington was the very last person on earth she expected to run into. The fantasies she’d harbored for years about casually bumping into him had petered out long ago. Well, maybe not long ago, but it had certainly been awhile.
    She’d followed his career in the papers, and his personal life in the tabloids, grateful for any tidbit. It was pathetic, but at least she’d stopped googling him daily.
    Her heart had brimmed with pride the day he was hired as the Blues’ general manager. She imagined him bursting with joy, his deep blue eyes bright and sparkling while he met the Boston press corps. An impossible grin, too big to wipe off his face, and that gorgeous dimple in the left corner of his mouth, getting deeper by the second. The one she’d dipped her tongue in, time and time again.
    Even his harshest critics gushed about his talents that day. The whizz kid who always had a baseball in hand, a pair of drumsticks tucked behind one ear, and a beautiful woman on his arm.
    There’d been a time, long, long ago, in a city not so far away, where he’d been happy to have her, only her, on his arm. But that was before his parents died, before he stopped going to class and became best friends with a bong. Before she’d found him passed out, facedown in vomit, and called his cousin Sophie. Before he left Brown…
    And before her life as a sheltered princess took a wrong turn off Fairy Tale Boulevard and veered onto Hard Knocks Drive with all its bumps and bruises. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Some days, it seemed so distant, so alien, like it must have been someone else’s charmed life.
    One day she was at his house enjoying dinner with his family and playing in the pool, and a few days later she stood sandwiched between her parents at the funeral home, waiting to pay their respects. Four caskets lined up at the front of the enormous parlor, holding the remains of Senator and Mrs. Harrington, and Ambassador and Mrs. Clayton. Avó Angelina clasping a rosary in one hand and an embroidered handkerchief in the other. Both Angelina’s daughters and their husbands, gone from this world. The parents to her eleven grandchildren, who stood shoulder to shoulder at her side.
    When she reached Drew, there was barely a flicker of recognition in his eyes. His arms went around her like a robot, stiff and automatic. He nodded and said thank you for coming , like she was a distant acquaintance, rather than the woman who had shared herself intimately with him for nearly three years.
    She sat between her parents for hours while a never-ending sea of mourners passed through the line. Sophie standing near her grandmother, translating and making introductions, often comforting rather than being comforted. Cole stood next to her, and the others in a line by birth order.
    The boys in charcoal suits with pressed white shirts and somber ties. The girls in simple black dresses with tearstained faces devoid of makeup. The only color was the red that rimmed their sunken eyes.
    The difference between the cousins was that the girls hugged with their entire beings, and allowed themselves the comfort of tears, while the boys stood stiff, empty carcasses with hollow eyes, like zombies inhabiting a horror movie.
    No one stood more stiffly than Drew. Normally personable and engaging, he looked through every person who offered condolences, and repeated the