Read Online Off the Rails by Isabelle Drake - Free Book Online Page A

out?”
    “I—I—”
    He tugged on the fabric of his shirt, drawing her attention to his magnificent fingers. “I’ve just been hanging out at home, watching some Netflix. You know.”
    Madison watched the motion of his hand as he moved it to place it on his thigh and swallowed hard. Her gaze went automatically to his mouth. He was smiling, and she realized she was smiling back.
    “Did you have a question?” she asked, hoping to cover up her sudden nervousness.
    “Just if you had any questions about the list I sent. That’s all.”
    Madison picked up her phone and waved it at the screen. “Yep. I got it. Looked it over and um, I don’t think I have any questions.” As soon as she said the words, she realized she was rushing the call. Sure, she’d told herself that was the plan. But that was before he’d said she looked pretty. And before she found out that he would notice if she’d changed clothes. “Anything else you want to tell me? About the list?”
    Drew began saying some things about the preferred contacts being marked by asterisks, then he offered some other information about which local printers he’d contacted, but Madison wasn’t listening that closely. Mostly she was watching his mouth and listening to the warm rumble of his voice. If she ran into a question, she could always call him back , right?
    His information somehow slipped into some simple questions about what she’d been up to and who she’d seen from their graduating class. The next thing she knew, they were laughing and finishing each other’s sentences and laughing so much they had to repeat themselves. She’d settled back against the wall of her apartment then stretched out and propped her head up on her palm. It wasn’t until her laptop battery sent up a distress signal that she realized how long they’d been online.
    She got to her feet and started waving to let Drew know she had to get up to go get her cord. Obviously he already knew what she was about to say because he said, “I know, it is getting kind of late. I should let you go, since you probably have to be at work in the morning.”
    “Oh, yeah, right,” she said, suddenly back to stammering.
    “Oh. Hey. One thing before you go. Just want to let you know I’m going out of town for a couple weeks. We can pick up wherever we are when I get back. That work for you?”
    “Oh sure, no problem,” she called down to her laptop, glad for the first time that she wasn’t looking into the screen. She did not want him to see what was no doubt a sour look on her face. A couple weeks of nothing? After that ?
    It was almost as though she was all the way right back where she started. Only worse, because now she had a taste of what she wanted, and as a result wanted it even more.
     
    * * * *
     
    “You weren’t right,” Madison said the next morning to Tia as she got out of bed and headed for the kitchen for her caffeine fix. “The doctor didn’t have a bunch of bedside humor jokes to tell me.”
    While Tia was silent and presumably thoughtful, Madison dug through her cupboard. No coffee. The caffeine fix would have to come in the form of tea. She put the kettle on and climbed up onto the counter.
    “And…” Tia prompted, lifting her eyebrows and circling with her hand. “Let’s hear the rest.”
    Prolonging the agony would be stupid, so she spilled the whole first part of the night, including the sweet granddaughter and the wait-for-me-here gold brocade chair.
    Tia summed the whole thing up in two words. “That sucks.”
    From her seat on the counter, Madison started rinsing out a mug. “You’re telling me.”
    “Now what?”
    Madison considered telling Tia about the hours long Skype session with Drew, but decided against it. All she had, really, with him was a bunch of funny stories and some laughs. That wasn’t a solution to her problem. Two weeks was too long to do nothing. “Plan B.”
    Tia pursed her lips and waited.
    Madison sighed. “I don’t know what