When Jackson had first seen Madison Carrington, he’d thought her the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.
He’d been a senior in college, and as starting quarterback, he’d been the big man on the Texas State campus. He’d dated whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. And he wanted to—often.
Madison had been a senior too, but not part of the football groupie crowd. A quiet English major with a perfect GPA, Madison was about as far from the usual girls he dated as it was possible to get.
In fact, the first time he’d worked up the courage to talk to her, the pretty brunette had confessed she’d never even been to a football game. And then she turned down his invitation to dinner. Multiple times. No matter how nicely he asked, no matter how extravagant the floral arrangement, she’d politely refused to go out with him.
And Jackson had fallen. Hard.
His friends had tried to tell him that it was a classic case of wanting what he couldn’t have—had warned him not to fall for the girl who played hard to get.
But Jackson had been determined, and halfway in love. Or at least lust.
Madison with her dark ponytail, wide blue eyes, and shy smile had reeled him in one rejection at a time. And by the time the rejection had finally—finally—turned into a yes, Jackson had been so relieved, his heart maybe a little bit weary, that he didn’t think to look for any warning signs. Didn’t think to look for anything other than another date and then another, until suddenly college was over.
Jackson had gotten the girl.
And Madison had gotten herself a number one draft pick.
It would be years later before Jackson realized maybe that’s what she’d been all along, and she’d played him brilliantly. Years before he finally acknowledged that the girl he’d fallen in love with had been a mirage—a perfectly crafted shell designed to be everything he wanted on the outside.
And completely rotten on the inside.
Interestingly, it hadn’t been Madison’s treatment of him that had awakened him to the woman beneath the sweet smiles. It had been the way she’d treated her sister.
For whatever reasons—sibling dynamics, perhaps—it had been Mollie who’d brought out Madison’s true colors. Sure, on the outside she’d been all doting sister and tolerant saint to Mollie’s sometimes quirky “outsider” ways, but by the time he and Maddie had gotten engaged, the veneer had started to chip. He’d gotten glimpses of how Madison really felt about the younger sister she’d had to help raise.
Resentment.
Resentment that she’d had to move home her junior year of college to care for Mollie rather than live near campus with her friends. Resentment that Mollie wasn’t a “normal” kid who was content to hang out at the mall on Saturday afternoons, and instead wanted to go to museums and music performances and bookstores.
Their mother had died just a year before Jackson met Maddie—a lethal drug and alcohol overdose that Madison had claimed surprised no one except Mollie, who’d been thirteen when she’d come home from school and found her mother dead at the kitchen table.
Jackson would give his ex-wife credit: she’d stepped up to the plate. Madison had moved home and played the role of mom as best she could at the age of twenty.
But the more time he’d spent with the two sisters, the more Madison’s resentment seeped through, and the more he’d realized that Madison’s love for her sister was obligatory. Hell, sometimes he wondered if the word “love” even applied at all.
Worst of all, Jackson suspected that Mollie knew it. Knew that her sister had only asked her to be maid of honor because it would look bad if she hadn’t. Knew that her sister’s invitations on Christmas and Thanksgiving had come from Jackson. Knew, even, that the invitation to stay with Jackson and Maddie in the gap between undergrad and graduate school had also been Jackson’s idea. An idea that had backfired.
Not that Jackson regretted it. If he could do it all over again, he would. Much as she had last night, Mollie had insisted on paying rent, even though he’d been making millions at that point.
But Mollie’s determination to pay her own way hadn’t been the problem. The problem had been that at some point during the year Mollie lived with him and Maddie, Jackson had found himself turning to Mollie when he should have been leaning on Madison.
When he’d come home from a shitty day at practice, needing to talk, Madison had laughed it off, reminding him of his paycheck, and telling him on more than one occasion to “suck it up.”
And then there had been Mollie, who’d always known the exact right question to ask, the perfect thing to say to remind him of the reasons he loved the game. Soon he’d found himself seeking her out for everything. Her plucky pragmatism had been a welcome change from Madison’s chronic self-involvement.