The last thing I expected was for him to come back. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d learned that this was a person who once he put his mind to something, nothing deterred him from his goal. This was the person who only heard what he wanted to hear. That didn’t exactly leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling. I guess a big part of me just wanted and expected to make a clean cut with him, especially after he’d made his lack of loyalty so apparent.
The fact that he’d somehow gotten my address and gone out of his way to come to my apartment when he hadn’t even been able to put in a single effort to ask me how I was doing, frustrated me more than it probably should have. It was too little too late. All I would have wanted from him in the past was at least a little bit of loyalty, if not friendship, and he hadn’t even been able to give me that.
“Everything all right, ma’am?”
“Everything is fine, thanks,” I lied, gripping the handle. “I thought I lost my keys, but I found them. How much do I owe you?”
Paying my fee, I slipped out of the car and hurried through the gate.
I made my way toward my apartment with one hand wrapped around my pepper spray and the other with my keys and wristlet, all too aware that I’d had too much wine to drink to deal with this crap right now.
My visitor was in the same spot on the stairs I’d found him days ago.
Aiden’s gaze almost immediately landed on me, hovering on the hem of the dress I’d worn to dinner as he climbed to his size-thirteen feet. Dressed in workout shorts that reached his knees and a T-shirt, I was pretty sure he’d left practice and come straight over. If my dates were right, the team was halfway through preseason training camp, focused more on the rookies than on veterans like Aiden.
“We need to talk,” he stated immediately, his eyes scraping their way to my chest and catching on the low dip of the cotton sundress right between my breasts.
Huh.
I gave him a side look as I approached my door, ignoring the curious expression he was giving me. It wasn’t like I hadn’t worn dresses around him before, but none of them had been above my knee, and they had all covered The Girls. The one I had on now? Not so much. But it had been my ‘I’m meeting up with a man for the first time in almost two years’ dress on a blind date with someone I’d met on the matchmaking website I’d signed up for a few weeks back. While we’d gotten along pretty well in the messages we’d exchanged, we hadn’t hit it off in person. Paranoid about meeting a stranger that could write down my license plate, I’d taken a cab to the Italian restaurant we were having dinner at.
“Give me a few minutes,” he said in a slightly less confident and aggressive tone, his eyes still dipping to my dress.
The temptation to say ‘Oh, you finally want to talk after two years?’ was on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back and raised my eyebrows at him before sliding the key into the lock.
A muscle in his cheek twitched and he ground out, “Please.”
Hell was about to freeze over. He’d said please?
Before I could think about it much more, voices suddenly came from one of the apartments above mine, damn it. Aiden’s big frame was a little too eye-catching, especially when he happened to be a celebrity in Dallas. Just a few days ago, I’d seen a handful of Three Hundreds jerseys around the complex with GRAVES stitched on the back. The last thing I needed was for someone to see him when I had made sure for years not to let anyone find out he was my boss.
“Come in,” I muttered, waving him in quickly before someone spotted him.
He didn’t need to be told twice. Aiden squeezed his way inside with just enough time for me to close and lock the door just as three men came down the stairs. I walked around him and headed into the kitchen overseeing my living room, frustrated with myself for inviting him in.
“You look different.” His comment had my steps faltering for a moment.
“I’ve worn dresses in front of you before,” I snapped a little more bitterly than I would have liked.
“Not one like that,” came the quick, nearly brash retort that came out aggressively enough for me to frown. “I wasn’t talking about your shirt.”
My shirt?
“You look different.”
I sniffed and circled around the kitchen counter. “My hair is a different color, and I lost weight. That’s all.”
Taking a seat at my small table, Aiden’s gaze brushed over the part of my body he could see, my face, my neck, chest, and bare arms. Good lord, he made me self-conscious. Making another sweep over me with those dark orbs, his thick eyebrows climbed up his forehead as he made an indiscriminate noise, like a “hmm.” Like most things with Aiden, another thought immediately forgotten. The next comment out of his mouth confirmed it. “I want you to come work for me again.”
I couldn’t hold back my groan as I turned to the refrigerator.
“I mean it,” he kept going as if I doubted him.
I took my time opening the fridge, and ducked inside to pull out the water jug in there. I was stubborn. I accepted my flaw honestly. But Aiden? Good grief. He had me beat by a landslide; he took stubborn and hardheaded to a whole new level. He was supposed to have just forgotten my existence after a couple of days.
Keeping my attention down as I closed the fridge door, I took a calming breath in and let it out. I knew him, and the way he was acting really shouldn’t be a surprise. It was like spoiling a kid his entire life and then trying to put your foot down once it was too late. I’d let him get away with too much over the course of the time we’d known each other, and I had to deal with it now. “I meant what I said too. I don’t want to, and I’m not going to.”
Silence ticked by, second on top of second, buoyant and endless with the things I thought we both could have said to each other but didn’t.
The chair Aiden was sitting on creaked with his weight. I didn’t want to look at him. “You don’t get on my nerves,” he noted almost as if I’d cured cancer.
I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t even look at him. You don’t get on my nerves. I had to set the jug on the counter, and grip the sharp edge of the countertop with my free hand. How did he expect me to respond? Did he want me to thank him for such a heartfelt compliment?
I counted. One, two, three, four so that I wouldn’t just blurt something out in frustration. Picking and choosing my words carefully, I lifted my head and pulled a glass out of the cabinet. “Tell your next employee that talking isn’t required,” I said as I poured water into my cup.
“I never told you that,” his rough, low voice responded.
“You didn’t have to.” Actions spoke louder than words after all.
He let out an exasperated noise and followed it up by saying something that stopped me in the middle of putting the water jug back in the fridge. “You’re a good employee.”
One, two, three, four, five.
Of all the things he could have said…
I could have smacked him in the face right then. I really could have. “There are plenty of good employees in the world. You pay well enough for someone to not half-ass their duties.” I set the water into the fridge and closed the door. “I don’t know why you’re here. Why you’re insisting that you want me to come back when I don’t want to be your assistant anymore, Aiden. I can’t make myself any clearer.”
There. I’d said it, and it was painful and relieving at the same time. “Do you remember when I first started working for you? Do you remember how I’d tell you good morning every day and ask how you were doing?”
He didn’t reply.
Perfect. “And do you remember how many times I’ve asked you if there was something wrong, or tried to joke around with you only for you to ignore me?” I licked my lips and paused where I was, one shoulder against the refrigerator, able to see him at the kitchen table. “I don’t think anyone could get on your nerves unless you let them. And anyway, I told you that none of this matters any more anyway. I don’t want to work for you.”
The big guy sat forward in his seat, his nostrils flaring. “It matters because I want you to come back.”
“You didn’t even care that I was there to begin with.” Sudden irritation at what he was trying to do set the nerves of my spine on fire. You will not bang your head against the fridge. You will not bang your head against the fridge. “You don’t even know me—”