And just thinking about it filled me with smugness that he was legally my husband, so all these jealous women could eat shit… I knew what my chest was telling me, what it was feeling. Possessiveness. Horrible possessiveness.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. This was Aiden. My friend. The man I was married to so he could become a resident. The guy who watched television with me. Sure, I was in love with him, but I knew there was nothing I could or would do about it. I knew what we were to each other for the most part.
Possessiveness had nowhere to live in our complication.
“They were all nice because you were there,” I explained, giving him a side-glance to take in his reaction. “No one came by before you got there.”
He blinked, not caring at all that I was telling him his looks were the reason why I had people drop by. “If they didn’t walk by, it was because they’re blind and dumb, I told you, Van. You had the best-looking promo stuff out of everyone. I took your bookmarks.”
“You really took my bookmarks?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Two.”
He was killing me. He was slowly killing me. “You sneaky ass.” I smiled even wider and patted the hand he had on me. “I really can’t believe you’re here. In The Motherland.”
“I’m from Winnipeg.”
“I know what city you’re from, dummy. I just thought you would never come to Canada.”
Aiden paused. “I don’t hate it here.”
“But you never want to visit and you don’t want to live here. Isn’t that why you… got me? Because you don’t want to move back here?”
“I don’t want to live here.”
“Because of your parents?” I had the nerve to ask.
His head kind of tilted, that full mouth forming a thoughtful line. “They’ll never be the reason I make a decision ever again, Van. I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t have anyone here except Leslie.” The fork in his hand jerked. “Everything I care about is in the States.”
I gave him a wary look and nodded as if I understood, but I didn’t. Not really.
The big guy just touched me again and I smiled that time.
“I owe you big time.”
That had him groaning before he dug back into the tofu he had on his lap. “You don’t owe me anything,” he said into the container.
“I do. You have no clue how much this all meant to me.”
Aiden rolled his eyes, even though he was glancing down.
“I’m serious. You have no idea. I can’t thank you enough.”
“I don’t need your thanks.”
“Yeah, you do. I want you to know how much it means to me. My own mom didn’t even show up to my college graduation, and you caught a flight to come sit with me and be bored out of your mind for hours. You have no idea how much you’ve made my day—my month.”
He shook his head and raised his gaze, his long eyelashes sweeping low as he leveled that ring of warm brown on mine. “You haven’t left me when I needed you. Why wouldn’t I do the same for you?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“My friends are coming to visit after I get back from the All Star Bowl.”
Leaning against the counter two days after we got back from Toronto, I gulped down the rest of the water in my glass and narrowed my eyes in Aiden’s direction. Sitting at the breakfast table, he’d greeted Zac and me when we’d dragged our feet inside following our run a few minutes ago.
I was exhausted, beyond exhausted, and with only three weeks left until the marathon, I was seriously beginning to doubt I’d be able to finish it. I’d been struggling to finish eighteen miles a week ago, so a little over twenty-six? Eighteen miles was more than I ever imagined I could do, so I realized I wasn’t appreciating the long strides I’d taken over the last few months. Needless to say, I was busy worrying about how the hell I was going to tackle eight more miles when Aiden made his comment.
I blinked at him. “What?”
“My friends are coming to visit…” He trailed off as if making sure I was listening. “After the All Star Bowl.”
I was listening, but I didn’t get why he was giving me a strange, expectant look. He’d learned he was voted into the All Star Bowl when we’d flown back to Dallas from Toronto. He was set to leave tomorrow. “Okay…”
“They’re coming to visit us.”
Slowly backing up toward one of the stools at the island, I slid onto it, forcing my sluggish, distracted brain to focus. Us. He’d said us. They were coming to visit—
Oh shit. “Us.”
He nodded solemnly, watching me closely.
Okay. “And they want to stay here?” I asked, even though it was a stupid question that I already knew the answer to. Every time his friends had come by in the past, they had always stayed with him.
Why would this time be any different?
Oh right, because I lived with him and stayed in the room that had always been used as a guest room.
And because we were legally technically married and had agreed to pull this charade off so neither one of us would get in trouble with the law.
Oh hell.
Realistically, it wasn’t the end of the world, and we could figure something out. We could. We would. It wasn’t a big deal. This was bound to happen at one point or another. “Okay. Do you… I can stay with my friend while they’re here if you want. You can pretend I went to visit someone.” Or maybe I could find a last minute getaway somewhere warm. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten Diana to pretend to be sick so we could go somewhere.
Apparently, my comment irritated him. “This is your house too. I’m not asking you to leave because they’re coming. We knew this was going to happen. They want to see you too. It isn’t a big deal.”
Why did that seem to be his life’s motto when it was something that mostly only affected me? And why wasn’t I telling him that I’d met his friends in the past before and that it really wasn’t necessary for us to see each other now? It didn’t really matter if I was home or not, did it?
“I already told them you were going to be here,” he concluded.
There went my argument.
He scratched his jaw and my gaze stuck to the white-gold wedding band he’d started wearing right after Toronto. I wanted to ask him about it but I was too much of a coward to. “You’ll have to stay in my room,” he explained.
With him obviously. Where the hell else would I sleep? One of the guys usually took the bed and the other crashed out on the couch downstairs.
The problem wasn’t that I would just stay in his room.
The problem was that I would have to stay in his room with him, on his bed, was what he wasn’t telling him, but knew he was implying. It wasn’t like you could exactly hide a blow-up mattress, and I knew this diva sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep on the floor because neither was I.
It’s not a big deal, I told myself. It’ll just be like a sleepover. I’d done sleepovers a thousand times. Aiden and I were adults, sharing a bed didn’t mean anything. We’d already done it the night the lights went out. We’d done it again in Toronto when he surprised me. We would just be, literally, sleeping on opposite sides of a California king-sized bed. Doing it again shouldn’t cause me to lose any sleep over it.
Except for the small fact that I’d been carrying this love I felt for him around my neck since the book convention, and it had only gained weight each day we were together.
“Okay,” I found myself agreeing as my heart warned me I was asking for it. “That’s fine.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know, Van. They’re coming the day after I get back. It’ll work out,” he assured me.
* * *