His to Cherish (5 page)

I didn't care that we were in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave and it was almost eighty degrees outside. I grabbed the largest sweatshirt I could find, threw it on, and hurried back to the kitchen.

I had cake and wine to enjoy with a man who sent my body into a flaming ball of lust, and I didn't even care if it was wrong to think that about him.

I liked it.

But I'd still be smart and stay covered up.

“I won't be around tomorrow night.”

I blurted this out and blamed the wine. Only a fool would think she needed to make some guy she wasn't dating—or doing anything with—aware of her whereabouts. But I'd been thinking about tomorrow night for the last two hours since Aidan had shown up.

We drank a bottle of wine and shared an amazing red velvet cake.

We'd also watched
Flip This House
so many times I felt like I could make it my career. Although when I said that, Aidan snorted and I swore he actually laughed.

Then I blushed because I was a moron. It was what he did for a living, and obviously you had to know more about building than what you gleaned watching a television show to actually be able to do it as a career.

“Where you going?” he asked. His head turned to me, slightly tilted. While he looked nonchalant, his shoulders tightened.

“Girls' night out at Fireside.”

“Right.” He nodded and looked at the table. “Been there before when you and your girls are there.”

I knew that. There were several times over the last couple of years that Aidan and Derrick had come into Fireside while my friends and I were being so loud we knew everyone in the place was watching us. Not that we cared. The tequila gave us the ability to ignore any typical social manners.

“We do it every month,” I said. “Mostly because it doesn't matter that Suzanne and Paige are married, they still love looking at Declan.”

“Trina doesn't care?”

She didn't. She might have at first, when she joined our group. But I was pretty sure she thought we were also completely crazy, Suzanne especially. Now we'd known her long enough, heard enough about her and Declan over the last several months that I thought Suzanne liked listening to Trina's stories about Declan, almost more than she liked looking at the man.

I smiled, thinking of Trina. She was kind and sweet, and considering she'd met Declan while on the run from an abusive husband, she was also strong.

I thought of the way they looked at each other. They had been through a ton to get to a place where they were happy, where Trina was finally safe and Declan was finally trusting someone again. They could barely keep their eyes off each other when we were all together, and even when Suzanne was staring at Declan's ass, his eyes were always on Trina, like he didn't even see the rest of us.

“I don't think Trina minds,” I replied.

He made that snort-laugh sound again. I thought I might spontaneously combust if I ever heard a full belly laugh fall from his thick lips “Yeah…man like Declan around her, claiming her, I don't think she'd care at all.”

The idea of being claimed by a man like Declan…or Aidan…flickered through my mind and I felt my cheeks grow warm.

This conversation needed to change direction and quick, before I said something, or did something, I'd regret.

“Well then, now that that's out of the way,” I said, taking a deep breath of courage for what had been on my mind all day. All night long I'd been wondering if I should bring up my conversation with Shane. Aidan and I didn't talk about Derrick or the accident. My role, I figured, was to be a safe place Aidan could go when the silence became too much for him. I didn't want to push the boundaries he'd somehow put in place without ever saying them. But I also hadn't been able to get Shane out of my head after our talk today. And I knew tonight I'd hear his cries in my nightmares. “I need to tell you something.”

It must have been the tone of my voice, the quick change from playful to serious and hesitant, but the air between us instantly changed.

I shifted my position on the couch so my back was against the armrest and I had one foot curled under my other knee. My other foot nervously tapped on the carpet.

“And?” His eyes narrowed.

In order to lessen the blow, I lowered my already quiet voice. “Shane's been eating lunch with me. I don't know why,” I continued without taking a breath. “But he was really upset today and I wanted to let you know.”

His lips pulled into a thin line and his features hardened. I watched as he turned to granite in front of me. He leaned forward on the couch, elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands together.

He looked intent, but the muscle jumping in his jaw and down the side of his throat told me to proceed cautiously.

I might have already overstepped, but this was too important.

“He thinks you blame him.” I watched the impact of my words smack his chest with a force that had him jerking back in shock. “He thinks you hate him.”

I finished with a whisper because I could see the physical pain I was causing this beautiful, rugged, and demolished man in front of me.

I instantly regretted it. I should have minded my own business. Even before the accident I barely knew Aidan; I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly our lives had become interwoven. In that moment, as I watched a myriad of emotions play out over Aidan's face and in his body language, I regretted opening my mouth.

He spoke, and his words pierced my heart.

“I do blame him.”

He moved before I could blink. He was on his feet heading toward the front door, and I scrambled to beat him there before he could leave. Not like this. Not mad at me for causing him pain or making him angry.

“I'm sorry,” I said, almost yelling it while I scurried after him. Damn, his long legs could move fast.

“I'm so sorry,” I repeated as soon as I met him at the door. My fingers wrapped around his forearm and he flinched beneath my grip.

He was so warm. I stared at my hand on his exposed skin and watched his veins pop. His muscles tightened under my hand while I stared at where our skin touched, his blood pumping quickly underneath my palm. My fingers twitched, strengthening my hold on him.

“I didn't mean to hurt you.” I couldn't look at him. My body felt hot. My mind screamed at me to shut up. But touching him, feeling the heat radiating off his skin, made my heart feel like it was gripped in a vice, and my groin begin to pulse.

God. This was not okay.

“I don't hate the kid, and I don't know if I blame him, either, exactly. I just know that if they hadn't gone skateboarding, I'd still have Derrick.” His voice was thick and tortured. Tears dropped down my cheeks. I caused this pain and I hated it.

I was so tired of people hurting, of the heaviness that came from grief, and yet I knew it would last for so long.

“You should tell him.” Bravely, and potentially stupidly, I whispered the words and pulled my eyes off my hand, still on his arm, to look up into Aidan's eyes. They were filled with tears, and I knew by the tightened jaw muscles that he was trying not to let them fall in front of me.

His shoulders shook and he looked at the door.

“When you're ready,” I whispered.

“I don't know when that will be.” He pulled his arm away from me, breaking contact with my hand.

I took a step back and wrapped my arms around my stomach, trying to hold myself together. I'd ruined something in that moment. I knew it, and I hated it.

I'd broken some sort of unspoken rule that I didn't remind Aidan about his loss, even though I knew I had to. I had to be some link to the son he was trying to hold on to. Why else would he come to my house?

But I still shouldn't have said anything. I hated that I did.

“I'm sorry,” I told him when his fingers wrapped around the doorknob. “I was just trying to help.”

I wiped the tears on my cheeks and then jolted in shock when he touched me.

Aidan's thumb swiped under my other eye and my jaw dropped. My breath froze in my lungs and I could do nothing but stand like a marble statue and stare, shocked, into his green eyes that were mixed with gold flecks.

I wanted to stare at them forever.

I wanted to look away and move out of reach of his touch, but as his thumb wiped away my tears and then dragged slowly across my cheek, I couldn't do a thing.

His thumb and finger hit my hair and ran through a small strand until he was at the tip. He stared at my blond hair as if it'd been spun with gold. Or held the answer to his problems.

I know it didn't, but I watched his eyes soften, his jaw relax, and then his eyes hit mine again.

“You are.” He swallowed and dropped my hair from his fingertips like it'd burned him. “You are helping.”

He opened the door and walked through, closing it behind him before I could move.

Or think.

It was long after he was gone when I finally moved, and when I did, I sank against the door.

My body tingled all over.

My pulse raced.

Perhaps I hadn't ruined things as much as I thought I had.

And I couldn't help the smile that stretched my lips as I replayed the way he looked at me while he brushed his hand across my flesh.

I wanted him.

And by the look, by the feel of it…he might have wanted me, too.

“Wow. That's some twisted story you have there.”

I looked around the table to my friends. Between college, graduation, marriages, cheating, and divorce, we'd been through just about everything together. But I'd still managed to stun them all into silence when I told them about Aidan and how we'd been hanging out.

I also talked with them about Shane and everything that happened in the library. While I'd planned on keeping all of it to myself, especially considering Aidan was friends with Blue and Trina's men, I could no longer hold it in. The way Aidan had left last night told me things were changing and I needed perspective, or advice, on how to proceed. As soon as I was done, my shoulders relaxed, as if I'd been finally able to unload all the stress I'd been carrying on my own.

Also, my smile was bigger…happier—although that could have been attributed to the margaritas.

“I don't know what to do,” I told them, scanning their eyes for wisdom, hopeful they'd be able to impart something that would make everything make sense.

Especially with the way Aidan had left last night. I hadn't been able to erase his thick, warm, yet conflicted voice from my brain.
“You are helping.”

It still made hairs stand at the back of my neck when I thought about the look in his eyes.

Heated.

They screamed,
I want you.

I wanted to shout the very same words to him as he walked out to his truck. Instead, I collapsed against my door. Typical. I'd always been the queen of missed opportunities.

Yet I still didn't know if that was what last night had been.

Getting involved with Aidan could be a colossal mistake. It reeked of bad decisions and morning-after guilt.

Although try telling that to my subconscious, which had replaced my nightmares of Shane's screams with groans of pleasure as I envisioned Aidan bringing me to intense orgasms. Twice.

“Ugh.” I dropped my head into my hands, shaking it back and forth.

Next to me, Camden wrapped her arm over my shoulders. She was the most serious one of us, the most hesitant to enter into a relationship. She had her reasons and they made sense, even if I still wanted to see her get her slice of happy.

She certainly hadn't had much of it growing up.

“I think you need to be careful, maybe pull back a little bit. I hate the idea that he could be using you as some link to his son. When he realizes it, when he realizes he has to start moving on, he could leave you in the dust.”

She was right, as usual. It was the thing that terrified me. Besides the fact that it was way too soon to even suggest something happening with Aidan, I was also afraid that, someday, seeing me, and remembering the way I looked in the hospital with his kid's blood on my shirt, would become too painful for him.

It linked us. It could also be the thing that broke us. Or whatever was happening between us.

“I think you should just see what happens,” Paige chirped up. As usual, her view of the world was colored with rainbows and unicorns. Her smile said it all. She believed in fairy tales and to her, this was the ultimate one. “Follow your heart.”

Next to me, Camden quietly snorted her displeasure.

I eyed Suzanne sitting across from me. “It sounds like a mess.” She was small, and her light blond hair and pixie haircut made her look like Tinker Bell. She had also been married since two weeks after college graduation and was absolutely in love with her husband. They were nauseatingly perfect together. Whenever I was at Suzanne and Jackson's house, I felt the need to guzzle Pepto-Bismol. They made my heart hurt so badly—in the cutest way possible.

Even when things had been good, or great, with Cory and me, we'd never seemed that much in love.

“That being said,” she continued, raising a hand to silence Paige's protest. “We all
know
he's a good man, he's just a good man going through a hard time right now. I think if anyone could help him move on, it's you.”

Yeah, but would he move on with me or without me, was the question I was too afraid to ask.

Trina took a sip of her margarita and set it down on the table, gently sliding her finger around the rim and then sucking off the salt. She looked deep in thought when she lifted her eyes to meet mine.

“What?” I asked.

She made a face before she sighed. “I haven't been around as long as you have, and I don't know Aidan at all, really. I mean, he's friends with Declan and I know Declan's going crazy with worry right now, not knowing how to help his friend.” Her voice drifted and she glanced toward the kitchen window where we could see Declan, his focus on the grill I knew was in front of him. “But I really like Aidan. And I just have to say that I know he's liked you for a long time. I also don't think he's in a place where he'd be willing to act on it. If you being in the same school as Derrick was enough to keep him away, I think this would be harder for him.”

Her words were like a knife to my chest and my next breath burned as I asked, “What?”

She rolled her pretty blue eyes playfully before smiling. “Shush. We all knew there was a tension between you two, and I've said it before. But this is different. I think you should proceed…but do it carefully.”

I was too stunned at her admission to speak. I mean, yeah, I thought maybe sometimes Aidan had noticed me before. He'd given me looks that a man gave a woman when he wanted to make an approach. But he'd never acted on them.

I opened my mouth to ask her to explain when I felt it.

A shift in the air.

A tingling that began at the base of my neck and ran down my spine.

It was thick. It was palpable.

And it was directed at me. I felt someone's eyes on me before I turned around.

It was so severe, such an intense feeling, that my spine stiffened instinctively and I set my glass on the table in front of me.

Slowly, my eyes roamed the restaurant looking for the culprit, for whoever was staring at me, when I saw him.

Aidan.

My eyes widened and my jaw dropped. It was slight, but enough of a motion that it caught Camden's attention.

“Well,” she drawled, nudging me with her shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”

I snickered even while my heart began to thunder inside my chest.

He was at the bar across the room, elbow on the bar top, standing, facing us. In front of him was a guy with his back to us, sitting on a barstool and clearly talking to Aidan. Aidan didn't look like he was paying attention to the guy at all.

His focus—his gaze—was directed at me.

I felt a push at my back. “Go talk to him.”

I shook my head, unable to pull my eyes away from Aidan. It was dark in the bar, but I could still make out his features. The tightness of his jaw. His thick black hair hung too long and he needed a haircut, but I wasn't going to be the one to tell him.

I had dreamed of running my hands through his hair, gripping it, and pulling while he was moving on top of me—inside of me.

“Shit,” I gasped, and turned around. I stared at my margarita glass while I felt all my friends gawking at me along with Aidan's eyes still on me. I looked up, directly at Suzanne across the table. “He's here.”

She wiggled her eyebrows. “No shit? Why are you still talking to us?”

It was a challenge, one I wasn't nearly brave enough to take on.

She dropped her playfulness and shrugged. “Go say hi, at least.”

I wanted to. I could feel the pull to be close to him from across the restaurant and I was curious why he was there. Why his eyes seemed to be daring me to do…something.

Taking a large drink of liquid courage, I finished my margarita, licking the salt from the rim, and stood up.

“All right, all right.” I winked at my friends, feigning bravery I didn't feel.

“And tell us who the hot guy is next to him!” Suzanne shouted when I pushed away from my barstool. Based on the way heads whipped in her direction, I figured the entire place had heard her.

By the way the hot guy at the bar turned on his barstool and grinned at our table, I was certain that at the very least he had.

“Oh, that's David,” I heard Trina say as I walked away. “He helped me out in Chicago.”

“Idiots,” I said with a smile as I reached Aidan and the hot guy named David, who I now recognized from being with Aidan at the funeral. My bravery showed up three feet from the bar. “Don't mind them, the zookeepers don't let them out in public much.”

The guy, who I would call attractive and definitely cute in a nice-guy kind of way, threw his head back. His easygoing, loud laugh had me laughing with him.

“David,” hot guy said, extending his hand. “You can tell the wild animals I'm David.”

“Chelsea. I heard Trina say she's met you,” I said, taking his hand in mine. “Something about Chicago. Are you here visiting?”

His blue eyes flashed and that laugh evaporated as if sucked from the air. “Something like that.”

He gave Aidan a look, one I couldn't understand, and pulled his hand from mine.

“And I know who you are,” he said, turning back to me and standing up. “I've heard a lot about you, actually.”

“Shut the hell up.”

The growl came from Aidan. It was deep and angry, and my smile disappeared when my eyes snapped to his. I'd never heard him sound like that before. Had I made a mistake in coming over to say hello?

Perhaps I was pushing another boundary I wasn't fully aware of.

“Don't be a dick,” David warned, flashing me a grin before rolling his eyes. “He's all bark, no bite. I'm going to go bug Declan, and say hello to Trina and the animals.”

I laughed softly as he smacked the back of Aidan's shoulder. On his way to the back of the restaurant, he smiled at my friends and flicked his hand in a wave toward all of them.

“Friend of yours, I take it?” I asked when I looked back to Aidan. At the expression on his face, my smile vanished. His anger and tension, not to mention the overwhelming sadness radiating off of him, was clear. If I hadn't known him before tonight, I would have stayed a dozen yards away from him. His “back the hell off” vibe was obvious to anyone.

“Don't do that,” he scolded. I pulled back with a jerk.

“Do what?”

“Drop your smile and act sad for me.”

I frowned. He was acting different right now than he had previously. I glanced back at my table and considered walking way.

“Shit. I didn't mean it like that.” I pulled my eyes back to his and he scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I don't want to take my shit out on you, and you're always so quiet when I'm around. Seeing you laughing with your friends was good. I don't want you to stop just because I'm here.”

“I didn't,” I declared confidently. It was true. The only thing that made me lose my smile was the way he barked at David. Then I lowered my voice and leaned in. I knew I was risking saying something that could make him go arctic like he had last night, but I'd consumed enough margaritas to risk it. “I don't act sad around you, Aidan. I
am
sad.”

His nose twitched and he looked away.

There was awkwardness tonight. A tension I didn't understand or know why it was suddenly between us, but it was long enough that I felt the need to escape.

Odd, considering I usually wanted to burrow closer to him and wrap him in my arms.

“I'm going to go.” I took a step away, pointing my thumb in the direction of my table. My friends' laughter could be heard from across the room. Declan had told us before that our volume increased with each successive pitcher we drank, and I no longer doubted him. Based on Paige's loud laugh vibrating through the air, I figured pitcher number four had just been delivered. “I'll see you later?”

I bit my lip waiting for him to answer. He didn't owe me anything—he never had. Yet my hands trembled as I thought back to last night. Had bringing up Shane really ruined everything between us?

“Chelsea.”

“What?”

He rolled his lips and studied me. It was unnerving, but not completely unwelcome. The man was giving me a case of emotional whiplash. “How are you getting home tonight?”

“A cab.” I shrugged. “We usually share one.”

He nodded before letting out a breath. “Let me take you home.”

“You don't have to. We're usually here pretty late.”

He pushed off the bar and took a few steps closer to me. I had to tilt my chin up at him to see his eyes, and when I did, they made my heart skip a beat. “I'll wait.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, giving in far too easily.

Aidan nodded in reply and moved back, retaking his spot at the bar right as the bartender asked him if he'd like a refill.

I heard him request water as I turned around and walked away.

When I reached my table, everyone's eyes hit mine with expectant glee.

“You guys are insane. I didn't proposition the man, I just said hello.”

“Looked like a lot more than hello to me.” Paige practically sang and it sounded horrible. The girl might have participated in beauty pageants all across the country until she went to college, but she couldn't carry a tune to save her life. Couple her tone deafness with a pitcher of margaritas and it was a slurred mess.

“He's taking me home.”

I gave them this, and watched as Camden shot a look his way and Suzanne arched a brow in caution toward me. Their looks said it all. Camden didn't trust him, but she didn't trust men in general. Suzanne was simply hopeful, yet wary.

“I like this,” Trina said. When I looked to her, I didn't see any wariness or doubt in her eyes.

And it made me hope, too. Because out of all of us, she'd spent the most time with Aidan, ever since she got involved with Declan. She would know him better than any of my friends.