He brought my hand up to his lips and kissed my knuckles.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked.
I squeezed his hand, and he looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t know what happens next,” I admitted. “I came here because Redeye asked me to and because I was worried about you. I called in sick to work, but I can’t keep that up for long. I need to go back home.”
Aiden nodded slowly.
“I guess my cooking hasn’t convinced you to stay here forever,” he mused.
I chuckled.
“I don’t know about that just yet,” I said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around all of this.”
Aiden flexed his fingers and furrowed his brow. He took a deep breath and licked his lips before speaking.
“Do I have another chance with you?” he asked. “I know I fucked up the beginning of this by not telling you everything sooner, but I have to know if there’s still hope here.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond at first. The last few days we had been together, before the fiasco at the restaurant, I had certainly felt like we were a couple, but we hadn’t put a name on it. The way it all happened was so foreign to me, I hadn’t even considered it.
So where did that leave us now? Putting a name to it made it all the more real, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. There was still so much about each other we didn’t know, and even with some of the misunderstanding cleared up, we had distance to consider. I was also still hesitant, still afraid. I hadn’t talked to Mare or my mom about him. None of my friends had met him.
I had my doubts, but they were focused more on my own insecurities and fear of the unknown than anything else I might learn about Aiden. Before I had heard about Cayden and the people who destroyed Aiden’s life, I had been focusing on my concerns about Aiden and his supposed lifestyle. My perceptions were different now. If I had known everything from the beginning, would I have doubted him in the first place?
No, I wouldn’t have.
Everything was clearer to me now. The distance was going to be a challenge, but weren’t there challenges in any relationship? There might be other things I didn’t know about Aiden Hunter, but learning about each other was part of the excitement. He had some baggage, certainly, but didn’t we all? It was a risk, but if I had learned nothing else from my time in Miami, I had learned that risks could be worth it.
“Yes,” I said, “there’s hope.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You aren’t just saying that because you think I’ve gone off the deep end?”
“I’m not just saying it,” I confirmed. “However, I might want you to agree to some conditions.”
“Conditions?” He took a deep breath. “Honestly, I think I’d agree to almost anything right now, so give it your best shot.”
I watched his face carefully, but he seemed sincere.
“I want you to think about seeing someone,” I said.
Aiden looked confused.
“I thought…I mean, I thought we were talking about me seeing you.”
“Not that.” I shook my head. “Aiden, you need to deal with the loss of your son. You need to see someone professionally and work it out. I’ll be here for you, but I won’t be enough.”
He dropped his eyes.
“You’re talking about a shrink, right?”
“A psychologist, yes.”
He stared into my eyes, and he didn’t look pleased at the idea. Anticipating his objections, I decided to strike first.
“If your leg was broken, would you have a doctor fix it?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow at me.
“You saying my head’s broken?”
“No, not exactly.”
He laughed.
“Yeah, it is,” he said. “At the very least, there are some dark corners I don’t care to think about on my own.”
“So what do you think?”
He scratched his head.
“Okay…yeah. If that’s what it would take to bring you back here, then yeah, I’ll do it.”
I reached up and ran the backs of my fingers over his jaw.
“Thank you,” I said. “If you can do that, I can certainly consider trying this long-distance thing. I’m not sure how well it’s going to work, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”
“Fair enough,” he replied. He turned his body on the couch to face me and took both my hands in his. “Thank you, Chloe.”
“For what?”
“For coming here,” he said. “For giving me another chance.”
“Thank you for not holding all my assumptions against me,” I replied.
“I guess they were understandable,” he said. “I wish you had just asked me.”
“I’m not very good at being straightforward like that,” I admitted.
“Then that’s my condition,” he stated.
“What’s that?”
“If you have doubts, you tell me,” he said. “No more making stories up in your head. If you are wondering something about me, ask and I’ll tell you.”
“Deal.”
He pulled me closer to him tentatively. When I didn’t resist, he ran his hand up my arm, cupped my face, and placed his lips on mine. He was slow at first, but when I wrapped my hand around the back of his head, he opened his mouth and kissed me deeply.
My body became electrified, remembering the sensations he had brought to me in the past.
“Will you let me try to convince you?” he asked.
“Convince me?”
“I want you, Chloe,” Aiden said. He stroked my cheek with his thumb and stared into my eyes as he spoke. “I want to know I’ll have more days of waking up to you in my bed. I want to make you breakfast again. When I walk down the beach, I want you beside me, looking for seashells. I want you in my life, Chloe. I want to convince you that you want it, too.”
He kissed me again and again. I trailed my fingers up his arms, feeling the strength of the muscles there before landing on his broad shoulders. He pushed against me until I was lying beneath him on the couch.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I smiled up at him.
“I think I’d like that,” I said.
He smirked, his devilish grin reaching his eyes as they sparkled with life. He leaned in and brushed his lips over mine.
“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about all morning?” Aiden whispered against my lips.
“What?” I pressed my mouth against his, tasted his tongue with mine, and let my fingers slide through the short hairs on his cheek. He sucked my lower lip into his mouth and then trailed kisses over my chin and down my neck.
“I was thinking about how good it felt sliding my dick into you.” His breath was hot against my throat, but all the skin on my body warmed as he spoke. “I was wondering if you still liked watching my cock move in and out of you, like you did that first time we were together. I was thinking how good you look lying on your back underneath me when I come in you.”
I closed my eyes as he ran his nose up the side of my neck to my ear. My skin tingled as he took my earlobe between his lips and sucked at it gently.
“I’d love to spread your legs and taste you right now,” he whispered. “I want to make your clit sing with my tongue. I want to feel your legs shake as you come all over my face, and then I want to fuck you so hard and so fast you forget your own name.”
“Jesus, Aiden…”
He chuckled against my ear.
“You love that, don’t you? You love hearing all that dirty talk.”
“Stop teasing me,” I said with a groan.
“I’m not making a move,” he mumbled as he kissed down the side of my neck.
How in the world he didn’t consider all of this “a move” was beyond me. I felt like my skin was on fire. I grabbed his head with both of my hands and turned him to face me.
“Aiden Hunter,” I said as I stared straight at him, “make a move.”
His eyes twinkled.
“That’s what I needed to hear.” He slid his hand up to cup my breast over my shirt. “We’re going to have to do something about all this, though.”
He reached down to pull off my shirt, and I did the same to his. Our shorts and underwear quickly followed until everything was in a heap next to the couch. Aiden climbed back on top of me, straddling my waist.
“That’s better,” he said. “Now spread your legs for me, knees up.”
I licked my lips and did as he said, bending my knees at his sides and raising my hips slightly. He looked down at me as a slow smile spread across his face. He looked back at me, pressed his lips against my shoulder, and then moved up my neck.
“Are you ready for this, Chloe?” he cooed in my ear, the softness of his voice contrasting with his words. “Are you ready to get fucked?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “Please.”
I wrapped my arms under his and held tightly to his shoulders, preparing myself for the onslaught. Aiden held himself over me, balanced on one hand as he took the shaft of his cock in the other and slowly pushed into me.
“Oh, yeah…Oh, fuck! I missed this…” Aiden buried his face in my neck and moaned.
It seemed like forever since I had felt him inside of me and heard his intoxicating words invade my ears as he pounded into me over and over again. The blur of his marked body swirled in my eyes as he moved, keeping me from being able to focus on anything other than the full, tight feeling of his body meshing with mine.
With soft strokes, I ran my hands over the lines of ink on his chest and arms. I traced the cross covering his shoulder and bicep, using my fingertip to write over his name inscribed down the middle of it—A HUNTER. For a moment, I wondered what it really meant. Was it simply a representation of his name or a declaration of his mission to bring his son’s killers to justice?
He gripped my hip with his hand, and my fingers slid up around his shoulder and down his back, landing on his ass. I gripped the muscles there, feeling them tighten and release as he plowed into me. I closed my eyes and just let myself feel his hands on me, caressing my sides, stroking my breasts, and running up and down my legs.
With my thighs gripping his sides, I pushed up, deepening his penetrations and crushing his hand between our bodies. He continued his quick movements over my clit, and I shuddered, giving in to the intense feeling as I cried out for him.
The muscles of his ass tightened beneath my hands as he pushed forward a final time. I felt the warmth of his semen inside of me as he shuddered.
“Chloe, Chloe…oh, baby, you’re so fucking perfect. You’re perfect for me.”
I wrapped my arms around his head and held him against my shoulder as both of us tried to regain control of our breathing. His lips pressed to the side of my neck, and I leaned my cheek against the top of his head.
All the feelings of security and comfort I’d had in the past returned—this time without reservations.
And with that, I knew I wanted to make this work.
EIGHTEEN
“Will you come back for the weekend?” Aiden asked as he carried my bag toward airport security. “I’d just head up there to see you, but the police want me to stick around town in case they locate Marc and Hayden.”
“I’ll have to see,” I said. “I’m going to be behind at work—I’d just gotten caught up from being here before, and I kind of had it out with my boss the day before I left. I have no idea what I’ll be walking into tomorrow. I may have to work this weekend to make up for some of it. Maybe the next weekend?”
“At least I’d have something to look forward to,” Aiden said with a smile. “That might keep me going through the week.”
At the security checkpoint, we had to part ways. Aiden leaned down to kiss me softly, and I squeezed his hands.
“Hang in there,” I told him as I ran my fingers up over his inked arms. “I’ll call you when I get home.”
“You’d better!” He gave me one last hug.
The flight back was uneventful, leaving me to continue my ponderings. Now that I understood everything that had happened, I was able to focus on the whole idea of a long-distance relationship instead of what secrets Aiden might be hiding from me. It should have been easier, but I found I was almost as distressed by the idea of trying to make things work from so far away as I had been when I wondered about Aiden’s occupation.
At least now I would be able to talk to Mare about it. She was going to laugh at me for being so distrustful now that I knew the truth, but I could live with that. I was also dreading my return to work in the morning, which was actually a decent distraction.
As promised, I called Aiden when I got home. We talked about the mundane for the most part, but I did make him promise to seek out his friends over the weekend instead of staying home by himself. He said he would, and I threatened to follow up with Redeye to make sure he made good on that promise.
Opening up my laptop for the first time in days, I checked my personal email. I found a message from Nate’s recruiter, Brian, who said he had a couple of opportunities that seemed to fit my skillset. I emailed him back with my availability for a lunch meeting sometime next week.
It was good to have something promising. I only hoped it would work out.
At work the next day, I walked into a firestorm.
“Hey, Chloe!”
I looked down the hall to see Matt, the guy in charge of major problems with the IT systems. It was never a good thing to have him searching for me before I even got to my desk. He bustled down the hallway, holding a pad of paper under his arm. He had a pen shoved between his teeth as he tapped on his phone.
“What’s going on, Matt?”
“Can you get on the conference bridge?” he asked. “Those servers for the acquiring software have gone haywire.”
Fabulous.
I was on the phone for the next three hours. The server techs managed to restart the systems eventually, but they weren’t in good shape and were bound to fail again. In the meantime, we’d incurred a lot of fines from our customers who couldn’t use the system.
As soon as the call ended, Kevin and his Chia-head face appeared at my desk.
“Those servers have been over capacity for months,” he said.
“I’m aware of that,” I replied.
“Well, why haven’t you done anything about it?”
I looked up at him, stunned. These were the very servers I’d warned him about, but he had disregardd my recommendations and axed the project anyway.
“You cancelled the project,” I reminded him. “This was all part of the upgrade we had in the pipeline since June, but you said the funding was going elsewhere.”
“Don’t you try to put this on me,” he said, pointing his finger at my face. “You were in charge of that project. If you couldn’t be bothered to make the risks known, that’s on your head, not mine!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“I gave you all the data on those servers,” I said. “I told you there was risk.”
“You most certainly did not,” he said, “and now your lack of foresight has cost this company more than the upgrade would have!”
He leaned back with his arms crossed over his chest, smirking.
I tightened my hand around my pen enough that it nearly broke. I gritted my teeth together as my head began to pound. Slowly and deliberately, I stood up and put my hands on my hips.
I had officially had enough.
“My lack of foresight?” My hands were starting to shake as my heart beat wildly in my chest.
“You were the project manager.” Kevin continued to stare me down. “You should have made the risks obvious.”
“I did,” I stated. “You are the one who wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t even look at the data.”
“You didn’t provide me with any data,” he sneered.
I lost it. I dropped back down into my chair, stabbed at the keyboard to pull u
p my sent emails, and opened seven documented requests sent directly to Kevin, explaining the exact risks of not upgrading.
“There you go,” I said as I shoved my chair back away from the computer. “And at this point, here I go.”
I grabbed my security badge out of my purse and handed it to him.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“I quit,” I said. “I’ll send you my formal resignation by email before the end of the day.”
My heart continued to pound as I gathered my things and walked away from Kevin and his accusations. I could barely believe what I had just done. It went against everything ingrained in me. I had no backup job. I had no other means of supporting myself, and I was in deep shit.
But I didn’t stop.
As soon as I got to my car, I locked the doors and called Nate’s recruiter to let him know I was available immediately. Then I called Mare, told her what I had done, and started to cry.
“Holy shit, Clo!” Mare bellowed on the other end of the phone. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know!” I blubbered. “I just…I just couldn’t take any more!”
“Well, damn, girl!” Mare let out a whistle. “I knew you weren’t telling me something, but I wasn’t expecting this. Does it have anything to do with that guy in Florida?”
“No…yes…I don’t know!”
“Hang in there,” she said. “I’ll be over with a bottle of wine before you know it. We’re going to get this sorted out.”
True to her word, about five minutes after I got home, Mare was at my door with a bottle of merlot gripped in her fist.
“I thought you were never going to tell me what was going on,” Mare said as she sat down on the couch and pulled a corkscrew from her enormous purse.
“Do you have glasses in there, too?”
“Of course not,” Mare said. “They’d break.”
I laughed and grabbed a couple of wine glasses from the cupboard.
“So, tell me everything,” Mare said. “You never avoid me on purpose, which you’ve obviously been doing. I couldn’t decide if it was work or what. Start at the beginning, although I’m pretty sure it’s the night you met this Aiden guy.”