“That’s not for me to tell.” Porter grabbed the ketchup bottle, adding more onto his plate. “I’m not sure if it’s a problem, so to speak, or if Cora will sort it out in her own time.”
Aidan straightened on his stool. “Hrmph.”
A deep chuckle had Aidan glancing to Kyler. Even with the smile, Kyler held a powerful presence. In the cop uniform, it was only amplified. Kyler said, “You seem awfully invested in this. Why don’t you just listen to her and leave it alone?”
Under the all-too-knowing stare of Kyler, Aidan narrowed his eyes. More than once Kyler had pointed out Aidan’s attention to Cora. And more than once Aidan pointed out that he cared for Cora as a friend, nothing more.
He was her Dom, for fuck’s sake. Of course, he gave her attention.
As Cora was tired of saying I am fine, Aidan was equally as exasperated with saying they were only friends. He didn’t want a committed relationship. He didn’t know how many times he could possibly defend that. “You know it’s not like that between us.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kyler muttered.
Porter studied Aidan, giving him a look. Whatever Porter planned to say, he clearly didn’t, since the intensity in his features softened. He finally said, “One thing that did surprise me, it’s not like Cora to play so casually.” He looked to Dmitri. “When we broke up it was because she wanted to find love.”
“When she first joined Club Sin, she did play with others.” Dmitri’s gaze zeroed on Aidan. “Now you’ve been with her almost exclusively, yes?”
Why did that feel more like a lesson than a statement?
His journey with Cora had been a natural progression, but he had only played with her for the last year and half. Even though there were new submissives joining Club Sin all the time, Cora gave him what he needed, as he did for her. Why search out a new play partner when he already had it great? He rubbed the back of his neck. “Only me for the last little while.”
“Wonder why that is,” Kyler scoffed.
Aidan’s fists clenched on top of the table, preparing to respond with Shut the fuck up. He and Kyler were close, and Aidan always thought their relationship mirrored that of brothers—brothers who disagreed often. That closeness usually meant Kyler voiced his thoughts when others wouldn’t. And Aidan was a second away from taking his frustrations out on Kyler’s pretty-boy face.
Before he could spit out a word, Porter interjected, “It’s a shame she hasn’t found a Dom to love her. She deserves that—she’s a good woman.” After taking another bite of his chicken wing and as he chewed he said, “I won’t get into details with what was said between us, but I will tell you that it has nothing to do with me or our past.”
Aidan frowned.
The past grated on his last nerve. He had no reason to be so uneasy to hear and know that Porter had once dominated Cora. Or that he had, at one time, shared her bed. Aidan’s head could explain it all away, but deep inside him, it wasn’t easily ignored.
He glanced to his beer bottle and spun it in his hands. Through the time that had gone by he knew how close Cora and he had become, but it bothered him to know that she had been closer with someone else. That she acted different with Aidan than she would with a boyfriend. With Porter, she was more open and felt safe to admit her deep emotions.
Porter added, “To me, she seemed like the same sassy spitfire she’s always been.”
Aidan narrowed his eyes and restrained himself from punching the mouth that uttered those words. Terrific. That was exactly what he needed—a lesson from another Dom about the submissive he’d played with for two years.
He knew who Cora was, he liked who she was.
He also knew she was in trouble.
So what was he missing?
Aidan lifted his beer to his mouth and swallowed back four deep gulps, shaking off the rise to his body temperature. As he lowered the bottle from his mouth, Dmitri said, “Cora will face this—just give her time and support her. She is not a woman who runs from a problem. You know this about her.”
“Yeah, I do.” Which is exactly why he couldn’t stand this; she wasn’t acting like herself. He gazed at the men he respected around him, and he also knew why none of them would understand. They hadn’t seen that sadness in her gaze, that misery that he had sympathized with. He’d lived that pain he’d witnessed in her and drowned in that hell for so long.
If Porter hadn’t caused that agony in her, what caused
it now? How could something so dark haunt her? And what brought it up that night with Presley? It hadn’t been about a collar, of that he was sure.
Now he knew it had nothing to do with Porter.
Which had been exactly why he’d asked Porter to come to Club Sin; he was eliminating every plausible reason for her pain. Needing to rule out his remaining suspicions, he turned to Porter. “Tell me this, is it something from work, her family, anything at all to do with her past?”
Porter hesitated. “No.”
So it was something in the present. What the hell was it? Aidan stared at Porter, his insides vibrating that her old Dom knew what troubled her now. He pushed away his plate, losing his appetite, and started thinking up excuses to leave.