“Of course you could, my pet, but where have you been all week?” Beau asked, ignoring that it wasn’t his business and Violet didn’t seem interested in talking to him.
“She’s been staying with me,” Aidan interjected. Beau had already touched Violet without her permission, used pet names, questioned her competence and completely ignored Aidan’s presence. It was time for all of that to change.
Beau finally turned toward him as though he’d just noticed Aidan standing there. “Oh. I thought he was your cab driver.”
Aidan started to tense for a fight, but a cautioning hand from Violet stopped him. “Quit being so rude, Beau. You knew full well that he was here with me. I’m not going to just stand here while you show up unannounced, question everything I do and then be disrespectful to my guest. Why don’t you tell me what it is you want so you can go and I can finish moving back upstairs?”
Beau turned to Aidan with a disgusted look, as though he were somehow responsible for Violet’s new backbone. “I just wanted to say hi and see how you were. You haven’t been returning my calls.”
“Hi. I’m fine, thank you. And I haven’t returned your calls because we’re not dating any longer.”
“I know we’re not but—”
“No buts, Beau. I made it very clear when the paternity test came back, but you and my parents don’t seem to want to listen. So here’s what you need to know—I’m seeing someone else now. End of story.”
“Him?” Beau said with a thumb jerked in Aidan’s direction.
“Yes,” she answered matter-of-factly.
“And just who is he, huh?”
“Knox’s father.” Violet said the words proudly, startling Aidan.
So far, she’d seemed fairly hesitant for people to know about their relationship, especially where Knox was concerned. He understood that things were new between them, and that she wanted to feel more comfortable before the world poked its nose into their business. Apparently she was feeling more comfortable. Or at least angry enough with Beau overstepping in her business to want to throw that factoid in his face.
“I thought you didn’t know who his father was.”
“I didn’t know. If I had, I certainly wouldn’t have led you and everyone else on the entire nine months. But I’ve gotten some of my memory back from that lost week.”
“Some? Not all of it?” Beau asked with a concerned furrow of his brow.
“No, not all of it. Just the part where I met Aidan. We’ve since reunited. That’s all of my business you’re going to be privy to from here on out.”
Beau’s worried expression faded as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Do your parents know about...him?” The word almost seemed to taste bad in his mouth as he said it.
It made Aidan want to glance down at what he was wearing to see how bad he looked. He had on nice jeans and a fitted T-shirt with the name of his bar on it. He certainly wasn’t dressing up to haul her stuff back to the apartment. And yet her jerk of an ex seemed to think he was less than worthy of Violet.
Maybe so, but her opinion was the only one that mattered. At the moment, she seemed to think he was good enough. She didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed to announce who he was and that they were dating. He was surprised, especially considering that someone like Beau could take that information straight to her parents or family friends.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no, I haven’t spoken to my parents about it yet. They haven’t been stateside in a while. But I will when they return. And if you rush home and tell them, Beau, I will make your life extremely difficult, do you understand?”
For a moment Beau’s macho demeanor seemed to crumble a bit under Violet’s threat. Then he recovered and shrugged it off. “Like I want to spend my precious time gossiping about who my ex is sleeping with. If it’s not me, I really don’t care. Call me when you regain your senses,” he said, turning to walk away without giving Aidan a second glance.
Violet and Aidan both stood together watching Beau stroll casually down the sidewalk, disappearing into a crowd. “That guy is a piece of work,” Aidan noted. “If you weren’t dating me, I’d question your taste in men.”
“I’d question my taste in men, too, except I didn’t really choose Beau. We grew up together and it was always just sort of expected that we would get married one day. If I’d been born a hundred years earlier, our marriage would’ve been arranged. Now, my parents just used social pressures to get us together.”
“I don’t know why they’d want you with that jerk.”
Violet lifted the handle of the bag and started toward the door of her building. “I guess because our families are old friends, we’re around the same age, he’s from a good family, and of course, he’s Greek. They’re not good reasons, but they’re reasons. I’ve always said we were better on paper than in real life.”
Aidan just shook his head and followed her inside. “Well, if I was your father, the most important thing to me would be how he treated you. And considering the state you were in the night you came into Murphy’s, I’d say he wasn’t treating you well at all.”
Violet paused in the marble and brass lobby and turned to him. “Did I tell you anything that night? Like I just told Beau, I still don’t remember everything about that week. Just you. I don’t know why I was upset or in the bar that night.”
Aidan realized they hadn’t really discussed her memory loss in quite a while. At first, he’d considered it a convenient excuse, but the way she spoke about it now, he was more convinced that she really had lost her memory. “You didn’t say. Actually, what you said was that you didn’t want to talk about it. Just that your boyfriend was, quote, ‘a dick’ and you wanted to forget about everything for a while.”