Everything around me was dulled with the rain. The buildings, the road, and the people hurrying along in their dark-colored raincoats and umbrellas. The only startle of color was in the brightly painted doors of the shops and flats here, and in the banner across the entrance of the King’s Theatre opposite us, advertising a musical.
And Aidan.
To me he was a bright, vivid beacon in the dreary world around me, and I knew that more than anything, I needed to shut whatever this was down.
Glowering up at him, I said, “Well, I am. I’m going home. You should go home too.” The cab came to a stop and I reached for the door only for Aidan to beat me to it. I found myself ushered into the car. And then he got in beside me!
“Fountainbridge Square,” he told the driver.
“What are you doing?” I looked at the driver frowning at us in his rearview mirror. “Not Fountainbridge Square, it’s—”
“Fountainbridge Square,” Aidan insisted.
“Are you kidding, mate?” the driver gaped. “That’s just around the bloody corner.”
“I’m going to Sighthill.”
Aidan scowled down at me. “I know everything, Nora. Seonaid tracked me down at the music studio yesterday.”
I had no words.
Inside my head, I was screaming at my best friend, but for Aidan, I had no words.
He looked at the driver. “Fountainbridge Square and then possibly Sighthill.” He stared at me with a mixture of remorse and frustration. “Why the fuck did you not tell me?”
“Tell you what?” I murmured, feeling all the emotions I’d kept under that concrete layer starting to poke through little cracks.
“Tell me what?” he asked in disbelief. “That Laine lied to you.”
“I wasn’t sure she had,” I lied.
Aidan’s expression darkened. “She and I had words last night. She fucking lied, Nora.”
“You texted,” I said, dazed, stupidly trying to hold onto the misunderstanding. “You told me you were leaving. That it was over.”
That made the muscle in his jaw pop as he grit his teeth together. His hands curled into fists and then flexed as he exhaled, like he was trying to control his temper. “I lost my phone the day after I last saw you. When you left, I let fucking Laine talk me into getting a new number so you couldn’t contact me. I was so angry at you for leaving that I thought it was a good idea. I didn’t realize she was trying to make sure I never saw the last text sent from it to you.”
God, she was despicable. Truly despicable.
“Oh, it gets worse. Cal made it clear he wanted space for him and Sylvie to bond so even if I’d decided to leave, I couldn’t go to California. And I certainly wouldn’t have gone without you.” His expression turned so pained I glanced down, unable to bear seeing him look at me that way again. Like he cared.
Like he more than cared.
Oh God, Seonaid, why did you do this?
“When you weren’t answering your phone and there was no answer when I came to your flat, I remembered the salon Seonaid worked at. I found her and asked her where you were. She told me you’d left. That you’d gone home to the States.
“No word of warning, no goodbye, just gone. During the worst time imaginable, I thought you’d left me.”
“I know,” I whispered, and then cleared my throat of emotion. “I didn’t. I went to see you the morning after Cal took Sylvie. Laine let me up. All of your instruments were gone and she told me so were you. That you had packed up and gotten a job in California to be close to Sylvie but the job meant leaving right away. I didn’t want to believe it, but all your stuff was gone … and then when I tried calling you, I got no answer. I texted you and you confirmed what Laine told me. I couldn’t … I … I needed to leave, get away, so I did.”
His warm, large hand with its calloused fingers slid over mine and I wanted to pull away from his touch but at the same time, I wanted to hold on tight. Tears burned my eyes as I let him hold my hand.
“I was at Cal’s, seeing Sylvie. I know a woman who runs a home removals company and I called her and paid her an obscene amount of money to get out there with a team and pack up Sylvie’s stuff. I was drunk. Miserable. And I didn’t want to have to deal with it. So they took it all to Cal’s that night, and I moved all my instruments into Sylvie’s old room. The next morning, I felt like shit. I didn’t want Sylvie to think I was throwing her away, so I went there. It was just Cal, no Sally, and he felt bad for doing what he’d done, so he let Sylvie and me have the day together. I was out all day and I didn’t have my phone on me because I’d left in such a rush that morning.”
“Oh my God.” I felt sick that someone could lie like that. “Laine should’ve been an actress.”
“She admitted to deliberately misleading you.” His grip on my hand tightened. “She stole my phone. She was the one who texted you.”
“She’s not well, Aidan,” I stated the obvious.
“She has feelings for me that I don’t return. I knew that. I thought we’d gotten through it over the years. Obviously, I was a fool. She decided you were too young for me, too immature to handle everything I was going through. I told her—” His voice began to rise in anger and he stopped himself. “I told her she was vindictive and jealous and she tried to ruin the best thing that had ever happened to me.”
I gaped at him in disbelief, his words so beautiful but so painful. “She succeeded, Aidan.”
His eyes darkened at my comment. “My relationship with Laine might be well and truly fucked. But our relationship needn’t be destroyed, Pixie.”
My eyes closed against the nickname. I couldn’t see him stare at me with affection and hear his name for me at the same time. It was too much. Way too much!
Like he sensed my thoughts, he slid his hand around the nape of my neck, gently forcing me to look at him. His smell, his warmth surrounded me, and I found my eyes dropping to his lips, longing for them even though part of me wanted to jump out of the moving vehicle.
Voice hoarse, he told me, “I have missed you so damn much, Pixie.”
“We’re a mess,” I whispered, thinking of the last few weeks.
“I’m sorry I treated you so badly. I was a bitter arsehole. But you have haunted me for eighteen months, and I resented the hell out of you for it. I thought you’d betrayed me, Nora, at a moment I needed you the most. That’s my only, and terrible, excuse for what I’ve done the last few weeks.”
“Did you know I was a member of Quentin’s cast?”
“Aye,” he admitted. “He asked me to help him out and I saw your name on the list of players. I had to see if it was you.”
“So you could torture me.” I pulled away from him, remembering his callous treatment and my equally horrible treatment of him after we’d had sex.
“I wanted closure. I couldn’t find it.” Aidan brushed my hair off my face, refusing to let me create a physical distance between us. “I still wanted you, even when I’d thought you betrayed me.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
He was silent and then he leaned in and I felt his warm breath on my ear as he whispered, “If coming inside you is the last thing I ever do, I’ll die a happy man, Pixie.”
Tingles fizzed to life between my legs and despite my fight against him, my whole body swelled toward in him in arousal. “Aidan,” I breathed.
His lips whispered across my jaw and I felt his fingers press gently to my chin, forcing me to look at him again. He spoke his next words against my mouth. “Let’s start over.”
Images of us together, laughing, making love, talking, and being at peace with each other flitted through my head. However, those images were quickly crushed by the agony I had experienced when I’d lost him once before. The pain was too fresh, too sharp to have forgotten what it felt like to lose Aidan Lennox. More than that, however, I was afraid of losing myself. It had been a messy, twisted, unpleasant road to liking myself, forgiving myself. I feared that somehow being around Aidan would take me back to the person with insecurities and little self-worth.