He decided to ignore me. Shocking. “I tried to get Trevor to find you, but no one even knew you had another cell phone or had your right address.”

Of course no one did, because neither one of them had ever made an effort to know anything about me, but I kept that to myself. The address they had was from the place where I’d lived with Diana and her brother in Fort Worth, a sister city to Dallas. Rodrigo had moved out a year and a half afterward when his girlfriend had gotten pregnant, and when I got my job with Aiden, I got my own place, needing to be in Dallas instead of travelling back and forth almost an hour every day. Since then, Diana had moved in to her own place.

It also didn’t escape me that Aiden didn’t drop Zac’s name. He was the only one in our small circle who knew my personal number, and I was sure he wouldn’t share it.

“Come back.”

I pushed the bridge of my glasses up and used one of the strongest, most resilient words in the English language: “No.”

“I’ll pay you more.”

Tempting but “No.”

“Why not?”

Why not? Men. It was only freaking men who would be so… so dumb. He hadn’t apologized to me for what he’d said. He wasn’t even trying to be nice and win me over to come back—not that I would. It was the same old shit it always was.

Come back.

Why not?

Blah, blah, blah.

Why not?

Why the hell would I?

I almost said I was sorry for not doing what he wanted, but I wasn’t. Not even a little bit. As I took in Aiden, his overwhelming size swallowing my couch, demanding that I come back and not understanding why I wouldn’t want to, I realized that being ‘nice’ wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I had to tell him the truth, or at least the closest thing to the truth as possible. A small, immature part of me wanted to be mean.

I wanted to hurt him the way he’d hurt me, but as I took him in, I took in the man who had provided me with a job that had allowed me to fund and fulfill my dreams. This was the same person who I’d seen at his worst, when he’d faced the possibility he would never play the only thing in the world he loved again.

This was Aiden. I knew some of his secrets. I didn’t want to care about him, but I guess I couldn’t help it, even if it was a subconscious, mutilated version of what it had once been. And I didn’t want to be like Trevor, or Susie, or any other person I’d ever met who was mean for the sake of being mean.

So I kept it as simple as I could. I stuck my fingers under my thighs and said, “I told you. I deserve better.”

Chapter Six

“Oh shit.”

I spotted the black Range Rover in the parking lot the instant the taxi pulled up in front of the complex by the guest entrance. There was no way I could miss it; I’d taken it to get an oil change and a wash a few times in the past. It wasn’t necessarily the nicest car in the lot—a few of my neighbors had Escalades and Mercedes that I wasn’t sure how they afforded—but I recognized Aiden’s license plate number.

Yet it still caught me off guard to see it there.

He hadn’t exactly left my apartment with a smile on his face a few days ago. After I clearly told him I didn’t want to go back to work for him, he’d looked at me like I was speaking a different language, and asked, “Is this a joke?”

There went arrogance for you.

I’d answered the only way I would. “No.”

He had gotten to his feet, turned his attention toward the ceiling for a moment, and left. And that was that.

The last thing I expected was for him to come back. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d learned that this was a person who once he put his mind to something, nothing deterred him from his goal. This was the person who only heard what he wanted to hear. That didn’t exactly leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling. I guess a big part of me just wanted and expected to make a clean cut with him, especially after he’d made his lack of loyalty so apparent.

The fact that he’d somehow gotten my address and gone out of his way to come to my apartment when he hadn’t even been able to put in a single effort to ask me how I was doing, frustrated me more than it probably should have. It was too little too late. All I would have wanted from him in the past was at least a little bit of loyalty, if not friendship, and he hadn’t even been able to give me that.

“Everything all right, ma’am?”

“Everything is fine, thanks,” I lied, gripping the handle. “I thought I lost my keys, but I found them. How much do I owe you?”

Paying my fee, I slipped out of the car and hurried through the gate.

I made my way toward my apartment with one hand wrapped around my pepper spray and the other with my keys and wristlet, all too aware that I’d had too much wine to drink to deal with this crap right now.

My visitor was in the same spot on the stairs I’d found him days ago.

Aiden’s gaze almost immediately landed on me, hovering on the hem of the dress I’d worn to dinner as he climbed to his size-thirteen feet. Dressed in workout shorts that reached his knees and a T-shirt, I was pretty sure he’d left practice and come straight over. If my dates were right, the team was halfway through preseason training camp, focused more on the rookies than on veterans like Aiden.

“We need to talk,” he stated immediately, his eyes scraping their way to my chest and catching on the low dip of the cotton sundress right between my breasts.