“You were a great assistant,” Aiden added.
I still kept on eyeing him. Of course I had been a good one, but I was also the only assistant he’d ever had so…
With a hand to his neck, his Adam’s apple bobbed. I’d swear those impressive shoulders slumped forward. “You’ve always been loyal to me, and I didn’t appreciate it until you were gone.”
Neither one of us said a word for a few extended moments. Maybe he was waiting for me to rail him again, and maybe I was waiting for him to ask me to do something that I didn’t want to do. Who knew? But it must have been long enough for Aiden to finally clear his throat.
“Vanessa, I’m sorry for everything.”
I could believe he was slightly sorry, but a bigger part of my conscience believed he wouldn’t be apologizing if he didn’t wanted something from me. I couldn’t help but feel skeptical, and I was positive that emotion was written all over my face.
But Aiden wasn’t an idiot or anywhere close to it, and he kept going. “I’ve been angry over other things that have nothing to do with you. I haven’t tried to be nice, that’s true, but I’ve never gone out of my way or wanted to be mean to you either.”
I snorted, the scene at the gym, and at the radio station at the front of my brain.
He must have known exactly what I was thinking about because he shook his head, frustrated or resigned, I didn’t know or care. “I’m sorry I took that out on you. Apologizing doesn’t change anything, but I mean it. I’m sorry.”
Did I want to ask what other things he was angry with? Of course. Of course I did. But I knew if I asked him to elaborate it would seem like a sign he was on the road to maybe, possibly winning me over.
He wasn’t.
So I kept my mouth shut. There was a lot of things I would be willing to forgive, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized he’d let me down when I didn’t have high hopes for him to begin with. Aiden became just another person who didn’t live up to the expectations I had. What kind of crap was that? Plus, the stresses surrounding him being an asshole for a short period of time didn’t explain the rest of the months and years he’d never given me the time of day.
Aiden kept watching me with those coffee-colored eyes, watching, watching, watching. “I’ve been incredibly stressed lately,” he said, his words like bait.
All this stuff I had already known.
He licked his top lip and tilted his head down before letting out a long, low exhale. “Can I use your bathroom?”
I pointed in the direction of my bedroom and nodded. “It’s in there.”
He disappeared through the door between my living room and kitchen a second later, and I took that moment to let out my own shaky breath. My head had started hurting just a little bit at some point, and I knew it was the result of hunger and tension. In the kitchen, I grabbed my now-cold sandwich, and leaned over the sink while I took a few bites out of the grilled cheese.
I wasn’t even halfway done eating when Aiden appeared, leaning against the doorway that led from the kitchen into my bedroom, crossing his arms over his chest. If I wasn’t in such a shitty mood, I would have appreciated the breadth of his shoulders, or how his arms were perfectly proportionate to the rest of his massive size. I didn’t need to look at his thighs to know those things had the width of a redwood tree.
“I’ll pay you,” he said while I was not checking him out.
Ready to tell him one more time that I was fine money-wise, Aiden kept going before I could.
He laid the bomb. “I’ll pay off your student loans and buy you a house.”
I dropped my sandwich in the sink.
Chapter Eight
To say that I had an Achilles heel would be an understatement.
Growing up in a family with five kids and a single mom, money had always been tight. So, so tight. Scarce, really. Crayons in elementary school were those off-brand ones that didn’t color so well. I’d worn mostly hand-me-downs exclusively until I was old enough to pay for new things myself, and that hadn’t been until I was with my foster parents.
But if there was one thing that having so little for so long had taught me—it was the value of money and appreciation of belongings. No one respected money more than I did.
So, it had been to my utmost horror, when I applied to college and received zero scholarships. None. Nada. Not even $500.00.
I was smart, but I wasn’t an extraordinary student. I was shy in school. I didn’t raise my hand much in class, or joined every extracurricular activity available. I didn’t play sports because there wasn’t disposable income lying around to buy uniforms, and there hadn’t been any for us kids to join league teams either. My favorite thing had always been hanging out by myself, drawing and painting, if I had paints. I didn’t excel at anything that could have gotten me a scholarship. My high school hadn’t had a fine arts program worth anything; the closest class I’d been able to take was Wood Shop and I’d excelled at it. But where did that lead me?
There was a very clear memory of my high school guidance counselor telling me how average I was. Really. She’d said that to me. “Maybe you should have tried harder.”
I’d been too shocked to have to count to ten after that.
All As and a couple of Bs hadn’t been good enough. Yet I’d still been horrified and disappointed when I got accepted to every decent school I applied to, but received no financial help other than a federal grant I qualified for because of my financial need, but that only covered 10 percent of my total yearly tuition.
And, of course, the school I wanted to go to was out of state and incredibly expensive. I’d loved it more than I loved any other one I’d gone to check out with my friends the fall of my senior year.
So, I did the unthinkable. I took out loans. Massive student loans.
Then I did the next most unthinkable thing in the world: I didn’t tell anyone.
Not my foster parents, not my little brother, or even Diana. No one knew except me. There was no other person in the world who carried the burden of nearly $200,000.00 on their conscience but me.
In the four years since graduating with my bachelors, I’d been paying off as much as I could from my loans while also attempting to put money aside in savings to eventually be able to dedicate myself full-time to my dream. A debt as large as the one I had was a bottomless pit that you had to accept like it was Hepatitis—it wasn’t going anywhere—but it only served to make me work harder, which was why I didn’t mind going to work for Aiden, and then doing my design work well into the middle of the night afterward. But there was only so much you could take, and I’d saved and paid off a significant enough of a chunk to get to the point where I felt like I could breathe for the first time in years… as long as I didn’t let myself look too closely at the loan statements I got in the mail every month.
But…
“What do you think?” the big man asked, leveling his stare right at me as if he hadn’t just busted out the greatest secret in my life.
What I thought was he was out of his damn mind. What I thought was my heart shouldn’t have been beating so quickly. What I also thought was no one else should have known about how much money I owed.