The Wall of Winnipeg and Me (44 page)

And just thinking about it filled me with smugness that he was legally my husband, so all these jealous women could eat shit… I knew what my chest was telling me, what it was feeling. Possessiveness. Horrible possessiveness.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. This was Aiden. My friend. The man I was married to so he could become a resident. The guy who watched television with me. Sure, I was in love with him, but I knew there was nothing I could or would do about it. I knew what we were to each other for the most part.

Possessiveness had nowhere to live in our complication.

“They were all nice because you were there,” I explained, giving him a side-glance to take in his reaction. “No one came by before you got there.”

He blinked, not caring at all that I was telling him his looks were the reason why I had people drop by. “If they didn’t walk by, it was because they’re blind and dumb, I told you, Van. You had the best-looking promo stuff out of everyone. I took your bookmarks.”

“You really took my bookmarks?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Two.”

He was killing me. He was slowly killing me. “You sneaky ass.” I smiled even wider and patted the hand he had on me. “I really can’t believe you’re here. In The Motherland.”

“I’m from Winnipeg.”

“I know what city you’re from, dummy. I just thought you would never come to Canada.”

Aiden paused. “I don’t hate it here.”

“But you never want to visit and you don’t want to live here. Isn’t that why you… got me? Because you don’t want to move back here?”

“I don’t
want
to live here.”

“Because of your parents?” I had the nerve to ask.

His head kind of tilted, that full mouth forming a thoughtful line. “They’ll never be the reason I make a decision ever again, Van. I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t have anyone here except Leslie.” The fork in his hand jerked. “Everything I care about is in the States.”

I gave him a wary look and nodded as if I understood, but I didn’t. Not really.

The big guy just touched me again and I smiled that time.

“I owe you big time.”

That had him groaning before he dug back into the tofu he had on his lap. “You don’t owe me anything,” he said into the container.

“I do. You have no clue how much this all meant to me.”

Aiden rolled his eyes, even though he was glancing down.

“I’m serious. You have no idea. I can’t thank you enough.”

“I don’t need your thanks.”

“Yeah, you do. I want you to know how much it means to me. My own mom didn’t even show up to my college graduation, and you caught a flight to come sit with me and be bored out of your mind for hours. You have no idea how much you’ve made my day—my month.”

He shook his head and raised his gaze, his long eyelashes sweeping low as he leveled that ring of warm brown on mine. “You haven’t left me when I needed you. Why wouldn’t I do the same for you?”

“
M
y friends are coming
to visit after I get back from the All Star Bowl.”

Leaning against the counter two days after we got back from Toronto, I gulped down the rest of the water in my glass and narrowed my eyes in Aiden’s direction. Sitting at the breakfast table, he’d greeted Zac and me when we’d dragged our feet inside following our run a few minutes ago.

I was exhausted, beyond exhausted, and with only three weeks left until the marathon, I was seriously beginning to doubt I’d be able to finish it. I’d been struggling to finish eighteen miles a week ago, so a little over twenty-six? Eighteen miles was more than I ever imagined I could do, so I realized I wasn’t appreciating the long strides I’d taken over the last few months. Needless to say, I was busy worrying about how the hell I was going to tackle eight more miles when Aiden made his comment.

I blinked at him. “What?”

“My friends are coming to visit…” He trailed off as if making sure I was listening. “After the All Star Bowl.”

I was listening, but I didn’t get why he was giving me a strange, expectant look. He’d learned he was voted into the All Star Bowl when we’d flown back to Dallas from Toronto. He was set to leave tomorrow. “Okay…”

“They’re coming to visit us.”

Slowly backing up toward one of the stools at the island, I slid onto it, forcing my sluggish, distracted brain to focus.
Us
. He’d said us. They were coming to visit—

Oh shit. “
Us
.”

He nodded solemnly, watching me closely.

Okay. “And they want to stay here?” I asked, even though it was a stupid question that I already knew the answer to. Every time his friends had come by in the past, they had always stayed with him.

Why would this time be any different?

Oh right, because I lived with him and stayed in the room that had always been used as a guest room.

And because we were legally technically married and had agreed to pull this charade off so neither one of us would get in trouble with the law.

Oh hell.

Realistically, it wasn’t the end of the world, and we could figure something out. We could. We would. It wasn’t a big deal. This was bound to happen at one point or another. “Okay. Do you… I can stay with my friend while they’re here if you want. You can pretend I went to visit someone.” Or maybe I could find a last minute getaway somewhere warm. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten Diana to pretend to be sick so we could go somewhere.

Apparently, my comment irritated him. “This is your house too. I’m not asking you to leave because they’re coming. We knew this was going to happen. They want to see you too. It isn’t a big deal.”

Why did that seem to be his life’s motto when it was something that mostly only affected me? And why wasn’t I telling him that I’d met his friends in the past before and that it really wasn’t necessary for us to see each other now? It didn’t
really
matter if I was home or not, did it?

“I already told them you were going to be here,” he concluded.

There went my argument.

He scratched his jaw and my gaze stuck to the white-gold wedding band he’d started wearing right after Toronto. I wanted to ask him about it but I was too much of a coward to. “You’ll have to stay in my room,” he explained.

With him obviously. Where the hell else would I sleep? One of the guys usually took the bed and the other crashed out on the couch downstairs.

The problem wasn’t that I would just
stay in his room
.

The problem was that I would have to stay in his room with him, on his bed, was what he wasn’t telling him, but knew he was implying. It wasn’t like you could exactly hide a blow-up mattress, and I knew this diva sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep on the floor because neither was I.

It’s not a big deal
, I told myself.
It’ll just be like a sleepover
. I’d done sleepovers a thousand times. Aiden and I were adults, sharing a bed didn’t mean anything. We’d already done it the night the lights went out. We’d done it again in Toronto when he surprised me. We would just be, literally, sleeping on opposite sides of a California king-sized bed. Doing it again shouldn’t cause me to lose any sleep over it.

Except for the small fact that I’d been carrying this love I felt for him around my neck since the book convention, and it had only gained weight each day we were together.

“Okay,” I found myself agreeing as my heart warned me I was asking for it. “That’s fine.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know, Van. They’re coming the day after I get back. It’ll work out,” he assured me.

I
heard the two loud
, male voices before I saw them. Chris and Drew, the only friends Aiden had, other than Zac who had mostly become an acquaintance, and me, his sort-of-fake wife. Saving my work, I closed my laptop and grabbed my tablet with my free hand. I’d already taken everything else I would need for the next few days and moved it into the big guy’s room.

While Aiden wasn’t a clothes whore—his “fancy” wardrobe consisted of three suits, four dress shirts, two dress pants, and a black and brown belt—the rest of his closet was filled with boxes of trophies, shoes and other free clothing that hadn’t been opened, and it was packed. His dresser had the rest of the stuff he typically wore: sweat pants, workout shorts, enough T-shirts to clothe an entire basketball team, and tons of underwear and socks.

The point was, there wasn’t space for my clothes, so it didn’t seem like a stretch for us to say I kept my clothes in the other room if the guys opened my drawers and saw my things inside, which I doubted.

What did worry me was this façade we were going to try and pull off. Why had we agreed not to tell anyone else the truth? Couldn’t we have made some exceptions?

No. I knew we couldn’t. If you told one person something, they told another, and then that person told another, and finally, everyone found out. That’s why we’d both jumped into agreeing to keep it a secret as much as possible.

We could do this. We could play it off, I promised myself as I put my laptop and tablet on the desk in the office. I’d left my desktop computer in my room.

I crept down the stairs listening to… four male voices? I’d barely cleared the landing when I spotted Aiden standing in the living room, circled by three men nearly all in the general vicinity of his size, give or take twenty or thirty pounds. I recognized Chris’s close-cropped hair and Drew’s long, black dreadlocked hair, but it was the back of a blond head I wasn’t familiar with that caught my eye.

“Vanessa,” Aiden called my name. “Come here.”

I swerved my attention over to find him standing there with his hand extended in my direction. I hesitated maybe half a second, not long enough for his friends to turn around and notice, but long enough for Aiden to raise his hand an inch from where it was upturned. His face was so… expectant, so fucking expectant like he didn’t doubt I could play this off, that I realized how badly I needed to, how much my terrible-lying-ass was willing to do to make sure he was happy.

I walked forward and took his hand, steeling myself for this massive lie sitting on my soul.

“You know Drew and Chris,” Aiden said as he gestured toward the men in front of him. Drew was carrying Leo in his arm, letting the little guy go to town nibbling at one of his dreads.

Squeezing Aiden’s hand, I smiled at the two friends I’d met before and reached forward to shake their hands as the blond-headed man took a step forward out of the corner of my eye. “Vanessa?”

It took me a second to recognize the handsome blond-haired, green-eyed man standing in the living room. His hair was a lot shorter than it had been the last time I’d seen him more than six years ago. The fact he’d filled out even more and gotten older only made him look so much more different than the nineteen-year-old I used to know.

“Cain?” I took a step forward, grinning wide.

“No fucking way.” He blinked for a minute, shook his head, and grinned so wide I wasn’t paying attention when he cut the distance between us and hugged the hell out of me, pretty much crushing me against his chest for a moment before pulling back and shaking his head some more. “I can’t believe it.” He hugged me again. “What a small world.”

“I know.” I smiled, so shocked to see him I really couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I’m gonna guess you know each other,” Drew said.

I glanced at him and nodded, glancing back at Cain in surprise. “We went to school together.” Then the pieces all clicked together.

But Cain explained it anyway. “Before I transferred to Michigan, I was at Vandy.” Those green eyes flicked back in my direction as he smiled. “We had what? Three classes together?”

I nodded. “Yeah, and you tried copying off my quizzes for the first two weeks until you talked me into helping you study.” What he hadn’t known was that I didn’t give away my hard work for free, but he’d learned that quickly after I shot him down time after time.

“I can’t believe you’re Aiden’s Vanessa.” Cain glanced at the big guy, who was standing just slightly behind me and to the right.

I wished.

“That’s me,” I said, taking a step back, the side of my hip and butt bumping into Aiden. Almost instinctively, a wrist and then an elbow climbed over my shoulder and the heavy weight of his arm draped over me. I had to tip my head back to find his gaze. Why did he look so serious?

“Where’s Zac?” Drew, Aiden’s friend, asked.

The big guy seemed to shift next to me, his side pressing into mine. “He’s at the gym, isn’t he?”

He was and I was so happy he was taking it seriously enough to keep training even though the season was over and most players were taking a small break—hence, the four of them standing in the living room. Well, at least I knew Chris and Drew played professionally; I wasn’t sure what Cain did now. “Yeah. He’s usually back by four.” We always went for a run afterward, but I wasn’t sure if we were going to go since Aiden’s friends were in town. Then again, they were Aiden’s friends, Zac just happened to get along with them; he got along with everyone.

“Well, I’m hungry, who wants to go out to eat?” Drew asked.

“Me,” the other two that didn’t live with me replied.

The arm around me tightened. On the rare occasion he went out to eat, there were only a couple places he liked. “I’ll choose the place.”

I snorted. “I need to finish two covers by tonight, so I’m going to get back to work. You want me to keep Leo?”

Aiden shook his head. “It isn’t that cold. We’ll take him. I want him to get used to riding around in a car more.”

“Well, you guys have fun. I’ll see you later.”

With a wave to all of them and an extra smile thrown in Cain’s direction, I ran back upstairs. The two covers I was working on were going to be hand-drawn designs, so I set up my brand new tablet and quickly got to work. I’d already jotted down ideas I had, so I quickly set forth drawing the bones for one of them so I could send it off before going any further.

One hour bled into two, and at some point, I heard the door open and a handful of male voices float up the stairs. The low hum of the television reached the office, but I kept on working.

It wasn’t until the garage door opened once more and the voices got louder that I sat up and listened. Sure enough, a few minutes later, someone pounded up the stairs and “Van!” reached me.

“In the office,” I yelled back, already saving my work.

Zac peeked his head into the doorway and grinned. “We goin’?”

“Sure. Let me get dressed.”

He nodded, disappearing in the direction of his room. Sneaking into my bedroom, I grabbed my running clothes—leggings, a long-sleeved thermal shirt, sports bra, socks, and shoes—and darted into Aiden’s room to change. I had just finished pulling up my leggings when the door to the bedroom opened and Aiden came in, shutting it behind him.

I smiled as I sat on the edge of the bed, my heel on the mattress. “How was lunch?”

He lifted a shoulder and eyed me, leaning against the door. “Good.”

“What restaurant did you go to? The Chinese place, that café you like, or Thai?” I asked playfully, slipping my sock on.

“We went to eat Chinese.”

“Where’s Leo?” I asked.

“Downstairs,” was his curt reply before going with, “Did you and Cain date?”

My sock fell out of my hand. “
What
?”

Aiden straightened his upper back as he pushed off the door he’d been leaning against. His face was so remote, I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean. “Were you and Cain together?” he repeated himself.

I kept my gaze on him as I reached down and picked up the sock. “Ahh, no.”

His cheek twitched.

“No.” I blinked. “The only reason he started talking to me back then was because he wanted to copy off my work.”

Why was he making that face?

“I’m serious. That was the only reason we became friends.”

He was still making that damn face.

“What? Okay, maybe I thought he was cute, but that’s all.” I shrugged. “Guys like that don’t like girls like me, big guy.” Honestly, while it was the truth, I had no idea why the hell I’d said it.

His nostrils flared and his shoulders drew back. “Guys like what?”

Damn it. There went me feeling awkward as hell. “You know…” I made myself look down as I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Like that.”

“Like me?” he asked in a low voice.

“Not you-you, necessarily. I just mean… look, it doesn’t matter. I know what I have to work with.” I was all right looking. Every so often, I got hit on. But I wasn’t a major bitch, I worked hard, my crazy was usually under control, and I thought that mattered more than a face that would eventually get wrinkled. “When you can pretty much date whoever you want, and most of you guys can, I’m not going to be at the top of anybody’s list—”

“Shut up, Vanessa,” he snapped.

I scoffed. “You shut up.”

“Van!” Zac exclaimed, banging on the bedroom door. “Chop, chop!”

Getting to my feet, I quickly slipped my shoes on and shot Aiden a frown. “Look, we never did anything more than eat dinner a few times and study for tests together. I never had any dreams of being his girlfriend or any crap like that, and he never gave me the impression he was interested. I’m not going to do or say anything to jeopardize this between us, okay? You’re the guy I signed paperwork with.”