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Aiden’s nostrils flared, but he nodded. To give him credit, he only slightly limped around the car, but it was more than enough to worry me. I’d been thinking about him since the night before when I’d found him on the couch, but I knew better than to baby him. Instead, I ran back in the house, grabbed my purse and set the alarm before going back to the garage and getting behind the wheel.
It wasn’t the first time I’d driven his car, except the last time I’d been behind the wheel it was to take it to get an oil change and a wash. “Where are we going?”
“To the acupuncturist.”
“Did you put the address into the navigation?” I asked as I backed out of the garage, extra careful, incredibly self-conscious about my driving skills.
“Yes.”
I nodded and followed the gentle female voice all the way to the acupuncturist’s office, though after a while of driving, I remembered exactly where we were going. Just like every other time I’d ever taken Aiden, what seemed like all of the female employees at the homeopathic clinic seemed to find their way to the front desk while he was signing in. I took a seat and, with a smirk on my face, watched as one woman after another approached the counter, asking the big guy for an autograph or a picture. Aiden spoke with a low, calm voice, his movements measured, and his entire body tense the way it always was around people he didn’t know.
He didn’t even get a chance to sit down before the door leading to the main part of the clinic opened and another employee called his name. Aiden glanced back at me and tipped his head toward the door before disappearing. The crowd of women disbanded too. I hadn’t really been thinking straight before we rushed to leave, so I’d forgotten to bring something along to keep me entertained. I grabbed one of the magazines on the table and started flipping through it, trying to tell myself that Aiden was fine.
An hour later, the door Aiden had gone through opened again and his bulky frame slowly crept out, one obviously pained step at a time. A man in a short white coat behind him at the doorway shook his head. “Get crutches or a cane.”
Aiden simply lifted a hand before approaching the window where only two employees were waiting at that point. I dropped the magazine on the table and got up. The Wall of Wi
“It’s such a pleasure to see you again,” the receptionist crooned just as I stopped right behind Aiden. Was she batting her eyelashes?
If she was, he didn’t notice. His attention was on what looked like the invoice in front of him.
“I’m such a huge fan of yours,” she added.
A fan of that ass, more than likely, I figured.
She kept going. “We all hope you get better soon.”
Yeah, she was definitely batting her eyelashes. Huh.
That had Aiden responding with one of those indecipherable noises of his as he straightened and slid the paperwork over to her.
“Mr. Graves, I can settle your visit with your assistant if you’d like to take a seat,” the receptionist said in a sugary sweet voice, her green eyes flicking to my direction briefly.
Aiden settled for shrugging a shoulder as he turned his body to face me. Nothing about his expression or body language gave me a warning. “She’s my wife.”
Time stopped.
What the hell did he just say?
“Handle it for me, would you, Muffin?” Aiden asked casually, digging into his back pocket and handing over his wallet like he hadn’t just said the freaking ‘W’ word in front of strangers.
And wait a second, did he just call me Muffin? Muffin?
My mouth went dry and my face went hot, but somehow I managed to smile when the woman’s curious and slightly shocked attention slid over to me, more than extremely aware of the weight of Aiden’s gaze on me.
His wife.
I was his freaking wife and he’d just said so aloud.
What the fuck?
There were words for everything, and I understood that a lot of times, they meant nothing. In this case, I recognized that yeah, ‘wife’ didn’t mean crap, but still, it was weird. It was really, really weird to acknowledge the title for a hundred different reasons.
It was even weirder to hear the word out of Aiden’s mouth, especially when it was me he was talking about.
The Muffin thing was its own beast, something I definitely wasn’t prepared to deal with in that moment.
Picking Aiden’s wallet from his hand, I turned my hopefully not-so-shocked face to the receptionist and handed over Aiden’s debit card. With a fake, strained smile that was more of a grimace, she took it from me and swiped it. After she handed a receipt over, I found Aiden waiting for me at the door and walked out alongside him. I resisted the urge to ask if he wanted to use me as a crutch for support. Once we were in the car and before I did anything else, I turned to him in the seat, acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“Aiden… uh…” I scratched at my forehead, trying to keep my features even. First things first. “Did you just call me Muffin?”
He looked at me. His blink was so delayed, I started thinking maybe I’d imagined it. “I figured it was too soon to call you Di
I stared at him, and as I did, my mouth might have been open at the same time. Slowly, eventually, I nodded at him dumbly, attempting to absorb what I realized was a joke he’d just made. A joke he’d made aimed at me.
“You were right. It would have been too soon,” I muttered.
He made this face that irritatingly said, ‘I told you so.’
Who the hell was this human being? He looked like Aiden. He smelled like Aiden. He sounded like Aiden, but he wasn’t the same Aiden I knew. This was the Aiden who had sought me out in Vegas and told me to shut up when I was teasing him. Okay. I swallowed and nodded, accepting that this was what I’d wanted from him. And I’d finally gotten it.
I liked this version more, even though he seemed like a completely different person. Messing with the leg of my glasses, I sniffed and floundered around for the other thing bouncing around in my head. “Why did you call me your wife in there?” My voice sounded all weird.
That heavy-lidded, smart-ass gaze was as cool as a damn cucumber. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I thought we were going to keep this under wraps for as long as possible.” And he could have at least warned me he was going to do it so I could have mentally prepared.
The Wall of Wi
“I just…” My nostrils flared on their own. Did I want him to? I wasn’t sure. But it wasn’t like he’d called me his bitch or anything. “It’s fine that you did it. You caught me off guard, that’s all.”
Stretching that long body out in his seat, Aiden didn’t add anything else. I sat there for a moment thinking about what he’d done and thinking about this unconventional fake marriage we had and this new, oddly shaped, blossoming friendship. And it was when I was thinking about those things that I remembered what Aiden had said to me in Vegas. How we’d made promises to each other and how he was going—in his own strange way—to keep up with them.
With my hands wrapped around the steering wheel, I looked at him over my shoulder and asked outright, with a choppy exhale, “What’s it going to be? Crutches or a cane?”
He went with nothing.
“Crutches or a cane, big guy,” I repeated.
Aiden shifted in his seat. “Give me a break.”
Give me a break. I had to count to five. Turning the ignition, I reminded myself that he’d called me what I was: his friend and, weirdly, his wife. He knew me. He’d missed the Vanessa I’d been back when things had been okay between us.
“I’ll find you a walker if you don’t make a choice by the time I get on the freeway,” I threatened, keeping my attention forward. “The faster you heal, the better. Don’t be a pain in the butt more than you need to be.”
He sighed. “Crutches.”
That was way too easy, and I wasn’t dumb enough to bring it up more than necessary so that he wouldn’t change his mind. I didn’t say anything else as I drove to the pharmacy and parked. Aiden stayed silent too when I hopped out of his SUV. In no time, I found crutches and bought a new bottle of over-the-counter anti-inflammatory pills.
The ride home was pretty quiet. I made sure not to watch as he slowly hobbled inside and made his way to the couch where the comforter I’d brought downstairs the night before was neatly folded, stacked under his pillow. Leaving the crutches I’d bought propped against the couch, I hesitated for a second by the stairs as I watched him settle in.
“I’ll be upstairs,” I said.
He nodded stiffly, palming the remote in one of his hands, his head turned toward me. “Thanks for taking me.”
“Yeah.” I shuffled my feet. “What are friends for?” I teased him in a small voice, unsure of how he’d react.
“For that, Van.”
The man I’d seen kind of, sort of, maybe smile a couple of times, had a tentative grin crack across his mouth. The expression on his face completely caught me off guard. For a man who never, ever physically reacted even when he won a game, his smile…
Heaven help me.
It was beautiful. There was no other word to describe it. It was like a double rainbow. Better than a double rainbow.
I felt stu
His features didn’t necessarily soften, but the way his entire face seemed to lighten…
I touched my mouth to make sure it was closed and not wide open.
I couldn’t respond. I could only stand there nodding in place with something that was pretty close to a deranged smile making an appearance on my face.
“Holler if you need me. I, uh, have work to do.” Yeah, I tucked my imaginary tail in and ran upstairs.
Good lord. My heart pounded as I sat at the chair behind my desk, and I set my palm over it. What the hell was that? That smile was like a nuclear bomb he had within his reach. I mean, I knew Aiden was attractive, obviously, but when he smiled, there was nothing to prepare you for that weapon of mass destruction.
Hello, I had eyes. Even if I had become mostly desensitized to those muscles on top of carefully sculpted muscles, I knew they were there. I knew his face was handsome despite how unyielding it usually was.
I sucked in a breath and let it out, trying to clear my head. But it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. When I was looking for photographs of male models for an e-book cover, I thought about Aiden one or two times more than necessary.
Good grief, he needed to keep that thing in check.