Aiden rolled his eyes at Thomas’s tone. The way he said his name like he was begging for understanding. But Aidenhadbeen understanding. He’d been so understanding he’d choked on it. He was done being understanding. He was just fucking mad. “Don’t fucking ‘Aiden’ me. Just get some sleep until we get to the safe house.”
Aiden could feel Thomas’s gaze on him, but he ignored it, ignored him, until he rested his head against the glass once more. Thomas didn’t sleep, but he stayed silent, his sorrows and regret filling the car like radiation until they infected Aiden, making him feel almost sorry for him.
Aiden wished he was a different man. A better man. Someone who learned his lesson and walked away from a relationship that, at its very core, was far more toxic than anything his emotionally stunted brothers had managed to create with their spouses. But even as he sat there, he wanted to take Thomas’s hand, wanted to drag him to him, bury his face in his scent, wanted to hold him until they both felt whole again.
Just like that one night.
He shook his head, disgusted. With himself, with the situation, with Thomas. He was so fucking tired. Of everything. He reached over and cranked the music back up. He just needed to stay awake for a little while longer.
* * *
“I need you to take over my cases for a bit.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “What’s a bit?” Lola asked.
That was a fair question, but one Aiden couldn’t answer with any accuracy. He collapsed into the overstuffed leather chair taking up the corner of the sprawling safe house living room.
Thomas had called it a cabin, but it seemed more like a lodge to Aiden. There were two floors, four bedrooms and several windows. It would have been a security nightmare. But there was also strong wi-fi, a thirty-thousand dollar alarm system, and a ten-foot privacy fence.
This was Thomas’s idea of roughing it.
Aiden sighed. “A week, maybe two. It’s a…it’s an emergency.”
The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted them. Aiden didn’t have emergencies. Emergencies meant obligations, and short of his cases, Aiden had been very good at avoiding obligations. At least, as far as his friends knew. Well, friend. His one friend. If he could even call her that. She was more of an associate.
Aiden could hear Lola judging him from a thousand miles away. “This is about him, isn’t it?”
Aiden didn’t ask who she meant. It was obvious—even to her—this was about Thomas. He had half a mind to lie about it. But if he did, she would just keep pressing him until he said something he couldn’t take back. “Yeah, fine. It’s about him. But it’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking that he called you—probably drunk—and begged you to help him with some random problem that, somehow, only you can solve,” she said, voice tight.
So, maybe it was what she was thinking.
Lola Nixon was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a fool. Aiden was the fool. Aiden was doing exactly what he said he wouldn’t do and making lame-ass excuses in the process. But even knowing all that, he wasn’t going to leave Thomas alone. Not now. His brothers meant too much to him.
Thomas means too much to you.
Aiden clenched his teeth until the thought went away, then glanced at the staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs. He’d exiled Thomas upstairs the moment they’d arrived, mostly just to get him away from him before he did something stupid like smother the man with a five-hundred-dollar throw pillow.
He was too mad. He could barely stand to look at him. But, even now, sitting there talking to Lola, all Aiden wanted to do was go upstairs and put himself in Thomas’s way so he could look at him…fight with him. It was so frustrating that it felt like someone tightening a noose around his heart.
“Hello?” Lola said, irritation obvious.
Right.
“Okay, yeah, but this time he really does need my help,” Aiden said lamely.
Lola snorted. “You sound like every client we’ve ever had, making excuses for their shitty relationship. Except, you don’t even have a relationship. This man uses you, twists you up, rings you out, and then spooks himself…every time. I don’t get how he makes you so dumb.”
“It’s not like that,” Aiden said. Except, it was. “He…there’s a lot you don’t know.” Aiden didn’t really know either. But he knew—deep down—that there was a reason Thomas kept doing this to him.
“That man is a hundred red flags made out of silk sheets and you’re too busy worrying about the thread count.”
Aiden didn’t even know what that meant but he wasn’t going to be lectured again. It wouldn’t change anything. “The last guy you dated was literally onAmerica’s Most Wanted,” Aiden recalled. “So, sticks and stones…”
Lola scoffed. “I didn’t date him. I fucked him. Then I took him to the Marshall’s and collected a big, fat bounty on him. We are not the same.”
Arguing with Lola was pointless. She was as stubborn as she was cunning. They weren’t business partners exactly, but they shared a caseload when things got to be too much to handle. She tended to deal with the more domestic side of things. Cheaters. Domestic abusers. Cases that didn’t get in the way of her bounty hunting gigs.
