AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cecilia stared between us, trying to figure out what Bran had. And then when she couldn’t, she said in a loud, clear voice, “Mom, they’re kicking each other under the table.”
My parents exchanged suffering looks. I sent Bran a death threat with my eyes.
He just grinned and rubbed his thumb over his other fingers at me. “Be sure to say hi to Uncle Aiden for me,” he said in a syrupy voice our parents should have picked up on but didn’t.
“Uncle Aiden,” my mom said, temporarily distracted from silently agreeing with my dad that they’d done something terribly wrong in raising us. “That’s cute. I like that.”
“To Uncle Aiden,” my dad said, and raised his wine glass again.
I tried to repeat the toast along with the others, but the words stuck in my throat. There was no way I could even pretend.
When I thought about Aiden, there was nothing familial about it.
CHAPTER8
AIDEN
I’d always been good at math, so on Monday morning, I sat at my desk and calculated exactly how little I could interact with Layla without Jack thinking I was being an asshole. I decided it was pretty damn little, especially if I stepped back from this Blake Morten thing and let Maureen run the show, like I usually did anyway. Sometimes I went with the team to the new employee lunch, but I decided that this time I wouldn’t. For one thing, I didn’t want it coming up that Layla and I already knew each other. That wasn’t a good look for her first day, even if she had earned the job completely on her own merit. For another thing, I didn’t want to spend an entire lunch hour sitting across from her, or God forbid, beside her. It was better for my sanity if I just checked in with her at the end of the day, made sure everything was going well, and then avoided her completely.
It was a good plan, but it didn’t account for the layout of the office. Cross Media had the top three floors of the building. The very top floor was two stories tall with a floor of cubicles below and then a ring of offices above with a walkway that overlooked the cubicles. As luck would have it, every time I walked out of my office and turned left to talk to the closest set of stairs down, I had a birds’ eye view of Layla.
The first time I left my office on Monday morning to meet Maureen for our usual Monday coffee meeting, I stopped short. Just outside of my office on the floor below, Layla was going through the onboarding process in her new cubicle. She was wearing all black, and it made her pale skin glow and brought out the fire in her dark auburn hair. I could only see her profile, but even in that, her beauty was undeniable. My stomach tightened. Any hopes I’d harbored that she wasn’t actually as stunning as I’d remembered were immediately dashed. I quickened my pace so that she wouldn’t catch me watching her out of the corner of her eye, but I took note of every detail.
Her desk was positioned so that her back was to me and I could see her monitor. I could also see the pictures she’d set up beside her computer. One picture was of the Davis clan, which meant Jack’s affable grin was fixed on me as I tried not to let my gaze linger on the slim lines of his daughter’s back. Another picture was of her with a group of girls, their arms around each other. They were all wearing fedoras for some reason, and there was a stage behind them.
“Aiden,” Maureen barked from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you coming?”
In my periphery, I saw Laya’s head snap up. I pretended like I hadn’t seen her and jogged down the steps to where Maureen was holding both of our to-go mugs from our favorite coffee shop down the street. I took mine from her and was about to say, “Let’s go” when all of a sudden she looked past me and said, “Hey Layla, why don’t you come with us?”
Catching my frozen stare, Maureen frowned. “What? This is a good chance to catch her up on Blake since you’re not coming to her welcome lunch.”
Behind me, I heard Layla pushing back her chair and gathering up her things. When she appeared at my side, we exchanged strained smiles. I was glad to see both of us were on the same page regarding hiding our connection. It was still strange, though. I wondered how the hell we were going to keep it up in front of Maureen.
I worried about the wrong thing. We were almost out of the building when Joe and Gloria snagged her.
“But it’s coffee time,” Maureen complained, holding up her empty mug like it was her ticket out of the meeting they were trying to pull her into.
“No, it’s crisis management time,” Gloria said. She took Maureen’s mug and held it out. “Will someone get Maureen coffee?”
“I will.” Layla took it, looking glad to have something to hold onto. “How do you take it?”
“Aiden knows,” Maureen said grumpily as she followed Joe and Gloria into a conference room.
In her absence, tension immediately filled the vacuum. I didn’t know if Layla felt it, too, or if it was entirely one sided. It was probably one-sided, I decided. After all, she just saw me as her dad’s stuffy old friend.
Since the tension was mine, I had to be the one to dispel it.
“So how do you like being back home?” I asked jovially as we turned out of the building and began the short walk to the coffee shop Maureen and I frequented.
“It’s great,” Layla said, the travel mug grasped tightly between her hands. Her nails were painted dark red and her fingers were bare. I had a sudden flash of her in high school, a ring on every finger, sometimes two. Her nails had been bitten off then or tipped with long, stiletto shaped acrylics that Jack always said would put someone’s eye out one day.
“What?” Layla asked self-consciously.
I realized I was looking at her sideways, silently clocking all the other ways she’d changed. I hurriedly snapped my gaze forward. “Nothing, I was just thinking about how much you’ve changed.” I wasn’t good at dishonesty.
“Have I changed much?” Layla asked.
I shot another look at her to see if she was joking, but her expression was serious. Her wide blue eyes met mine, and she seemed to be waiting for an answer.
