Page 67 of Clear Shot

I’ma little bummed when Aiden leaves but I wind up too busy to worry about it. Between helping out at Cicero’s—who’s still feeding the community—and helping Sloane with the baby, I’m on the go all day. Their nanny hasn’t been able to come to work, and Joanna isn’t sleeping through the night right now, so I try to get up with her in the morning so Sloane can rest for a few extra hours.

The guys have been gone for four days and I’m sitting in the kitchen giving Joanna a bottle when my texts start to blow up. I get five or six messages in a row from Aiden, and when I open the app, I see that they’re links.

To houses.

I blink in confusion for a moment and then it hits me—he’s started house hunting.

For us.

I thought we would rent something once we had time to look, but based on these links, he wants to skip right to buying a house.

And they’re all huge.

Well, huge to me.

The house I grew up in was probably seven hundred square feet, which is big for our little town. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a combined kitchen and dining room.

These houses are beyond my wildest dreams.

Granted, Johan’s house is large. Five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen, and the walk-in closet in the primary bedroom is bigger than the room I slept in growing up. He’s a rich hockey player, though. I never envisioned this kind of thing for myself.

Except now I’m married to a rich hockey player.

Up until this moment, I never gave much thought to Aiden’s financial status. I signed the prenup because I’m not in this for money, and the condo he lived in was modest. Modern and comfortable but nothing over-the-top.

Impulsively, I call him.

“You get my texts?” he asks when he answers.

“I did. And I’m… I mean, these houses are huge.”

“Yeah, but they’re also an investment.”

“We don’t need five bedrooms. It’s just the two of us. Even if my entire family comes to visit, we have room for them. And we’re not having kids… Not for a while anyway.”

“Okay, but that isn’t the point, is it? Having room for ourselves, our friends and family, and eventually a family. Kids need bedrooms, whether they’re biological or adopted.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“There’s a four-bedroom house in your brother’s neighborhood that we could get for a steal. It looks like a foreclosure and needs a ton of work—the realtor I talked to saidthey rented it out and the renters destroyed the inside—but that might be a fun project. We could make it our own.”

That’s intriguing.

“But you’re busy with hockey,” I say, “and while I can supervise and handle things like painting, I don’t know if I can manage major renovations.”

“Of course not. We’d hire people for that.”

“The question is, can we even find contractors now that half the city is in need of repair?”

“You have a point.” He pauses. “Tell you what—get online and start looking at houses. Send me links to the ones you want to see and we’ll set up a time with the realtor to go see them.”

“Aiden…we have to talk about money.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“The prenup is clear—you’re not entitled to anything I owned prior to the marriage, including my retirement funds and such. Anything we buy together is community property.”