Page 22 of Settling the Score

Sienna

LOL, are you spying on him now?

Paige

Isn’t that our job?

Astrid

He looks nervous!!

Sienna

Aiden doesn’t get nervous.

Paige

Are you hiding out to torture him?

Sienna

Astrid

Well, it’s working. Keep it up, sister.

Five minutes later, having finished the day’s Wordle – no way would even this wedding jeopardise her 237-day streak – and caught up on the news headlines, Sienna took a last glance in the mirror before deciding she was ready. She sucked in a deep breath, expelled it slowly, then did her very best attempt at a wiggly hip walk across the foyer, towards where Aiden did indeed look kind of nervous. Or impatient. Perhaps that had to do with the fact Chuck had come to stand beside him, though.

‘There she is.’ Chuck grinned as Sienna approached. ‘Astrid mentioned you might be heading down to the beach?’

Sienna’s heart dropped to her toes, even as she felt an overwhelming urge to giggle in the face of Aiden’s response to that – which was to clench his jaw tighter than a drum.

‘Yeah, we were going to go for a walk. D’you wanna come too?’

Chuck grinned flirtatiously. ‘Always, but after you, of course,’ he promised, so Sienna did burst out laughing at the double entendre.

‘You really are incorrigible.’

‘That’s one word for it,’ Aiden muttered, earning a raised brow from Chuck and a racing heart from Sienna. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was… jealous. Of Chuck Daly. Who she’d just met. Who flirted like most men breathed. To whom Sienna meant nothing.

Delicious heat flicked in her belly, a portent of what was to come. Victory. Victory over Aiden, victory over the way he’d hurt her and cast her aside, victory over the place he occupied in her mind. This week was going to be an exorcism; he just didn’t realise it. He just didn’t know that a ghost of him had haunted her for more than ten lousy years and she was finally about to banish him, by giving him his well-deserved just desserts.

‘Hey, I’m just speaking the truth,’ Chuck said with an exaggerated wink. ‘Shall we?’

Sienna’s glance flicked from Chuck to Aiden, and then she shrugged. Her spaghetti strap slipped down again; unlike Aiden, Chuck didn’t hesitate to reach out and slowly, so slowly his fingers grazed the flesh of her bare arm, littering her skin in goosebumps, slip it back into place. She was sure she heard Aiden growl.

Which only made her mad. How dare he be jealous after all these years? And after the myriad – and by myriad she meant billions – of women he’d been with since Sienna? She wasn’t an idiot. And she also didn’t have enough will power to be able to resist occasionally drinking a little too much red wine and googling Aiden ‘Horn Dog’ Carter. The pics online were alternately of him playing hockey, or him out on the town, never alone, though admittedly his reputation was nothing compared to what Blake’s had been before Astrid had swept in and tamed him.

Bitterness rose inside of her; she covered it with an ultra-bright smile, which she aimed somewhere between the two men. ‘Yeah, let’s go.’

The mansion was up a gravelled, winding path from the cove the boat had pulled into earlier that day, and Sienna’s shoes crunched underfoot as she walked. Palm trees formed perfect silhouettes against the evening sky, spiky and artistic, and quintessentially beachy.

‘So, you guys grew up in the same town, huh?’ Chuck said, as they left the din of the party behind.

‘Yeah.’ Sienna nodded.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Ashbury Falls,’ she and Aiden said in unison. She glanced up at him and then away again quickly. In the moonlit night, his face in profile was all harsh angles, and somehow it wiped away the years, so she was looking at him as a teenager and her heart skidded in her chest.