Page 26 of Settling the Score (The Karma Club #4)

‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘Are you sure?’

She lifted one shoulder. ‘Let me think about that. Do you snore?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You know I don’t snore.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she said. ‘You might have started snoring in the last ten or so years.’

‘If I have, no one’s told me.’

Her smile slipped for a nanosecond and he could have killed himself for alluding to having shared a bed with other women.

‘Because that wouldn’t really be a fair swap,’ she recovered quickly, her tone impish once more. ‘You getting away from the cricket and me inheriting a snorer.’

‘I don’t snore.’

‘Well, you just said you don’t know that definitively.’

‘Are you retracting your offer?’

‘I’m just making sure I know what I’m getting myself into.’

‘No snoring. No sex.’

Her jaw dropped at the brazen statement.

‘Unless you want?—’

‘No,’ she hastened to add, cheeks flushed a pretty bright pink. ‘I really did just mean for you to share the bed. As in, one side of it. With, like, a big, impermeable line, right down the middle.’

‘Got it. Our own Great Wall of China.’

‘Or Mariana Trench.’

‘As unpassable as the DMZ. Got it.’

She stared at him for a few seconds before gesturing to the door across the room. ‘The bathroom’s through there. And that’s pretty much it.’

‘Thanks.’ He moved towards the bed. ‘Do you have a favourite side?’

‘I use the whole thing,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m like a starfish right in the middle.’

‘Not tonight,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I should probably apologise in advance if I kick you to the ground.’

‘Try not to.’

She batted her lashes serenely. ‘We’ll see.’

His chuckle was low and soft.

‘I mean, you kind of deserve it.’

He really couldn’t argue with that.

‘I’ll tell you what, Mastrangelo. I’ll sleep here and try to take up as little space as possible.’

She snorted.

‘What?’

‘It’s just, you might not have noticed, but you’re kind of…’

‘What?’

‘Huge.’

He grinned and wiggled his brows, his implication clear.

She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re a child.’

‘Nope.’

‘Get in bed.’

He arched a brow, loving the way she blushed. Loving that he could make her blush.

Which scared the crap out of him all over again.

He pushed back the covers and made a show of lying down right on the edge of the mattress, enjoying the way she regarded him sceptically, before moving gingerly to her own side of the bed and peeling back the covers.

She kept watching him as she hopped in, and didn’t, in the end, starfish at all, but rather lay right on the edge of her side of the bed, too. With a gulf of mattress and covers as wide as two hockey rinks between them.

It only occurred to him, as he was starting to drift off, that her predilection for starfishing meant she probably didn’t share a bed often, and he hated how much that thought pleased him…

* * *

At first, she thought it was a dream. It wouldn’t have been the first time her subconscious had conjured Aiden up out of nowhere. But this was different. This time, she could feel him. Even after her eyes had opened.

His warmth and nearness. His breath on the back of her neck. His hand, heavy and comforting, wrapped around her waist. She could hear him too, each exhalation like a deep, throaty rumble.

Aiden.

Carter.

In.

Her.

Bed.

With his arm around her. And his body playing big spoon to her little.

She startled, eyes wide, staring at the wall across the room, but stayed perfectly still, as though she couldn’t bear to break the contact, even when she knew it was a mistake, and probably a disaster in the making.

‘Morning.’ His voice was a deep rumble from behind, close to her ear. She hated the way her insides twisted with something like need.

He moved his hand. She was instantly cold.

‘Sorry ’bout that,’ he muttered.

‘It’s fine,’ she demurred, voice crisp. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yeah,’ he responded. ‘I guess it was just habit or something. Muscle memory.’

She moved then, shifting away from him a bit, towards the edge of the bed, the safety of space, before she flipped onto her other side, so she was facing towards Aiden.

And immediately regretted it.

If feeling his arm around her had been intimate, then this was somehow so much more. The sheet was down around his waist, revealing his tatted-up torso, and his face had creases in it from the pillow. His eyes were sleepy, his lips parted, hair all messy.

It was like being sucked back in time.

And being hit with a sledgehammer of his life since then. His success. His modelling work. His being a spokesperson for so many global brands.

‘How did you sleep?’ Her voice was softened by the earliness of the morning.

‘Better than I have in a while,’ he said, one side of his lip twisting upwards in a half-smile.

‘No cricket.’

‘No cricket.’ He lifted one shoulder. ‘No dreams.’

‘Same,’ she said, after a beat. ‘And if you snored, I slept right through it.’

‘So I was a good house guest?’

‘You were acceptable,’ she said.

His laugh was deep and rumbly, doing funny things to her stomach. ‘That might be the first time I’ve been described that way.’

Her heart stammered. Anger seared her. No, not anger. At least, not solely anger. But outrage. Jealousy. Irritation. A swirling current of dark, brooding emotions that caught her unawares because of how instant – and unexpected – they were.

‘Does that mean you’d invite me back?’

Her heart lurched. Anger – or whatever she was feeling – evaporated, to be replaced by a rushing pulse and a hotness in her lungs.

‘I – I’m sure you’ll deal with the cricket today.

’ Mentally, she made a list, and at the top of it?

Get the girls to remove the noise-making thing from his room, pronto.

‘But if not…’

‘Aiden.’ Her sigh was soft, and final. ‘I don’t know what last night was.’ Her eyes lifted to his. ‘A temporary truce, I guess.’

‘A truce?’ He seemed to shift closer. No, he definitely shifted closer, because a second later, his hand was on her hip and his gaze seemed to be probing hers, looking right into her consciousness. ‘Are we at war, Sienna?’

His touch was incendiary. His eyes were like a spark, turning her pulse into a livewire.

‘Worse. We’re nothing,’ she forced herself to say. Wishing it were true. Wishing their history wasn’t still such a huge part of what she thought and felt.

‘It doesn’t feel like we’re nothing.’

Her breath hitched in her lungs. ‘No?’

He shook his head slowly, but something seemed to change in his features, giving him a look of hesitation. He didn’t move, but she felt like he did. It was almost as if the air between them thickened and grew warm. Almost as if they were stuck in mud. She could hardly breathe.

‘Then what are we?’ she managed to squeak out.

‘Hard to define.’

Her brow furrowed. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Tell me this,’ he said, rather than answering her question. ‘On the beach, when we kissed…’

‘Yes?’ She couldn’t believe her voice emerged so steadily.

‘You acted like it was nothing.’ He laughed uncomfortably. ‘Like you go around hooking up with guys all the time, or whatever.’

Her eyes widened instinctively. Her insides squirmed. She felt like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She felt like the worst kind of liar.

‘What’s your point?’ Now there was the slightest tremble.

He stroked her hip and her pulse went haywire. She wished he didn’t have such an easy ability to affect her like this.

‘I guess… I’m just wondering if that’s accurate.’

‘Which part?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was the kiss nothing to me? Or do I kiss random guys all the time?’

‘I didn’t mean random,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘And why exactly do you think you have any business asking me this?’

‘That’s the thing, I don’t.’ He moved closer, his features imploring. Her heart twisted. He was her first love. He would always have a hard-wire into her mind, and annoyingly, into parts of her heart. ‘But I still want to know.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to understand you.’

‘Why?’

His lips showed the ghost of a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You don’t want to answer?’

‘I just… don’t know what to say.’

‘Is it hard to just be honest?’

‘Honest?’ She was floored. ‘This, coming from you?’

‘I never lied to you.’

‘Fine, you tell me something. Back then, you walked away like I was nothing. Is that how you really felt?’

He stared at her, mouth compressed into a straight line. ‘You know you weren’t nothing to me.’

‘So why did you go out of your way to make me feel like it?’

He flinched then, and she was glad. Because she wanted to hurt him. She needed to hurt him. In order to have any kind of closure, she needed to draw blood. Even if just a little.

‘I thought it would be better for you, in the long run.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Bullshit.’

‘No, I mean it,’ he insisted, and this time, when he moved closer, there was no space left between them.

Their bodies connected, and her cells danced in giddy shock and delight.

‘I knew I was leaving town for good. I had to. Everything with my dad, man, it was so fucked up. I had to get us the hell out of there. But you, Sienna Mastrangelo, were kind of a sticking point.’

She couldn’t speak. He was too close. His words too full of passion and truth, his face showing genuine turmoil, as though he’d actually angsted over what had happened back then, which just didn’t fit the narrative she’d lived with all these years.

The past was her truth – a talisman she’d lived alongside since that awful night when he’d broken up with her.

Now he was asking her to see it differently, and she just didn’t know if she could.

‘All I’d ever wanted was to leave town. Leave Dad. Save Mom. Start afresh. And then we started hanging out. And suddenly, it was less about what I wanted and more about what everyone else needed from me. They needed me more than you did. That’s what it came down to, I guess.’

His words cut through something inside of her, but she still didn’t really buy it. They could have done the whole long-distance thing. He hadn’t needed to just walk away from her, wholesale. He’d done that because he’d wanted to start a new life. Without her in it.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Stop saying that.’ A tinge of anger coloured his voice, and he immediately withdrew, his face a blank slate, his chest still as if holding his breath, and then he moved, expelling it long and slow.

‘They didn’t need you more than I did,’ she said, glad that her own tone showed impatience. ‘You only justified it that way.’

‘I didn’t know any of that stuff, Sienna. About the baby, about your dad.’

‘Nor did I, when you left. That all came later. I just mean… I needed you, regardless of that. Or I thought I did.’ She jutted her chin out defiantly.

‘I loved you, Aiden. Not like some stupid high school crush. I loved you. Every part of me loved every part of you, and if you’d let me, I would have stood by your side while you chased down your dreams, being your biggest cheerleader, your biggest supporter, forever and always.

’ She blinked quickly to clear the hot sting of tears. ‘Just like we promised each other.’

The silence between them was flooded with static electricity. It sparked in the air between them, buzzing around the room.

‘Anyway.’ She couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear being this close to him, touching him, with the aching wound in her heart wide open and exposed, raw and making her vulnerable in a way she’d fought not to be ever since that night.

‘It’s done.’ She went to lift the sheet and push out of bed but his hand, on her hip, moved quickly, grabbing her wrist and stilling her.

‘I’m sorry.’ His thumb padded her inner-wrist and sparks shot towards her shoulder then pirouetted inside her body. ‘I thought I was doing the right thing.’

He lifted both their hands, holding them between their chests, still stroking her sensitive skin.

‘A part of me thought… if you were in my life, I wouldn’t be hungry any more.’

Her brow furrowed. ‘What does that even mean?’

‘Don’t you get it?’ His voice was gruff. ‘You became my whole world, Sienna. I didn’t give a shit about hockey once we hooked up.’

She made a scoffing noise. ‘That’s not how I remember it.’

‘I still played, but my heart wasn’t in it. My heart… my heart was with you.’

She ground her teeth together, needing the physical act to stop herself from saying something stupid, or from gushing over him.

‘That scholarship was my ticket out of town. My mom and Blake’s, too.’

‘Blake could have gone without you.’

‘We were a package deal. Everything was locked in – and it revolved around the both of us.’ He expelled a harsh breath. ‘Maybe if I’d quit, it all still would have worked out for them. I don’t know. I wasn’t willing to risk it.’

For the first time, his words made a strange kind of sense, but there was no relief in that. If anything, she felt a weird hollowing out. An emptiness. Because it was all so futile.

‘It’s fine. I get it,’ she said, and in her heart, she did. ‘But the thing is, even understanding why you did what you did, I can’t… I just can’t forgive you for it. The thing is, Aiden, you got wings. You flew away. And I just… I got stuck.’