Page 40 of Settling the Score (The Karma Club #4)

‘Mastrangelo, wait up.’

She stopped walking but instantly wished she hadn’t. She’d made it through the wedding, the photos and most of the post wedding cocktail reception without being alone with Aiden. But right at the moment she decided to slip out and call Melanie, he followed her.

Grinding her teeth, the wave of anger she’d been surfing all day coming to the fore, she turned around, crossing her arms over her chest leaving her free to just stare at him.

‘Hey, stranger,’ he said, coming so close she thought he might actually do something stupid like try to kiss her on the cheek. But he didn’t.

Thank God.

She didn’t know what she’d do if he touched her.

Cry, punch him, or kiss him right back?

‘Got a sec?’

‘Well, we’re at a wedding, so, not really.’

He looked around. ‘As in, you’re busy right now?’

She held her hand out, as if to say, ‘what do you think?’

‘I just want a couple of minutes of your time.’

She clamped her lips together, trying to bite back the angry retort. ‘Why?’ she managed to snap out.

He grimaced, dragging a hand through his thick dark hair.

She looked sideways, towards the ocean.

‘Look, I need?—’

She felt his finger on her chin and startled at the unexpected touch, as he guided her face back towards him.

‘I need to tell you something.’ There was urgency in his voice.

She closed her eyes. ‘Please, don’t.’

‘It’s important.’ She heard the plea and ignored it.

‘It’s really not.’

‘I realised something last night, something I think I’ve always known but never wanted to accept.’

‘Don’t say it,’ she groaned.

‘I’m in love with you.’

She swore, the curse a bitter recrimination, loud enough to push a bird in a nearby tree to seek flight.

‘Damn you, Aiden,’ she said, with more control. ‘I said, I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Astrid told you.’

‘Yes, Astrid told me. And where the hell do you get off putting this on her, of all people, on her wedding day? This is their day, not ours.’

‘I didn’t tell her, Blake did.’

‘And how did Blake know? You told him, right?’

‘We… were talking. I guess, yeah, I did.’ His frown was a deeply etched line in his face. ‘It kind of came out.’

‘Is that supposed to impress me?’ she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest.

His jaw dropped. ‘I’m not trying to impress you, Si. I’m trying to tell you that I realised last night, I don’t want to let you go. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and know I’m never going to see you again. I don’t want this to end.’

‘This? This?’ She scoffed, half-laughing, in a manic, deranged sort of way. ‘There is no this, we both agreed to that . ’

A muscle ticked in his lower jaw. ‘You’re pissed.’

‘I’m not “pissed”. I am furious. Livid. So angry I can hardly see straight.’ She leaned close to him and jabbed a finger to his chest. ‘How fucking dare you do this to me?’

His skin paled. ‘Do what to you?’

‘Take your pick! Think you can tell me you love me and that the past just magically goes away? Or do it on the day of my best friend’s wedding? Or tell her before me so I’m left being goddamn ambushed?’

‘That’s not what I meant to happen.’

‘Yeah, well, it did.’

‘Okay, but listen,’ he said, urgently, reaching out and putting his hands on her hips. ‘I am in love with you. I have no answers about how this will work, where we’ll live, what will happen next. All I know is I want you in my life. I can’t lose you again.’

The last sentence was hollow, so desperate, it almost, almost got through to her. He sounded so genuine.

And maybe he was. Maybe on some level he’d really come to think he loved her, that they could make a go of this. Maybe he’d just got so caught up in all the excitement of Blake’s wedding that he was fantasising about this kind of future for himself. Whatever. Sienna wasn’t buying it.

‘You don’t love me.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘An apology I might have accepted ten years ago, but I don’t want to even hear it right now,’ she muttered.

‘I mean?—’

‘I know what you mean. I’m not interested. You. Don’t. Love. Me.’

‘Don’t you think I know how I feel?’

‘Nope.’

‘You sound pretty sure of that.’

‘Because I value facts over fantasy. Because I think actions speak louder than words.’

He stared at her, expression impossible to interpret.

‘A decade ago, you did something to me that no one, and I mean no one, who was in love could ever, ever do.’

He blanched visibly. ‘That’s not true.’

‘You dropped me like a hot potato.’ Her voice cracked as she forced herself to admit the harsh truth to him. ‘You dropped me like I was worthless.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s the exact opposite of how I felt.’

‘It’s easy to say that now.’

‘Nothing about this is easy.’

‘You think?’

They stared at each other, two people on opposite sides of the same divide.

‘The thing is, I get why you did it. I get what you were afraid of. I get why you left town. I get all of that. I’m just saying, that’s not the action of a man in love, and even though I understand it better now, it’s definitely not the kind of thing I can forgive.’

His jaw dropped. ‘I genuinely thought it was right for you, to end it like that. To make it a clean break.’

She wanted to push him. She wanted to push him so hard he fell backwards on his big, beautiful butt. She wanted to shove him because he was breaking her heart all over again now.

‘And what? I didn’t get any say in that?’

He clamped his lips together.

‘You chose for me. You chose for us. And this, Aiden, this is what you chose.’ She threw her hands up in the air in exasperation, tears now threatening and damn it all to hell if she’d let him see her cry.

That was definitely not part of the plan.

She dug her fingernails into the palm of one hand, staring at him with a mutinous expression.

‘You’re right.’ His voice was soft, flooded with emotions.

‘I did choose this, for both of us. And I’m standing here, right now, telling you it’s a decision I regret with every single part of me.

It’s a choice I would undo a thousand times over, if there was any way to go back in time. I’m telling you, I made a mistake.’

She tried to channel her inner warrior woman. To think of Bella, Paige and Astrid and what they’d say to that. She tried to think of what she’d tell Melanie, if she ever wound up in the same situation. But her mind was spongy and her lips flubbed.

‘And it took you this long to realise it?’

His Adam’s apple shifted. ‘It took me seeing you again to realise I couldn’t keep pretending I don’t feel this way. Out of sight, easy to put my head in the sand.’

She bristled. ‘That’s my point.’ Now she jabbed his chest, and God, it felt good.

‘You were able to put me out your mind and go on with your life. That’s not love.

That’s not love .’ Tears fell freely now, and she didn’t bother to check them.

‘Whereas I have spent the last ten years hating you for what you did to me, and simultaneously’ – she stumbled a bit, drawing in a breath, a part of her desperately willing herself to stop talking, but she didn’t – ‘missing you so much I couldn’t think straight. ’

He stared at her, but there was a look of hope on his face, almost a smile on his lips, so she shook her head angrily.

‘No, you don’t get it,’ she growled. ‘That’s not a good thing.’

‘But doesn’t that tell you that you’re not over me?’

‘I know I’m not over you,’ she muttered. ‘I’m not an idiot. Do you know how I met those girls?’ She thumbed towards the reception, still in full swing.

‘At an airport.’

‘Yeah. At an airport, where we drank way too much prosecco and talked about our worst ever exes, and made plans to get revenge on them.’

‘What?’ She could practically see the gears of his brain turning. With the slight guilt of someone throwing their best friend under a bus, she didn’t see any way through this conversation without revealing the truth of the Karma Club. He needed to understand.

‘The guys we really, really couldn’t ever forgive.’

He was frowning, still connecting the dots. ‘You mean, me?’

She closed her eyes, screwing up her courage, and hoping Astrid would forgive her for this. ‘That’s what Astrid was doing in New York. She was meant to be screwing up your life, not falling in love with Blake.’

His eyes widened. ‘You sent Astrid to get revenge on me?’

‘Not mean revenge. Not, like, stabby murder or whatever. More like giving you a taste of your own medicine. To reel you in and cast you adrift… which was damn stupid now I come to think of it.’

‘How so?’

‘Because you’d have to have a heart capable of breaking for the plan to have worked.’

‘I see.’

She refused to pander to the pain in his gaze. So what if her words stung? He’d hurt her far more.

‘She turned me orange,’ he muttered.

‘Yes.’ Sienna nodded once, remembering the fake tan incident with a hint of amusement, despite her splintering heart.

‘The chilli!’ His eyes widened, and she halfway felt sorry for him.

‘Yep.’

‘She gave me diarrhoea because of you?’

She bit into her lower lip, fighting an urge to defend both herself and Astrid. But Aiden wasn’t waiting for an answer. He dragged a hand through his hair and said, ‘That’s why Astrid came to New York? The real reason for her article was to get back at me?’

She didn’t want to get bogged down in that though.

In any event, Astrid had written an incredible article that did everything she’d promised: she’d rehabilitated Blake’s image, and in the process, she’d rehabilitated him.

‘My point is, you were the worst ex of my life, Aiden! I didn’t get over you.

I didn’t move on. I’ve never moved on. And I don’t know what that means?—’

‘Don’t you?’ he interrupted, gently, moving a little closer towards her.

She took an abrupt step backwards, talking over him. ‘This week wasn’t about a fresh start.’

‘Then what was it?’

‘Fun. Nothing. Closure.’ She searched around for the right word. ‘It was an end, not a beginning.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘That’s your prerogative, but I’m not lying to you.’

‘Sienna—’