Sugarcoated

by Erin Nicholas

  Zoe hadn’t wanted to hear any of it. Which had ended up with her being more hungover the next morning than she had been in a very long time. From schnapps. That was kind of hard to do.

  But the part she really hated, was how their insistence that Aiden could never be casual about her had stuck with her. She’d assumed “he can’t have casual sex with you” meant he can’t have sex with you at all, ever. Not “he’s going to want to have sex with you and only you. Forever.

  That was nuts.

  But it was also nuts that she couldn’t stop thinking about it now.

  “Yeah, he stopped by,” Zoe said, trying to act nonchalant.

  “In a suit,” Jane repeated with a knowing grin.

  Her back was to Maggie, so Zoe was the one who had to school her features. “Yeah, I guess he was wearing a suit, now that you mention it.”

  Jocelyn tossed something into the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. Because she was an awesome friend.

  Jane leaned in. “She also mentioned he looked hot as hell in it.”

  Zoe glanced at her mom then at Jane. “So?”

  Jane laughed. “You kissed him.”

  Zoe opened her mouth, then frowned, and said, “I kissed him back.”

  “And how was it?”

  Zoe shrugged. “Fine.”

  Jane laughed. She sat back and lifted her glass. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  She was. She said what she thought, and she had no poker face whatsoever. Which sometimes sucked. Like when she was trying to convince Aiden that she had no interest in picking up where they’d left off—where he’d left off—on Christmas Eve. “What do you mean?” she asked anyway.

  “You haven’t looked in a mirror?”

  “So?”

  “You’ve got frosting and sugar all over, and your hair is coming down.”

  Zoe’s hands flew to her head. “So?” She’d just come from work.

  “You were distracted when you left the bakery.”

  “And?”

  “And I find it interesting that Aiden—a guy you’ve known your entire life—can suddenly distract you. He must have done something… unusual.”

  Well, that was a freaking understatement.

  Jocelyn shut the disposal off and glanced over. She had a stupid knowing grin on her face too.

  Zoe loved these women. Usually she loved that they knew her so well. Right now, though, she was trying to not give away the fact that she was having a hard time looking at her mother’s refrigerator and not getting flushed.

  “I’ll be back in a minute.” She quickly escaped the kitchen and headed to the upstairs bathroom, calling a “Hey, Dad!” to her father where he was coming down the hall from his office as she ran up the stairs.

  She shut herself in the bathroom, leaning against the door, and squeezing her eyes shut. “Dammit, Aiden.” Then she took a deep breath and opened one eye, moving to stand in front of the mirror.

  Both eyes opened.

  She was a mess.

  She’d had an apron on, but she still had a smear of pink frosting on the top edge of her sundress. As Jane had pointed out, she had pink candy coating on one cheek, a dusting of sugar on her cheek and neck, and most of all, her hair, lips, and eyes looked like she’d been making out.

  Of course, that was in part because she knew she’d been making out. But yeah, she looked like someone had had his fingers in her hair and his lips all over hers and… dammit, her eyes looked like she was maybe glowing a little or something.

  Glowing? For Aiden Anderson? Seriously?

  Zoe shook her head and turned on the faucet. She washed her face, pulled her ponytail out and brushed her hair. She slicked on some of her mom’s pink lip gloss—that would at least be a better reason for her lips to be pinker than usual—and took a deep breath.

  This was Aiden. She knew everything about him. His first dog’s name had been Badger. His second dog had been Finley. She’d loved both of them. He loved asparagus and any movie Gerard Butler was in—which she couldn’t disagree with, exactly, but was a little weird for a guy—and got motion sick on roller coasters.

  That was not exciting. A guy who couldn’t even go on a roller coaster? Come on. She could do better than that.

  Zoe stared at her reflection.

  She really was a bad liar.

  Even to herself.

  Aiden Anderson was a good guy. Full of himself, yes. But a good guy, deep down. He’d been an amazing friend to her big brother, an awesome big brother to her little brother, a fabulous, practically adopted son to her parents, a wonderful real son to his own father. Things seemed to work out for Aiden, but he also worked hard and took things seriously. After losing his mom and kind of losing his dad—at least emotionally—Aiden had seemed to decide that he needed to make the most of everything in life. He’d been determined to leave Appleby and really do something big with his life.

  He’d done that. He was a millionaire at age twenty-nine, for God’s sake. And she knew he gave a lot of his money to charity. Not only because Camden gave him a hard time about it, but because the Appleby Observer was run by Aiden’s great uncle, and he kept tabs on him and published all the great things he and Camden did, for the town and elsewhere.

  Aiden was nearly a saint in Appleby. But she couldn’t deny he deserved a lot of the accolades.

  Still, if an exciting, surprising, adventurous love life was what she was going for, Aiden was not the guy. She knew he would add more pepper than should be allowed to his fettuccini. He’d eat only a few pieces of broccoli so as not to insult her mother even though he didn’t really like it, and he’d drink at least three glasses of lemonade. Lemonade her mother made extra sweet for him. Yes, he also really liked chocolate pie. He liked most of the things they made at the bakery, but that was his favorite. He definitely had a sweet tooth.

  She frowned. Yeah, there weren’t a lot of surprises there. And his lemonade addiction was going to make having enough to spike later with the girls difficult.

  Of course, him being here was going to make it difficult to sneak off with the girls and talk about him at all.

  Finally, Zoe pushed away from the counter and headed back downstairs.

  She heard his voice before she was even halfway down the staircase. He was here. For dinner. The way he’d been hundreds of times before.

  But she’d never felt her heart flip or tingles go through her body just hearing his voice.

  She groaned. This was not good.

  “Purple diamonds,” Aiden was saying to her little brother Henry.

  “No. Way.”

  They were in the living room, the room right off to the side of the staircase. Aiden was sitting on the couch, and Henry was on the ottoman facing him. She was sure Henry had come running the second he’d heard Aiden’s voice. Not hers. He probably hadn’t even said hello to Jane and Jocelyn yet. Of course, Jane and Jocelyn and Zoe never came bearing news, or even better, insider tips about Warriors of Easton.

  Sometimes she couldn’t believe these guys were actually famous. Cam never went to conventions or did interviews, but Aiden often accompanied two of their partners, Oliver and Dax, to fan events. She’d seen a few of them online. But it was always surreal to think about the two boys who’d built a tree house in her backyard and who got caught at fifteen with beer in her basement and who’d been hospitalized—in side-by-side beds—after a nasty dirt bike accident were guys people thronged to see and listen to.

  Okay, so the “people” were mostly boys between the ages of eight and twenty. Still, Cam and Aiden were successful and famous, at least in their little corner of the world, and it was weird.

  “Seriously. But not until September,” Aiden said to Henry.

  He must have seen her out of the corner of his eye or sensed her presence—or maybe he heard the fourth step from the bottom creak—but he looked over just as she stepped into the room.

  For a second, she froze. Their eyes met. He stopped talking, and her stupid heart flipped
again.

  He’d stopped by her house. His old house. The house. She had a hard time referring to it as hers, considering it had been Aiden’s house for most of her life.

  He was now in a t-shirt and jeans, and his hair was slightly damp.

  He still looked really damned good.

  And there was something about knowing he’d been naked in the same shower she’d been naked in that morning that made heat curl through her stomach and dive lower.

  She mentally rolled her eyes and made herself move into the room. He’d showered in that shower hundreds of times. Many before or after she did. Why was this an issue all of a sudden?

  The. Freaking. Kiss.

  And now there had been two.

  She also wanted to smell his hair to see what his shampoo smelled like. She admitted she’d probably sniff his shampoo bottle the next time she was in there.

  That was so damned stupid.

  “Hey, Henry,” she said.

  “Hey.” He barely glanced at her.

  Yeah, well, she knew nothing about purple diamonds after all.

  “Purple diamonds don’t really sound very warrior-like,” she said, passing the ottoman.

  Aiden gave her a lifted eyebrow and half smile. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Fuck breathlessness. Fuck. It.

  “The diamonds are for the princesses,” Henry said.

  She turned back, mostly to break the eye contact with Aiden. “Oh, nice, that’s pretty gender stereotypical, isn’t it?” she asked, propping a hand on her hip. “Only princesses can have diamonds? I suppose the princesses just sit around and wait for the warriors to bring them diamonds and stuff?”

  She doubted that was true. She didn’t play the game, but she’d read enough about it—hey, it was her brother’s company—to know the women in the game were every bit as kick-ass as the men, and the guys gave the women important roles throughout their virtual world.

  Henry rolled his eyes. “The princesses get diamonds every time they bring a monster head to the queen. They get blue ones for troll heads and red ones for witch heads and black ones for dragon heads—only the bad dragons, of course,” Henry said.

  Of course. Zoe hid her smile. There was very little her baby brother was as passionate about as Warriors of Easton. Being Camden and Aiden’s little brother basically made him famous with his friends and most of the boys his age from the neighboring towns. It was serious shit in his world.

  “And the purple ones are going to be for the new monsters—the Rabid Arctic Rabbits.” He said it like someone else might talk about the Ark of the Covenant. There was awe and excitement mixed with a solemnity that was unmatched.

  Zoe turned wide eyes to Aiden. “Wow.”

  He nodded with a grin. “They’re pretty horrible.”

  “The snow bunnies?”

  He gave a little chuckle that tickled her stomach.

  “Yep. They eat hot coals and breathe fire.”

  “Well, sure they do,” she said. “I mean, they’re arctic, right? They have to stay warm somehow.”

  “Right,” Aiden agreed. “The burning rage against humans who’ve taken over their territories and driven them into the desolate, icy mountain ranges isn’t quite enough.”

  “Huh,” she said. “I don’t think you should teach kids to underestimate burning rage.”

  He outright laughed at that. She really liked his laugh.

  That thought seemed to come out of nowhere. She’d heard him laugh a million times. This post-Aiden-kiss period of her life was really getting annoying.

  “I’ll be sure to send Dax a note,” Aiden said.

  She’d never met Dax or Ollie or Grant, the other three partners in Cam and Aiden’s business, but she’d read about them all, and Aiden and Cam talked about them when they were home.

  “By the way, there’s no dessert tonight,” she said. “And you’re going to think it was because I was distracted when I was leaving the bakery so didn’t check my texts, but honestly, I don’t have any chocolate pie so wasn’t able to bring one. Because you didn’t tell us you were coming home. So none of us were prepared.”

  Why did she feel the need to point all that out?

  It wasn’t as if Aiden would believe she hadn’t been distracted. She’d clearly been distracted. And he obviously knew she was attracted to him. If not because of Christmas Eve, then by the way she’d wrapped herself around him in the kitchen like she was drowning in the ocean and he was her life preserver.

  She could be upfront about that. She could face that. That was out there in the open and so what? That didn’t mean he was going to get his way.

  But it felt like he was going to get his way, and she kind of felt like she needed to keep reminding him—and herself—that she wouldn’t be that easy for him.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” he said, leaning back into the couch and draping an arm along the back of it, the picture of casual and content. “I had a taste of something a lot sweeter than chocolate pie earlier. Maybe I’ll just have seconds of that. Later.”

  She blushed. Hot and immediately.

  He was going to be at the house. With her. Just the two of them. With four beds and three showers and multiple other firm horizontal surfaces. Not to mention a big old fridge in the kitchen.

  That was all she could think about.

  He was watching her with a mix of heat and amusement and cockiness.

  And she wanted to… climb into his lap and kiss the hell out of him.

  Damn. Him.

  5

  She shot a glance at Henry—who, of course, had no idea what they were talking about—and then narrowed her eyes at Aiden. “Wouldn’t want to overdo and get sick of it.”

  “Not one bit worried about that.”

  It was really good that eleven-year-olds were unable to pick up on innuendo and sexual undertones and things like husky, low voices that gave new meaning to every word they said.

  She swallowed.

  “Zoe! Henry! Aiden! Dinner!”

  Zoe actually breathed out a huge, relieved sigh when her mom called from the kitchen.

  Aiden gave her a knowing smile.

  She was really getting tired of knowing smiles.

  Then he stretched to his feet.

  Zoe backed up, quickly. Clumsily. Stupidly. It wasn’t like he was about to grab her or bite her.

  Though that was kind of how he was looking at her.

  Henry jumped up and ran past them.

  Zoe started after him, not even willing to be alone with Aiden in her mother’s living room, with five other people in the very next room, for two minutes.

  But he caught her by the wrist before she could escape.

  She pulled in a deep breath but didn’t look at him.

  “You know we’re not done.”

  Yeah, dammit, she did know that.

  “You should let it go,” she told him.

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  She finally looked up at him. “Thought you were a nice guy.”

  “Well, surprise, Sugar, I’m not nice all the time.” His voice was firm, and his expression said he was not teasing.

  Well, she was sure surprised to find the way he said that pretty damned hot. And Sugar? Really? In her head she thought that should sound a little condescending. Especially coming from a guy who had never had a nickname for her before. But his tone and the look in his eyes did not allow that to sound like anything other than an affectionate-slash-sexy just-between-them name she wanted to hear him call her in bed. Low and husky. Maybe even a little needy. While he was licking her like he was licking sugar off of the cake pops they’d made.

  Finally, she sighed. “Yeah, we’re not done.” She didn’t know what she meant by that exactly. That they’d talk about it more? That she’d use him for sex tutoring after all?

  But his expression went from surprise to victorious almost instantly. “That’s—”

  “What’s going on? Come on, dinner.” Maggie stuck her head
around the corner from the dining room.

  Zoe jumped. Aiden, of course, acted like he was totally in control and casual. He moved his hand from her arm to her lower back and nudged her in the direction of her mother.

  “On our way, Maggie,” he said. “Zoe was just apologizing for being too distracted to check your message about the pie.”

  Ugh. He was definitely not nice all the time. She elbowed him.

  “He had cake pops at the bakery earlier. He’s fine, Mom,” she said, moving toward the table and taking a seat next to Jane, leaving two empty chairs across from them. She couldn’t sit next to him. Because his shampoo did smell really good. And because she was afraid he’d find ways to “casually” touch her through the meal, and she’d be tearing her clothes off the second she hit the door at the house—that they were going to be sharing for the next who-knew-how-many nights.

  “I definitely did not get enough at the bakery,” Aiden said, pulling a chair out.

  Jocelyn coughed slightly as she carried a big bowl of noodles to the table.

  Jane outright laughed.

  Zoe sighed. There wasn’t enough vodka and lemonade in this house by far.

  Teasing Zoe was nothing new in his life.

  She’d had a crush on his and Cam’s friend Dillon when she was ten. She’d written terrible, angsty poetry when she was thirteen. She’d gotten a horrible orange fake tan when she was fourteen. There had been a lot of wonderful reasons for two big brothers to tease her over the years.

  Teasing her about sex though… yeah, that was new, and he was fucking in love with it. He intended to keep doing it. For a very, very long time. Like forever. Because even once they were sleeping together every single night, making her blush and stammer and drop her fork at her mother’s dinner table was a hell of a lot of fun.

  Aiden took the seat next to Henry, who paused talking about Warriors of Easton only to say grace and then finally stopped only after his father finally told him that every time he said the words troll, diamond, level, enchantment, or awesome, Henry owed him a quarter from his allowance. The kid would have blown through his entire allotment for the week before he was halfway through his meal.