by Lizzie Shane
The fear that she might never have children had been the hardest part of deciding she was better off alone. She couldn’t afford to have a child on her own and she’d resigned herself to that, but slowly a new whisper of hope penetrated her old, familiar regrets.
What if that part of her dream didn’t have to be gone? There were good men out there. Men like Aiden. Not that she could ever be with Aiden. But someone like him. A good father—firm, but affectionate. A kind man. Attractive too, with his knowing eyes and flashing smile. The shoulders that were broad and muscled beneath his suit coats. The lean line of his waist—
“Samira.”
She snapped to attention. “Sorry.”
Jackie grimaced, misinterpreting her distraction. “I know. You’ve always wanted kids. This is why you need to date again. Maybe Brian didn’t turn your crank, but there’s going to be someone out there who does—”
There was. Unfortunately, he was completely off limits. And the idea of Jackie setting her up again made her lungs tight with nerves. Yes, she’d literally just been thinking she ought to find a good man, but the idea of anyone but Aiden…
Oh God. This was bad. She had a crush on her boss. The way she kept fixating on his smiles, the warm fuzzy feeling deep inside her chest like a candle had been lit—
No. She couldn’t have a crush on Aiden. The absolute last thing she needed to be fantasizing about was having his babies. They needed to keep it professional.
She realized Jackie was still looking at her and blurted, “Okay.”
Jackie blinked. “What?”
She needed to stop thinking of Aiden and if she had to kiss a bunch of frogs to get him out of her head… “Okay, I’ll go on another date. But no more changing the subject, how did you leave things with Amal?”
Another grimace. “A cease-fire was declared, but it’s only temporary.” Her rueful expression faded into sadness. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“You won’t.” Samira squeezed her hand. “He’s a good man and he loves you.” She smiled gently, knowing Jackie too well. “Maybe stop trying to win the argument and listen to what he has to say?”
Jackie rolled her eyes. “It sounds so reasonable when you say it. I just wish I knew what I wanted. I’m afraid I’m going to do it because he wants me to and then I’ll resent him forever.”
“Don’t borrow trouble. Talk to him first. Maybe that will help you figure out what you really want.”
Jackie squeezed back on Samira’s hand, their eyes meeting. “What do you want, Samira?”
Aiden Raines.
The answer that popped unbidden into her mind was too terrifying to say out loud. Thank goodness Stella chose that moment to appear at the sliding door, her face scrunched up with misery. Samira was on her feet a second later, opening the sliding door. Stella tumbled inside, bringing snow flurries and tears with her. “Benji pushed me an’ I fell.”
The girls called the dog Benji because Benjamin Franklin was too much of a mouthful. Realizing one of her three wasn’t the culprit, Jackie closed the sliding door as Samira knelt in front of Stella. The tears seemed to be more woeful than pained, but Stella wasn’t always easy to read. She could be rattled because Benji had knocked her over or she could have fallen wrong and broken a bone for all Samira knew. “I’m sure Benjamin Franklin didn’t mean to knock you over. Did it scare you when you fell?”
“He wrecked my angel!” Stella wailed and it took Samira a moment to realize she meant a snow angel—so no injuries, that was good.
Maddie had recently acquired the word “wrecked” and elevated it to her favorite thing to say, usually with dramatic relish. Any time anything went wrong it was wrecked—and Stella, true to form, had begun echoing the word when she was upset.
Samira brushed the snow out of Stella’s collar before it could melt and dribble icy water down her neck. “We know he didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Can we make another angel?”
Stella whipped her head back and forth. “It was perfect,” she wailed—another Maddie-ism. Everything was either perfect or wrecked.
A few strands of blonde hair were plastered to her tear-stained cheeks and Samira gently brushed them back, tucking them up under the fleece hat. “It’s sad when we work on something and then it goes away, isn’t it? Do you need a hug?”
Stella sniffled and nodded, her lower lip jutting out and Samira folded her arms around her small frame. When she pulled back, she rubbed Stella’s narrow shoulders. “It was fun making the angel, wasn’t it? Even if snow angels aren’t supposed to last forever.”
“Yes, they are!” Stella shouted, a note of anger creeping into her tears.
Jackie reached for her coat and the sliding door. “I’ll go round up my crowd. It’s almost lunchtime anyway.”
Which sent Stella into another round of tears as soon as she realized her friends would be leaving.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Stella was the quiet one, the easy one. The one who almost vanished into her sister’s shadow. But her silence didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of what was going on around her and even if Maddie was more voluble about her feelings, Stella was sensitive. Especially to disruptions in her routine—like her father skipping out before breakfast. And no amount of explaining from Samira about traffic and bad weather was going to make that better.
Between Stella’s shouts of, “No!” that their friends were leaving and Maddie’s declaration that she didn’t like the plain noodles that had been her favorite food the day before, lunch was a challenge. And the day didn’t improve from there.
Everything was a battle today, if not with Stella then with Maddie. Nap time. Coloring pictures to give to Daddy when he got home—which, instead of reminding the girls that he always came home, even though he’d missed breakfast, had just set off a cascade of questions about why he wasn’t home now. By the time they got to dinner, negotiating with them to eat their food was like attempting to broker peace in Crimea.
And Aiden was late. Not surprising, considering the weather. He’d been trying to get home earlier ever since their first conversation about her date, but the roads were undoubtedly terrible tonight and the traffic had to be a nightmare.
But his absence only made bath time and getting ready for bed that much more stressful.
The girls were sitting at the island in their pajamas eating frozen yogurt bars, their hair still damp from their bath, when Samira heard the garage door open and an acute feeling of relief hit. She told herself it was just because she was exhausted after the day she’d had, but that didn’t explain the warm sizzle of awareness that shivered over her skin as Aiden stepped into the kitchen.
The girls shouted, “Daddy!” and scrambled off their stools to greet him with sticky fingers as Benjamin Franklin barked and darted to the door to lavish Aiden in an adoring frenzy. Aiden greeted everyone and glanced toward Samira as he set down his laptop bag. He looked as tired as she felt. She didn’t need to ask to see that the traffic must have been hell.
“You’re just in time for story time.” Technically it was already past their bedtime. The girls had been stalling, trying to stay up to see their father—but you’d never know they’d already wheedled her into an extra fifteen minutes by the way they both erupted into wails of protest.
Aiden helped her herd them upstairs, promising each girl her own bedtime story, even though his voice was thick with weariness. Samira slipped out while he was tucking them in, tired feet carrying her to the stairs, but then she stalled—as if her exhausted brain couldn’t decide whether to go up to her suite or down to the kitchen.
These last few days she’d gotten in the habit of going down to grab a cup of tea and speaking with Aiden for a few minutes before retreating to her room—not about anything as personal as their conversation on Saturday, but she’d savored those little moments. Savored them too much.
He was her boss. She needed to preserve her boundaries.
But she was still dithering on the landing when she heard
a whisper of sound behind her. She turned and there he was—talk, dark, and exhausted. “They passed out before we even got to the end of The Book With No Pictures,” he said. “Must have played hard today.”
“It was a long day,” Samira acknowledged, debating whether to say more about the disruption to their routine. It was hard to gauge when she was overstepping—especially when she was as tired as she was now.
He moved past her, giving her a questioning look when she didn’t fall into step beside him on the stairs. “You aren’t coming down?”
Their friendship had been building in bits and pieces, little moments here and there. Little intimacies. A slippery slope.
She needed to nip this in the bud. He was her boss.
“I think I’m just gonna go to bed,” she said. “Long day. The girls were challenging today. Stella doesn’t do as well with disruptions to her routine.”
“You mean the snow?”
She grimaced, almost reluctant to tell him, but now she’d brought it up and he couldn’t do anything about it if he didn’t know. “She said you promised to make bacon for her at breakfast.”
He frowned. “You can’t make bacon?”
“It wasn’t about the bacon. It was about the fact that you were missing for breakfast. They know you don’t always make it home for dinner or bedtime, but breakfast is a constant. You snuck out before they woke up this morning—”
“It didn’t make sense to wake them up early and I never would have made it in at all if I’d waited until a normal hour.”
“I know that, but they’re four. They don’t always understand when you aren’t there when they expect you to be. Even if you’re just going to work, to them you went away without warning.”
He grimaced. “Like Chloe went away.”
“That probably plays into it, not consciously, but on some level. They miss you more and worry that you won’t be back. We drew pictures for you, so they could feel like they were doing something about the way they felt, but it was a rough day. Sometimes we have rough days.”
“Thank you for telling me. And for being so good with them.” From three steps below her, he reached up and brushed her hand where it rested on the bannister.
Samira lifted her hand, forcing him to drop his, and started up the stairs. “It’s my job.”
She ignored the way his hand felt like it had left a warm imprint on hers and walked up the stairs without a backward glance, too raw from the weariness of the day to look at him for another minute without accepting the comfort he offered—and that was something she could never let herself do.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“No. I’m not meeting Charlotte’s bridesmaid. I’m in no mood to be hooked up with anyone.”
“Aiden…”
“No, Mother.”
Irritation flashed in his mother’s eyes, but she didn’t let it change her expression. They were in public, after all. The ballroom teemed with the most influential men and women in DC. Everyone who was anyone—or knew anyone—was here tonight. Aiden really should be using his sister’s engagement party to network, but after the week he’d had he wasn’t sure he’d make a decent impression on anyone. Especially not the woman his mother seemed to want to be the next love of his life.
“I don’t see how it would do you any harm to meet the girl,” his mother argued, before flashing a blinding smile past his shoulder. “Senator! How lovely of you to come!”
Aiden took advantage of her distraction to slip away, navigating his way through the crowds of tuxedoed power-players to the long mahogany bar in one corner.
He didn’t need to look to know that Charlotte’s intended would still be holding court on the opposite side of the ballroom. Tug Newton, of the Providence Newtons, was a large man, with the physique of an athlete who had gone soft and the air of a man who expected the world to adore him as much as he adored himself.
Charlotte certainly seemed to be doing her part to lavish him with adoration. She’d been hanging on her fiancé’s arm all night, beaming the smile of a devoted disciple—but maybe that wasn’t fair.
Aiden had met Tug for all of two seconds, when the man had blustered, “You must be the brother!” as if Charlotte didn’t have two brothers before calling over Aiden’s shoulder, “Mr. Secretary! When are you going to let me beat you at golf again?” Aiden had hung around in the circle around Tug and Charlotte for a few more minutes, until it became readily apparent that Tug wasn’t going to send any more conversational gambits toward Charlotte’s family—he was far too busy talking about himself.
Then his mother had cornered him.
Aiden ordered a scotch, hoping that would put him in a more hospitable mood. His instant dislike of Tug probably had nothing to do with the man himself. He’d been in a shitty mood all week.
It had started out well enough, with a lovely idyllic Sunday with his girls, but then that damn snow storm had hit and everything had gone to hell. He’d left the house early on Tuesday in a futile attempt to get to the office before the roads were too much of a mess. Only half of the staff had been able to make it in—but none of the deadlines for their filings had been moved back so everyone had been stressed and overworked trying to pick up the slack. His drive home had been white-knuckle terrifying, his tires slipping more than once. He’d barely avoided sliding into a ditch to join the dozen cars he’d passed that had already met that fate.
Then he’d gotten home to his girls, just wanting to unwind, and Samira had informed him that her own crap day with the girls was squarely his fault because he’d screwed with their routine by skipping breakfast. Which made him feel like the lowest kind of shit. With Chloe gone, he was all the girls had and he wasn’t enough. He couldn’t be.
He wasn’t as present at home as he wanted to be. His hours were too long and the girls needed more stability. But when he didn’t put in the long hours, his work—which was important damn it—suffered for it.
He tried to be what everyone needed—the best father, the best son, grandson, brother, lawyer, employer—and no matter how much sleep he shorted himself there were never enough hours in the day. It was never enough.
He couldn’t even be mad at Samira because she hadn’t told him to make him feel bad. She’d just been informing him of cause and effect—all businesslike and distant. Which, frankly, pissed him off.
Ever since the snowstorm, she’d retreated into herself again, all the progress he’d thought they’d made toward friendship in the last few weeks evaporating into one word answers. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much, but with everything else that had hit this week, it was just the icing on the freaking cake.
He’d won a case, a major case, one they’d worked on for months, but the damages awarded to his clients were laughably small. Too small to do the victims any good or penalize the corporation in the wrong enough to be effective as a deterrent. The win had been bitter—leaving the clients angry and Aiden frustrated for them even as he cursed the fact that all his time away from the family—fighting through the freaking Snowpocalypse—hadn’t even been able to do any good.
He wasn’t making a difference.
Was his grandfather right? Was there more he could be doing in public office than he was managing as a private citizen?
Right now all he wanted was to hit the reset button on the entire freaking week and figure out where the hell he’d gone wrong—not play nice with the sharks of DC at his sister’s engagement party.
He wasn’t in a state to be here. He shouldn’t have come. But his mother would never have let him forget it if he hadn’t made an appearance. He would have been Just like Candice who always skipped everything but the most crucial family events, thanks to her job three thousand miles away in California.
California was starting to look pretty damn good right now—but he knew that wasn’t him. He’d never run from a responsibility in his life and he didn’t want to run from them now. He just wished one damn thing in his life would go well right now.
&n
bsp; Aiden leaned against the bar, signaling to the bartender for another drink when he found his own empty.
“Have you had the pleasure of meeting our future brother-in-law yet?” his brother Scott said by way of greeting as he appeared at Aiden’s side and held up two fingers for the bartender to double the drink order.
“I have,” Aiden answered without turning—and without enthusiasm. It really was a shame Tug was such an asshole.
“I take it you aren’t a fan,” Scott said. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass before lifting it for a sip. From the loose, boneless way his brother was standing, Aiden had a feeling it wasn’t his first.
I thought you were back on the wagon, he almost said, but good sense kept his mouth shut.
Scott was ten years his senior and they’d always gotten along well enough, but Scott tended to treat him more like the family mascot than a peer. He wouldn’t appreciate having his latest fall from grace pointed out by his baby brother. And if he didn’t appreciate things, he had a tendency to fall even deeper into the bottle as a consequence.
The eighteen-year-old scotch in Aiden’s glass suddenly tasted bitter on his tongue.
He wasn’t usually in the habit of drinking to make himself feel better—he’d seen from far too early an age what drugs and alcohol had done to blow up Scott’s life—but he’d gone for the bar without a second thought tonight. Needing a drink like he hadn’t let himself since Chloe’s death.
Bad habits. Apparently, they were in the blood. He set down his glass without taking another drink, wishing he could set aside his own bad mood as easily.
“The jury’s still out,” he answered on the topic of Tug, trying to keep an open mind.
“The jury will have more time to deliberate. Dad invited Tug to join us on the spring turkey shoot since the old man wasn’t able to get back from whichever country he’s in these days in time for the engagement party. Luckily Tug was very sympathetic regarding Dad’s difficult schedule because he knows all about the demands of the State Department, given that he himself is so incredibly important there. Certainly not shy about praising his own accomplishments, that Tug,” Scott commented dryly. “I wasn’t expecting to hear some of the things Charlotte has said about him coming out of his own mouth verbatim. At least we know where she gets her facts now.”