Page 52 of Pretender

“Mark said I should be more touchy-feely with you if I wanted Amara and Venetia to believe us. I’m sorry I broke our rules.”

Aiden rubs his neck in that cute way again before he puts his hands back in his pockets. “Don’t worry. I don’t want you to do anything you find uncomfortable.”

I shrug.

It wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, which is probably the scariest part of it. I was lost there for a moment.

There’s a swirl of heat in my chest seeing him with his head bent and his hands in his pockets.

“I’ve had a wonderful time tonight,” I say. “You’re quite easy to be around. I’m not drained like I’d be with most people.”

I do, however, feel confused as hell most of the time, but that’s too much to share.

Aiden nods. “Same.”

“Really? You seem to thrive on this kind of energy. That’s why you’re so good at what you do, right?”

“Perhaps, but pretty much every woman I’ve dated has been like an energy vampire. I’ve had fun with you in the past week.”

He flashes me the easy smile of his, and the swirl in me goes wild, sparking in my chest before settling in my stomach like a little flame.

What the fuck.

I need to get past this.

“Maybe we can get to know each other better and make this easier to do naturally. Do you think we could be friends?” I ask.

He sighs, but his smile is still there. “Absolutely.”

I step closer, hit by the urge to hug him. He opens his arms in response, reading my mind, so I step into his embrace, and rest my head on his shoulder.

“Thank you,” I mumble against his shirt and a muscle flexes under my cheek.

“Always,” he says, and I like the sound of that. As I press my face against his warm body and breathe in his Aiden-y scent, I try to reel myself back in with the memory of Halloween. The pity he’s treated me with since. But it’s hard to think past the steel-blue of his eyes, and how they crinkle at the corners when he smiles widely.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

like torture

AIDEN

The boxing bag swings violently from Mark’s home gym ceiling, and I give it another solid right hook.

“Hold on, let me get this straight,” Mark says, stopping the swinging bag. “You’re not just fake dating a woman who’s also your strategic design partner, but a woman you’re crushing on?”

“I mean, crushing is an overstatement.”

“Please. You want her.”

I shrug. “Something like that, I guess.”

Fuck, when she kissed me… Every smile, every glance, every conversation, every time I’ve seen her work, or laugh with her team, the sway of her hips, the scent of her hair, the feel of her skin.

It all crashed down on me.

A Linnea tsunami. And I’ll never recover.

For a moment—a blissful, absolutely soul-defining moment—I thought, ‘this is it’.