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I blinked at him. “What?”
“My friends are coming to visit…” He trailed off as if making sure I was listening. “After the All Star Bowl.”
I was listening, but I didn’t get why he was giving me a strange, expectant look. He’d learned he was voted into the All Star Bowl when we’d flown back to Dallas from Toronto. He was set to leave tomorrow. “Okay…”
“They’re coming to visit us.”
Slowly backing up toward one of the stools at the island, I slid onto it, forcing my sluggish, distracted brain to focus. Us. He’d said us. They were coming to visit—
Oh shit. “Us.”
He nodded solemnly, watching me closely.
Okay. “And they want to stay here?” I asked, even though it was a stupid question that I already knew the answer to. Every time his friends had come by in the past, they had always stayed with him.
Why would this time be any different?
Oh right, because I lived with him and stayed in the room that had always been used as a guest room.
And because we were legally technically married and had agreed to pull this charade off so neither one of us would get in trouble with the law.
Oh hell.
Realistically, it wasn’t the end of the world, and we could figure something out. We could. We would. It wasn’t a big deal. This was bound to happen at one point or another. “Okay. Do you… I can stay with my friend while they’re here if you want. You can pretend I went to visit someone.” Or maybe I could find a last minute getaway somewhere warm. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten Diana to pretend to be sick so we could go somewhere.
Apparently, my comment irritated him. “This is your house too. I’m not asking you to leave because they’re coming. We knew this was going to happen. They want to see you too. It isn’t a big deal.”
Why did that seem to be his life’s motto when it was something that mostly only affected me? And why wasn’t I telling him that I’d met his friends in the past before and that it really wasn’t necessary for us to see each other now? It didn’t really matter if I was home or not, did it?
“I already told them you were going to be here,” he concluded.
There went my argument.
He scratched his jaw and my gaze stuck to the white-gold wedding band he’d started wearing right after Toronto. I wanted to ask him about it but I was too much of a coward to. “You’ll have to stay in my room,” he explained.
With him obviously. Where the hell else would I sleep? One of the guys usually took the bed and the other crashed out on the couch downstairs.
The problem wasn’t that I would just stay in his room.
The problem was that I would have to stay in his room with him, on his bed, was what he wasn’t telling him, but knew he was implying. It wasn’t like you could exactly hide a blow-up mattress, and I knew this diva sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep on the floor because neither was I.
It’s not a big deal, I told myself. It’ll just be like a sleepover. I’d done sleepovers a thousand times. Aiden and I were adults, sharing a bed didn’t mean anything. We’d already done it the night the lights went out. We’d done it again in Toronto when he surprised me. We would just be, literally, sleeping on opposite sides of a California king-sized bed. Doing it again shouldn’t cause me to lose any sleep over it.
Except for the small fact that I’d been carrying this love I felt for him around my neck since the book convention, and it had only gained weight each day we were together.
“Okay,” I found myself agreeing as my heart warned me I was asking for it. “That’s fine.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know, Van. They’re coming the day after I get back. It’ll work out,” he assured me.
I heard the two loud, male voices before I saw them. Chris and Drew, the only friends Aiden had, other than Zac who had mostly become an acquaintance, and me, his sort-of-fake wife. Saving my work, I closed my laptop and grabbed my tablet with my free hand. I’d already taken everything else I would need for the next few days and moved it into the big guy’s room.
While Aiden wasn’t a clothes whore—his “fancy” wardrobe consisted of three suits, four dress shirts, two dress pants, and a black and brown belt—the rest of his closet was filled with boxes of trophies, shoes and other free clothing that hadn’t been opened, and it was packed. His dresser had the rest of the stuff he typically wore: sweat pants, workout shorts, enough T-shirts to clothe an entire basketball team, and tons of underwear and socks.
The point was, there wasn’t space for my clothes, so it didn’t seem like a stretch for us to say I kept my clothes in the other room if the guys opened my drawers and saw my things inside, which I doubted.
What did worry me was this façade we were going to try and pull off. Why had we agreed not to tell anyone else the truth? Couldn’t we have made some exceptions?
No. I knew we couldn’t. If you told one person something, they told another, and then that person told another, and finally, everyone found out. That’s why we’d both jumped into agreeing to keep it a secret as much as possible.
We could do this. We could play it off, I promised myself as I put my laptop and tablet on the desk in the office. I’d left my desktop computer in my room.
I crept down the stairs listening to… four male voices? I’d barely cleared the landing when I spotted Aiden standing in the living room, circled by three men nearly all in the general vicinity of his size, give or take twenty or thirty pounds. I recognized Chris’s close-cropped hair and Drew’s long, black dreadlocked hair, but it was the back of a blond head I wasn’t familiar with that caught my eye.
