It definitely wasn’t my imagination that 90 percent of the women he walked by in line—and behind their tables—watched him and his tight, round butt make their way to the exit.

I was so screwed.

A hand moved in my peripheral vision. “You married that?” the lady next to me asked, even though her face was glued on that fabulous butt.

This huge knot formed in my chest as I watched Aiden’s broad back disappear into the crowd. I had to suppress what I was sure was going to be a sigh. “Yep.”

“I tried to get here earlier, but I couldn’t get a flight,” he explained a few hours later when we were lying on my bed in my hotel room with eight boxes of take-out scattered between us. Two dishes had some variety of tofu inside, three boxes were steamed rice, two were all sautéed veggies, and the eighth had sweet and sour chicken. The three apples, four bananas, two fruit cups, and large green tea he’d had at the convention hadn’t satisfied the big guy at all.

Dipping my chicken in extra sauce, I eyed him, still on a high from him surprising the hell out of me by showing up. It was unreal. The fact that I’d had person after person approaching my table, after he came back with drinks and snacks, hadn’t escaped me at all. To give him credit, Aiden had handled the attention as well as could be expected. He went as far as to say “thank you” and “nice to meet you” to the people who asked him for autographs once word got around he was there.

Sure, everyone who had dropped by came for him or used me as an excuse to approach the table, but by the end of the convention, all of my business cards had been taken and so had most of my bookmarks and pins. I’d been tagged in at least fifty pages online, more than one including some kind of picture of the big guy and me.

I wasn’t dumb; I would take what I could get, even if it was for the wrong reasons, and I’d capitalize on it. So what if everyone in the future knew our relationship hadn’t worked out and then wondered what had happened to cause us to split. So what if the first thing they assumed was that he cheated on me. That was what everyone usually guessed when couples broke up.

Telling myself I didn’t care what anyone thought, didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

I would know we hadn’t ‘split up’ for that reason. It would have to be enough.

“When did you start looking?” I asked him, shoving the thoughts of cheating and divorce aside again and focusing on him being here.

He hummed, his mouth full. “Yesterday.”

Ahh, hell. I knew I might have laid it on too thick when he’d driven me to the airport. It might have been me telling him, “Stick my hard drive in the microwave if I don’t come back,” that did him in.

“There weren’t any flights last night, and I had to wait to talk to Zac so he could watch Leo; otherwise, I would have gotten here sooner,” he added.

“I really didn’t mean to guilt-trip you into coming.”

He shrugged. “You would never ask me to come, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t want to.”

While I knew that was the truth, I still felt just a tiny, little, baby bit bad. Just a little. “Yeah, I know, but still. I shouldn’t have cried so much about it or made you think—”

“—you were going to have things thrown at you.” He let out a low chuckle that was all playful and totally unexpected. Aiden reached over and set his palm on my knee, careful not to touch me with fingers that had sauce on them. “I went to bed worried.”

He was worried about me?

“Everyone seemed nice,” he ended.

Of course everyone had been nice to him. Okay, they’d been nice to me too, but it was different. Everyone had been checking him out, before and even some after they realized I caught them in the act. Hookers.

I wasn’t going to lie. This unfamiliar and territorial feeling took over every time I saw women take on expressions that made it seem as if they were two seconds away from jumping his bones while he’d sat there, completely oblivious to the world around him, with a book in those million-dollar hands. And I thought then, of course they checked him out. Here was this massive, incredibly attractive man in a romance novel convention… reading a damn book.

But that part of my brain hadn’t been fond of the ogling even though I logically couldn’t blame them. I wasn’t going to be surprised if pictures of him showed up on the internet tomorrow—if they hadn’t already been posted—with ridiculous memes or captions beneath them.

And just thinking about it filled me with smugness that he was legally my husband, so all these jealous women could eat shit… I knew what my chest was telling me, what it was feeling. Possessiveness. Horrible possessiveness.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. This was Aiden. My friend. The man I was married to so he could become a resident. The guy who watched television with me. Sure, I was in love with him, but I knew there was nothing I could or would do about it. I knew what we were to each other for the most part.

Possessiveness had nowhere to live in our complication.

“They were all nice because you were there,” I explained, giving him a side-glance to take in his reaction. “No one came by before you got there.”

He blinked, not caring at all that I was telling him his looks were the reason why I had people drop by. “If they didn’t walk by, it was because they’re blind and dumb, I told you, Van. You had the best-looking promo stuff out of everyone. I took your bookmarks.”

“You really took my bookmarks?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Two.”

He was killing me. He was slowly killing me. “You sneaky ass.” I smiled even wider and patted the hand he had on me. “I really can’t believe you’re here. In The Motherland.”

“I’m from Winnipeg.”

“I know what city you’re from, dummy. I just thought you would never come to Canada.”

Aiden paused. “I don’t hate it here.”

“But you never want to visit and you don’t want to live here. Isn’t that why you… got me? Because you don’t want to move back here?”

“I don’t want to live here.”

“Because of your parents?” I had the nerve to ask.

His head kind of tilted, that full mouth forming a thoughtful line. “They’ll never be the reason I make a decision ever again, Van. I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t have anyone here except Leslie.” The fork in his hand jerked. “Everything I care about is in the States.”

I gave him a wary look and nodded as if I understood, but I didn’t. Not really.

The big guy just touched me again and I smiled that time.

“I owe you big time.”

That had him groaning before he dug back into the tofu he had on his lap. “You don’t owe me anything,” he said into the container.

“I do. You have no clue how much this all meant to me.”

Aiden rolled his eyes, even though he was glancing down.

“I’m serious. You have no idea. I can’t thank you enough.”

“I don’t need your thanks.”

“Yeah, you do. I want you to know how much it means to me. My own mom didn’t even show up to my college graduation, and you caught a flight to come sit with me and be bored out of your mind for hours. You have no idea how much you’ve made my day—my month.”

He shook his head and raised his gaze, his long eyelashes sweeping low as he leveled that ring of warm brown on mine. “You haven’t left me when I needed you. Why wouldn’t I do the same for you?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“My friends are coming to visit after I get back from the All Star Bowl.”

Leaning against the counter two days after we got back from Toronto, I gulped down the rest of the water in my glass and narrowed my eyes in Aiden’s direction. Sitting at the breakfast table, he’d greeted Zac and me when we’d dragged our feet inside following our run a few minutes ago.