commerce with my friends, the association also held a tinge of bitterness. I hadn’t admitted who I was, not truly, until I was sixteen. And after that I’d been kicked out of my house.
Sighing, I walked into Aiden’s job, the one shop that seemed busy, figuring I’d lurk around the outskirts until Aiden was finished.
Only to be brought to a stop by the sight of a customer standing far too close to Aiden. The man had a territorial air to him, and Aiden’s stony face let me know he wasn’t pleased about the customer. Aiden hadn’t spotted me yet, his concentration solely on the older man.
I stepped closer and overheard a snippet of conversation.
“Your profile is on the sugar daddy app,” the man was saying. “I’ve messaged you a few times.”
Bile rose in my throat. I remembered Mateo mentioning that app when Bryan had been dealing with a stalker from it. More like a creepy daddy app.
Aiden’s back was straight as a steel pipe, his jaw clenched hard enough, I saw a vein throb at his temple. “I’m not interested in a sugar daddy at the moment,” he said more evenly and graciously than I expected. “But thank you for your interest. Now—if you need help with your product, I can do that.”
The guy leaned in and threw an arm over Aiden’s shoulder. I felt a growl build in my throat. The dude needed to back off now.
“Come on,” he was saying, his lips brushing the shell of Aiden’s ear, “You don’t want to work at a store like this. You wouldn’t have to work at all. I can take care of you, baby. Let daddy take care of everything.”
Okay. Major barf.
Aiden must be limited by work protocols, because I expected by that point for him to have shot a few of his acidic zingers at the man and walked away. Instead, he was sulking and stewing, his eyes looking more like a deer in headlights.
Time for action, then. After all, I didn’t work here and while I didn’t exactly know what I was to Aiden and what he was to me, no one deserved this kind of abuse of power.
Walking over, I said to Aiden, “Hey, babe, are you almost finished with work?”
The older man stiffened and let his arm drop from Aiden’s shoulder. “Who’s this?” he asked Aiden, who was glaring at me.
I ignored the look and held out my hand. “I’m his boyfriend. You must be...his grandfather? He’s told me a lot about you.”
Aiden had never mentioned a grandfather—I just wanted to make the man feel old and inappropriate because he was both...and an asshole to boot.
My words worked. The man turned green and then a brilliant shade of red. “No, we’re not, uh, related,” he mumbled.
“Oh,” I said, allowing an edge to creep into my tone. I also snaked my arm around Aiden’s waist, pulling him close. “It’s just that you seemed so familiar with my boyfriend, I assumed you were family. Because otherwise, dude, that’s not cool.”
Then, to drive the point home (because honestly, I was having fun), I twisted and tugged Aiden into a kiss. It wasn’t planned. It just felt...well, it was an impulse and I acted on it before investigating my motives too deeply.
And what a fucking kiss.
My hands gripped Aiden’s waist tightly, pulling him snug to me. His lips were softer than I would’ve guessed and oh, so pliant, moving with mine without hesitation. We kissed like we’d kissed a thousand times, deeply and familiar, our mouths moving in sync.
He parted his lips and my tongue snuck in, tasting him, drinking in the kiss until my stomach was fluttering and blood was rushing south.
I felt his hand fist the front of my shirt, like he was going to pull me closer, and I couldn’t help it—I groaned.
Aiden pushed me back. Shoved, really, which would have ruined the illusion we were together if the man had still been standing there. But he was gone, which meant we’d been making out in the middle of the sales floor. At his job.
Perhaps I’d gotten a little carried away with the ruse.
Okay. Based on the rapid pounding of my heart and the rush of blood in my ears and the way my mouth tingled in sweet memory of the kiss, I’d gotten a lot carried away. So much so that it had stopped feeling like a ruse and had started feeling like the solution to a problem that had been weighing heavier and heavier on