Entangled (The Accidental Billionaires #2) - J. S. Scott Page 0,13

before you came back. We barely spoke after I married.”

“What about her grandchild?” Aiden questioned.

I shook my head sadly. “She didn’t care about Maya. My mother wasn’t exactly the grandmotherly type. She was sick in the head, Aiden. You know she was always crazy, but she was also brainwashed by the crazy church she attended in San Diego.”

“I’m sure she thought you were better off with him than me,” Aiden drawled.

“Marco’s parents were founding members of that church. That’s all she cared about. She thought I’d be lucky to have him. She never realized that she was part of a cult. Granted, they didn’t live in a commune, but that religious group had a hold on her, regardless.”

“How did you even meet your ex-husband?” he asked roughly. “I remember that you never went to that church once you got old enough to tell your mother that you didn’t want to go.”

“When I was seventeen, I did go with my mom a couple of times. I wanted to make her happy. But it only lasted for a short time. I didn’t like being there. The whole thing gave me the creeps. And so did Marco. He saw me there and decided he wanted me to be his wife. I think he wanted that all the more after I’d flatly refused to marry him. I wasn’t even out of high school yet when he asked my mother if he could marry me.”

“So you said no?”

I nodded. “And I refused to go to any events there ever again.”

“Then why in the hell did you give in later?” he asked in an angry tone.

I shrugged. “My circumstances had changed. I was desperate, Aiden.”

“And was your mother right?” he pressed. “Were you lucky to have him? Were you happy?”

“No,” I said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “The only happy part of my marriage was my daughter. Maya was everything to me. She still is.”

“What in the hell did the letter say? What did you want to tell me? Did you want me to come and find you?”

“I did,” I admitted. “I asked you to come find me if you really loved me. To get me out of marrying a man I didn’t love.”

“But you never heard from me because I never read that letter,” he concluded. “I was left to assume that you wanted to be with somebody else because he had more money than I did.”

“I never wanted you to think that,” I told him adamantly. “Did I really seem like that kind of woman?”

Maybe I could understand why he had felt that way, but it still hurt.

“I had no idea what to think,” he said. “I still don’t. But if I had known that you didn’t want to be with Marino, I sure as hell would have found you.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said in a tremulous voice. “I thought you’d just trashed the letter after you’d read it, and you didn’t think about me anymore.”

I flinched as Aiden’s fist came down on the table. Hard.

“You knew damn well that I was crazy about you,” he snapped. “Did you really think I wouldn’t have responded to a cry for help from you?”

I’d been so damn hurt that I’d thought exactly that. When Aiden hadn’t shown up to take me away, I’d given up all hope of being happy. All I’d focused on was my daughter, and survival.

But honestly, now that I was older, I probably should have wondered why a man like Aiden had just chucked me out of his life without another thought. “Just like you, I didn’t know what to think,” I said quietly. “I was scared.”

“So where in the hell do we go from here?” he grumbled. “We didn’t even have enough faith in each other to go and find out the truth.”

“I’m not here to get you back. I know you don’t believe me, and I don’t blame you for that. Really, we hardly knew each other. We only went out for a couple of months.”

The time for me and Aiden had passed a long time ago.

“So you just wanted to close this chapter of our life?”

“Not exactly.” I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “There’s another reason why I was really scared of becoming homeless. If it had just been me, I would have done it. But it wasn’t just me.”

He gave me an assessing look, one that seemed to be able to see my soul. “Who else was there?” he