the entire story, no matter how difficult. “Then one day I came home from work and she was already in bed and claimed she wasn’t feeling well, but I could tell something was off. Paige was never sick. Yet, she’d been fine that morning when we each went to work. I decided to go and get her some soup from a nearby deli, and since it was more convenient to drive her car than mine, I went to grab her keys from her purse and saw this piece of paper with a local hospital logo across the top. I was both curious and concerned, so I read the paperwork and discovered it was instructions for aftercare for a surgical abortion procedure she’d had that afternoon. She’d terminated our baby without ever telling me she was pregnant.”
Chloe gasped, her eyes round in shock. “Aiden, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, obviously stunned and appalled by what he’d revealed.
His hand curled into a fist on the table, but he managed to tamp down the bitterness threatening to engulf him. He could recall that moment so vividly, how everything inside him had gone stone cold and yet he’d wanted so desperately to believe that there was some kind of logical explanation for what he’d discovered...for what Paige had done.
Instead, he’d been slapped with the truth of just how little she valued their marriage, and the lengths she’d gone to protect and secure her climb up the corporate ladder. She might as well have stabbed him directly in the heart with a sharp knife; the pain of her deceit had been that enormous and great.
“I confronted Paige, and she didn’t even deny it,” he said with a harsh laugh that made his chest hurt. “She just calmly told me that the pregnancy was a mistake and she wasn’t willing to give up her job to take care of a baby she didn’t want. It didn’t matter to her what I might have wanted. She gave me no choice in the matter.”
Chloe reached across the table and placed her hand over his fisted one, her thumb grazing across his knuckles in a soothing caress. “That was an incredibly selfish thing for her to do.”
He met her gaze, seeing the compassion etching her features. He could feel her empathy for what he’d gone through, and her sensitive, supportive response played tug-of-war with his own emotions and made him see her in a different light, too. One week with Chloe, without any outside influences to dictate their feelings, and she was becoming a woman who knew him better than anyone else in recent years.
She stood up, pushed the small table out of the way, and then sat down on his lap, the move more comforting than sexual. He welcomed the tenderness she offered, which was something that had been missing in his life for much too long.
She pressed her warm palm against his cheek, so sweet and caring. “I can’t begin to imagine how difficult it was for you to find out about the abortion after the fact. You deserved better than that.”
He shook his head, a part of him still mired in the past. “How could I be so wrong about someone—someone I actually married?” It was a question he knew he’d never have the answer to, but it haunted him, nonetheless. “How could the one person I trusted so unconditionally betray me in a way I never thought possible, all because her career was more important than our marriage?”
“You couldn’t have known what she’d do, and she should have been open and honest with you, instead of stringing you along with false hopes.”
Despite his own bitterness, Aiden realized just how similar their past situations were, more than he ever would have expected. How Neil had presented one persona to Chloe, then revealed another after time. The same as Paige.
She dipped her head and settled her lips on his, the touch soft and reverent. A healing balm to his fractured soul. He accepted the kiss, wanting it, craving her in ways that went beyond pure physical desire and shook him to the core, making him think about the reasons why he believed things could never work between him and Chloe. Made him wonder how something so wrong could feel so damn right.
His confusion gave way to heated passion as their mouths fused more deeply, and that wild desperation rose within him again. An impatience to have her, to lose himself so completely in her lush body that