go to college, Aidan. She was meant for it, not me.”
“Bullshit.” He was leaning back against the doorjamb, feet crossed, hands in his pockets, a casual pose, but there was nothing casual about his expression.
He didn’t like where she was going with this.
“I’m not stating an opinion here,” she said. “I’m stating fact.”
“So Ashley was smart,” he said. “So what? So are you. Boulder wouldn’t have accepted you otherwise. Tell me you’ve since realized that, Lily.”
She shrugged. “It took awhile, but after cosmetology school, I started working full-time at the spa, as low on the totem pole as I could possibly get, of course. That frustrated me,” she allowed. “I did all the grunt work and then finally was given more to do but didn’t get any of the credit for it. So I went back to school at night and took some business classes. By the end I was practically running the spa myself.” Not that she’d gotten credit for that either …
“I hope like hell it hurt them when you left,” he said.
So did she …
“Did you like it there?” he asked. “San Diego?”
She’d thought so. Until she’d come back here. She hadn’t realized in all those years that she’d never really felt like she was home. “I missed the snow.”
He chuckled. “Can’t tell by the car you’re driving.”
“Yes, well, you always were a car snob.” She paused. “And I don’t plan to still be around by the time I need four-wheel drive.”
“You just got here,” he said. “In a hurry to leave already?”
“I’m only here until a permanent job comes through. I’m looking at this as a little break.”
“From the bad press you mean.”
She sighed. She shouldn’t be surprised he’d heard.
His smile faded. “You get a bum rap, Lily?”
She met his gaze, extremely tired of dancing around this subject. “Are you asking me if I ratted out one of my clients for money?”
He shook his head. “I know you wouldn’t rat out anyone.”
The words, unwavering, sucked the air from her lungs. “You don’t know me anymore,” she reminded him.
“I know enough.” This was said with steely certainty.
The blind faith in her actually made her throat burn. Her eyes, too, and for a moment she couldn’t speak, afraid she’d burst into pathetic tears. “But it was me,” she said softly. “My boss asked me to leak it in order to get the salon’s name in the press. But it backfired and so …” She shrugged.
“And so you took the fall for it.”
She nodded.
“So your boss was a real stand-up sort of person, then.”
She’d thought so, at first. Michael had run the salon, been her friend, her sometime lover, and sometimes her boyfriend. And not only hadn’t he stood at her back, he’d fired her and then blacklisted her as well. “It’s actually done a lot,” she said. “Where a celebrity calls ahead and wants their arrival or departure noted in the press. It keeps them in the public eye and relevant.”
Aidan never took his eyes off of her. “So then why didn’t your boss come clean? She could’ve saved you a lot of problems by doing so.”
“He. Michael,” she corrected. “And I don’t know, other than Michael turned out to be someone other than I thought.”
He studied her a moment. “This guy was more than your boss.”
This startled her.
“Turns out I can still read you,” he said quietly.
“Lucky me.”
“So you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Other than I hate snakes and you saw me in my PJs? Nothing.” She lifted her chin and defied him to contradict her.
She should have known better. Like Ashley, he’d never met a challenge he didn’t face head-on.
He moved toward her, right into her personal space.
She took a step back and came up against the wall.
This didn’t stop him. He kept his forward momentum until they were toe to toe. And then while she was still standing there a little dumbfounded and also something else, something that felt uncomfortably close to sheer, unadulterated lust, he put his hands on the wall on either side of her head.
This both escalated her heart rate and stopped her lungs from operating. “Um—”
“You had your chance to tell me what’s wrong with you,” he said. “You passed. Now I’m going to tell you what’s wrong with me.”
Oh, God. Talking would be a bad idea. As for a good idea, she had only one, and before she could consider the consequences, she gripped his shirt, hauled him down, and kissed him.