Chapter 7
7
LYLA
I wonder what kind of comment Sebastian would make if he could see me right now.
I mentally flip him off with both hands, and pride fills my chest as I dig into the pint of chocolate cherry ice cream in front of me to take my first bite. The nostalgic flavors coat my tongue, and I nearly sigh in bliss.
Towards the end of our relationship, Bas was such an asshole about everything I ate and kept meticulous track of my calorie intake. It’s taken me nearly nine months to stop feeling like a failure if I wake up hungry in the middle of the night or eat more than a thousand calories a day.
A quiet scuff on the hardwood floor spooks me enough that I jump forward and bump my ribs into the island. “Oh shit. Oh my god, you scared me,” I breathe with a hand held protectively to my side. I didn’t hit them hard, but the phantom pain from past broken ribs has me acting on instinct. “You’re a freaking giant. I don’t know how you’re so dang quiet all the time.”
Aidan lets out a husky chuckle and moves to grab a water bottle from the fridge before placing his palms next to me on the glittering white marble of the kitchen island. His tan, muscular arms flex as he leans forward, bringing my attention to his sculpted chest, bare save for the light smattering of fine blond hair and Crew’s birth date tattooed over his left pec.
I feel my eyes widen as desire pools in my lower belly quicker than ever before, and the feeling is nearly enough to send me running back to my room. The only guy I’ve ever been attracted enough to want to date was Sebastian, and even that was lukewarm compared to the feelings my new boss has been stirring up. I need this job, and I adore Crew, so I need to do what I can to ignore any budding attraction to the single father.
Even if he does look like he was carved by Michelangelo himself. I mean, David who?
“Whatcha got there?”
“Oh… so, I kind of have a terrible sweet tooth, and sometimes, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night craving something sugary. Tonight, I just felt like I needed ice cream.” A blush heats my cheeks, waiting to see how he responds.
His stunning eyes light up as he clasps his hands together over his heart in a dramatic gesture that makes me smile. “Ah!” he gasps. “A woman after my own heart.”
A quiet giggle falls from my lips, and his smile grows.
“Okay, follow-up question. What’s your favorite flavor?” Aidan grabs the pint sitting in front of me and examines the label, raising his brows in my direction and intentionally dropping his gaze to my cherry print sleep set with a smirk. “I’m sensing a theme here.”
Shrugging, I take advantage of him still holding my ice cream to stick my spoon in the creamy goodness and take another bite. “What can I say?” I ask around a mouthful of heaven. “I have a thing for cherries.”
His laugh is full and loud and so happy in that moment that it freezes me to the spot, spoon in mouth and all. The smirk returns to his handsome face and fans the heat still simmering in my veins to boiling levels, and I know I need to get the heck out of here before I say something monumentally inappropriate.
I fake a yawn and stretch, trying to take the ice cream from him to put it back in the freezer. My fingers cover his when I grab the carton, sending chills up my arm. Aidan’s eyes fill with heat the longer they stay locked on our overlapped hands.
My words are barely more than a whisper as I stare into his eyes. Their glittering blue reminds me of ice chips, only instead of cooling me off, the look in them has me quickly overheating. “I should probably get back to bed.”
He drops my gaze as he clears his throat and releases the melting container back to my waiting hands. “Right, yeah. I should, too.”
“Night, Aidan.”
I’m already at the stairs before he responds, but I can swear I hear him whisper back, “Goodnight, angel.”
“Okay so you have the list of emergency numbers? And you know he’s allergic to shellfish? Do you have the route to the hospital memorized from here?”
I don’t get a chance to answer any of Aidan’s panicked questions before he thinks of more. “And you know all the alarm codes and where the car keys are? ”
Rolling my lips together to hold back my own nerves, I place a hand on the anxious man’s forearm. “Aid, I got this. We’ve been over everything and I’ll treat Crew as if he’s my own. He’ll call you every night, and I promise I’ll text or call you if something goes sideways. Which it won’t.”
“But—”
I shake my head firmly. “No buts. You’ll be two hours away for three days. If, for some unknown reason, I can’t reach you and it’s an emergency, I have Wren, Rhodes, and the coaches numbers on speed dial. I think some time apart will be good for both of you. Remember what I said during my interview? Crew is now my only priority. Trust me.”
His worried blue eyes study my green ones for several intense moments before he relents with a small but anxious smile. Turning to where the subject of our discussion sits on the living room floor, happily munching on his lunch of sweet chili cauliflower wings, Aidan gives his son a lingering kiss on the top of his head.
“You’re gonna call me every day and be good for Miss Lyla, right, my little raptor?”
His sticky face lights up. “I’ll be the goodest! And I’ll call every day right before bed so you can read me my story.”
Watching Aidan interact with Crew always makes me feel all melty inside, but seeing just how much he loves and cares about him? Cue the pesky butterflies. Those inconvenient little jerks have been around way too often the last few days.
“Lyla, can I talk to you again for a sec before I go?”
The butterflies turn to ash and sit heavy as a stone in my gut at the question, but I nod anyway and follow him back to the kitchen.
“I just wanted to ask for your bank information so I can send over your pay for the last two weeks,” he says with a kind smile.
My heart stops. I feel my eyes grow impossibly wide with panic as I stare at him and scramble for anything that sounds even semi-reasonable. After all, what kind of twenty-two-year-old woman doesn’t have a freaking bank account?
Why did I not prepare for this exact question?
“I, um…” Absolutely no good excuses are coming to me, so I reluctantly tell the truth. “I actually don’t have one. My last job paid me in cash.”
He blinks owlishly at me. “Oh, right. Okay, well, do you need help setting one up? Honestly, I could have my agent do it for you if you don’t want to take Crew to the bank. I’d just need your social sec?—”
“No!” Shit, shit, shit. How do I get out of this? I probably look insane. “I just mean… I don’t really trust banks,” I mutter with a grimace.
The curiosity burning in his arctic gaze is impossible to miss, but he takes it in stride rather than calling me out on my obvious lie. “I’ll swing by my bank on the way back and grab cash then if you don’t mind waiting. No need to open an account if you don’t want to.”
I can’t disguise the gust of air that escapes me as anything other than relief. “That’s perfect. Thanks, Aidan.”
His returning smile is sad and doesn’t reach his eyes when he nods and goes to give his son a final hug goodbye. Aidan Black is a dangerous man, just not in the way I’m used to. He sees everything, and for a girl who’s desperate to hide, that’s almost scarier than anything I’ve faced before.
This new life in Charleston was supposed to be a fresh start for me to heal, and until now, it has been, but I’m starting to wonder if this security I feel is too good to be true.
If Aidan goes digging into my past or I get tangled up in his professional or social life, I have no doubt Sebastian will find me. I honestly don’t know how he hasn’t already. I know he’s alive from the few times I’ve seen him on TV with his dad or various actresses.
Staying here might put me in more danger than being alone, but the thought of being just another nanny in a long line to leave Crew makes me feel sick. I can shut down any budding feelings I might have for his dad and focus solely on my job. Keeping my head down until the season is over and they don’t need me anymore will be best for all of us.
Why does the thought of them not needing me hurt so much?
“Ly, can we watch Tinker Bell now?” Crew is bouncing on his toes in front of the massive fort we built over the couch, his face covered in the crusty remnants of the pasta he ate for dinner.
Giving him a big, goofy grin, I nod and point a finger. “But first, messy little raptor, you need a bath. Do you want to go start the tub and put in your favorite bubbles?”
He shrieks in excitement and sprints to the first-floor full bath to do as I asked, making me laugh. Crew is such a sweet kid, and the more time I spend with him, the more confused I get about why they have such a hard time keeping a nanny.
I know Wren said it had something to do with them hitting on Aidan, but would someone really use an innocent child like that just to get close to the parent?
It’s obvious he has some of the same attachment issues I had as a child, but his father, unlike mine, seems to be incredibly present and active in his son’s life. I quickly make my way into the bathroom to distract myself from thoughts of my dad, knowing if I continue down this path, it will quickly lead to tears or, worse, a panic attack.
Bath time with Aidan’s little clone ends with me and the floor looking like we got baths, too, and Crew’s infectious giggles successfully distract me from spiraling. I wrap him up in his dinosaur towel and laugh at the crown of horns across the hood before helping him dress in his, you guessed it, dinosaur pajamas.
“Are dinosaurs your favorite animal?”
He nods frantically, declaring, “Raptors are my most favorite!”
“I bet that’s because of your daddy’s baseball team, huh?”
“Yes!” he yells. “Daddy is the catcher, so he uses a mitt to catch the balls Uncle Cope throws at him!”
I nod like I understand, praying he doesn’t ask me any questions about how baseball works. The truth is, I know next to nothing about the sport despite my near-constant education over the last year.
Wren, my best friend, manages the Raptor’s PR department and frequently talks baseball stats, but I swear it’s like it’s in one ear and out the other; I can’t retain the information to save my life. Though maybe that will change working for a player since Crew and I will be attending some of the home games and further away games.
The promise of Disney and ice cream is enough to derail the conversation and remind Crew why he had to take a bath in the first place, so we rush back out to the living room and dive into the fort, creating the perfect little nest bed.
I promised him we could sleep out here tonight since he seemed so panicked about Aidan leaving all day. I don’t want to encourage his attachment issues, but with a kid this young, it’s important to enforce healthy boundaries and give a little when big changes happen. Hence, the fort sleepover.
I set the alarm and triple-check that all the doors and windows are locked before I truly allow myself to get comfortable, a habit I’ve developed since leaving Sebastian. The next several hours are spent watching fairies chase a crazy beast while Crew plays with my hair, and despite my best efforts to stay awake, I feel my eyes closing as sleep quickly overtakes me.
“Where’s my sweet little future wife, hmm?” Sebastian’s deceptively calm voice reaches my ears where I’m hiding in the hall closet. We attended a charity gala tonight that should have been a fun night out as a newly engaged couple.
That “fun” lasted less than an hour until Sebastian saw one of Dad’s friend’s sons making me laugh with a story of our time together on set as children. Apparently that pissed him off, because he stormed up and gripped me tightly around the bicep before pulling me away mid-sentence.
On the way home, he made his anger known with several cutting remarks, and I knew that if I didn’t hide until he lost interest, I would be in considerable pain for the next week, so the minute we arrived at the opulent home we share, I hid as fast as I could in a hall closet.
My heart feels like it’s seconds from beating out of my chest as I listen to him pace around the sitting room, no doubt with a glass of expensive bourbon in his well-manicured hand. Keeping my movements as silent as possible, I peek out of the mostly closed door only to come face to face with the man who haunts my nightmares.
A muscle in his cosmetically altered jaw tics as his sinister smile widens, and I know I’ve just sealed my fate by hiding rather than facing my punishment head-on.
“Lyly?” A tiny cry startles me out of my nightmare, and it takes me several seconds to process where I am. When my vision finally comes into focus, I see Crew standing in front of me with tears streaming down his ruddy cheeks. My stomach drops, worry overtaking any lingering fear from my dream.
“Little raptor,” I coo. “What’s the matter?”
His tears fall faster, and he throws himself into my arms, knocking me back against the couch in our fort bed. “I had a bad dream,” he whimpers between sobs.
My heart breaks for this innocent kid and all he’s been through in such a short time. “I’m so sorry, Crew-bug. Do you want to tell me what your bad dream was about?” I keep my voice low so I don’t overstimulate him, especially since he’s already upset.
He sniffles and twirls a long strand of my hair around his small fingers, tears slowly drying the longer his gaze stays transfixed on the repetitive motions. “A bad man hurt Daddy,” he whispers. “And then Daddy had to leave, too. Just like my mommy.”
A chasm opens up in the pit of my stomach and I’m pretty sure my heart falls into it. Most six-year-olds aren’t so worried about their parents leaving them that it manifests in nightmares, so to know that this is something that affects Crew this much is heart-wrenching.
I don’t know anything about the situation with his mother, so I need to tread carefully and remember to ask Aidan about it when he gets back to avoid a situation like this again. I understand he might not want to talk about it, especially after he brushed me off in the grocery store yesterday morning, but I can’t properly care for Crew during moments like this unless I have all the facts.
I run one hand over his soft hair in soothing motions while I use the other to hold him to me as tight as I can without hurting him. “Crew, listen to me,” I murmur. “Your daddy is one of the strongest guys I’ve ever met, and I promise that even if a bad guy did try to hurt him, he would still come home to you.”
He still looks distressed, so I scan the fort for my phone and find it sitting on the couch cushion where I left it to charge. Picking it up, I see it’s already well after one in the morning, and I have a missed call and a text from Aidan, that came in around ten, apologizing for missing their bedtime call. “Would it make you feel better if we called your dad so you could see for yourself that he’s okay?”
He hesitates but eventually offers me a tiny nod just as a snot bubble pops on his upper lip. I bite my lip to stifle a laugh and use one of the leftover napkins to wipe his nose before pulling up Aidan’s contact. He told me to call him any time, day or night, but I still find myself worrying he’ll be angry if we wake him up.
The little FaceTime tone only sounds twice before Rhodes picks up, startling me enough that I almost drop the phone. Why is he answering Aidan’s phone? Someone would have notified me if he was hurt, right? With shaking hands, I do my best to steady the screen as Crew starts to panic in my arms.
“Where’s Daddy, Uncle Rho?” he whimpers. Rhodes’ eyes go wide when he sees my own panicked eyes and Crew’s crying form molded to me.
Please tell me I didn’t just screw up.