Chapter 7
Aidan
After the day I’d had, I knew what would get me out of the funk I was in. It was the same thing that got me out of a funk every time. I really, really needed to fuck someone.
How long had it been? The last time had been a woman I’d met in a first-class airport lounge. Our flight was delayed and we spent some time talking. She told me her name was Rita, which was either a lovely name or an equally lovely lie—I hadn’t cared which. When we got off the flight in Miami, she’d taken me to her hotel room near the airport. I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me.
Two strangers. Completely anonymous, and only there to please each other for as long as it took to get off. That was the way I liked it.
Except I hadn’t particularly liked it.
I mean, it had been fine. Me, a willing woman, both of us naked. It had all the ingredients of a pleasant hour. There’d been physical satisfaction for both of us with minimal awkwardness. No expectations and no exchange of phone numbers. Pleasant, polite farewells when we were finished and I was dressed again.
It was my usual routine. I had never had a girlfriend, only the occasional encounter with an attractive woman. It happened a few times a year at most, when the pressure and the need became unbearable. I liked to be in complete control of my sex life; what that said about me, I had no idea.
A number of those women had made it clear they’d be open to more. Women try to get into Aidan’s pants, and Aidan says no, Dane had said, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. Most of those women would be wonderful partners—for some other man. But I was busy with my job as CEO of Tower VC, I was choosy, and I had no need to fuck all the time. It messed with my control. Besides, any woman who dated me would be in the eye of a lot of publicity, and I had no desire for wealthy divorcees, rake-thin models, or any of the other types the society pages expected to see me with.
So I kept to the routine. My sister, Ava, was the only constant woman in my life, and I only saw her when I took her for dinner a few times a year. You’re a loner, Aidan, she’d said to me once. Lots of guys say they’re a loner, but you’re the real thing. It was how I liked it.
And yet, that last time in Miami had been… unsatisfying. Rita had enjoyed herself, but to me it had felt mechanical. Practiced. Almost tawdry. Even though I’d gotten off, I’d left as unsatisfied as I’d been when we started. Maybe even more so, and I had no idea why.
That had been months ago—nearly six months, I realized now when I did the calculation. No wonder I was so restless, unable to stay home at night, and irritable with idiots like the Egerton brothers. No wonder I was making rash decisions and fixating on Samantha’s sexy goddamned shoes. No wonder I was still pissed off hours after I’d kicked out the Egertons, still so angry I couldn’t talk to Samantha directly. I needed to let off some steam, and tonight I would do it the usual way.
I walked into a midtown watering hole and made my way toward the bar. I was incognito tonight: jeans, dark gray T-shirt, dark brown leather jacket, baseball cap. I often picked up women like this, so they didn’t know they were sleeping with the famous Aidan Winters. Dressed like this, not a single soul would recognize me. When you were known all over town as the Man in Black, people only saw the clothes, which made it easy to wear a disguise. It was the Clark Kent effect. If I’d added glasses, I would probably have been completely unidentifiable, even to my closest friends.
But there was something else to the disguise I wore. Even though I was a success, even though I had a life that most people would envy—sometimes I chafed at being me. I wasn’t born rich or powerful. I’d been a too-thin teenager from a crappy home when I’d run away at fifteen and bunked in with three of my runaway friends. We’d lived on next to nothing for years, barely staying off the streets and making ends meet. I was a different man now, but deep down I was still that teenager. I was still that kid looking for his next meal or looking for a fight. Penthouses and big offices were nice, but sometimes I needed to escape them. Sometimes I needed to be someone else for a while.
It was why I left my schedule blank most evenings and kept it to myself. The life I lived could own most of me, but it would never own all of me.
I stepped up to the bar and ordered a draft. It was mostly an after-work crowd of locals here, west of the tourist spots near Times Square and south of the upper-class bars where people would expect to see someone like me. These were New Yorkers, coming off work and letting off steam before stumbling home to do it all over again.
It was the perfect place to find a stranger to sleep with.
Because the other me, the poor me—he liked sleeping with strangers as much as the rich me did. At least, he always had.
I noticed a woman watching me from the other end of the bar. She was leaning against the bar top with one elbow, waiting for the bartender to fill her order. She had brown hair cut just above her shoulders and lightly curled. A heart-shaped face and nice eyes lined with dark makeup. A light sweater that hugged her curves. She was pretty, sexy in a rather wholesome way, and she had definitely noticed me. In other words, she was exactly what I was looking for.
It should have been perfect, but I looked away, dropping my gaze to the top of the bar. I was still thinking about the woman in Miami, about my day, about the Egertons, about Samantha. I couldn’t get out of my own head.
I glanced at the woman again. She was paying for her drink, but she noticed me looking at her and met my eye. She smiled a little, in a nice way. She was probably like me: someone who didn’t do this all the time, but often enough. Maybe she was getting over a bad relationship or she’d been burned repeatedly by the Manhattan dating scene. Because pretty much everyone had been burned by the Manhattan dating scene.
Did Samantha date? Or did she have a boyfriend? She’d stood in the doorway of her office, watching me as I left today. I knew I’d left her hanging, wondering what had happened with the Egerton brothers. It had happened so quickly after she showed them into the meeting room—she had to at least be curious whether it had anything to do with her. She hadn’t contacted me afterward, as if she knew something was wrong. And since I hadn’t contacted her, she must be wondering if she was in some kind of trouble.
Where was she right now? Pouring out her troubles on a boyfriend’s shoulder? Or was she even thinking about me at all?
The thought came into my mind: If it had been Samantha I’d met at the airport lounge that day, it would have been very, very pleasurable.
Illogical, because I hadn’t met Samantha when it happened.
If it was Samantha at the other end of the bar, we’d already be on our way out of here to fuck.
Egotistical, because it assumed she wanted to have sex with me at all. But the sex-starved mind doesn’t always make sense.
The woman at the other end of the bar was looking at me again, unsure. I was still distracted by my own thoughts, and I wasn’t giving her a strong enough message one way or another. She had finished paying her bill, and as I watched, the couple sitting beside her got up and left, leaving an empty seat.
An invitation if ever there was one. All I had to do was walk over and take it.
It wouldn’t take much—just hello, some small talk, introductions. We’d tell each other things that were possibly true, possibly not. I rarely used my real name in these encounters, because I didn’t want the women Googling me after we parted. If the women I met used fake names or real ones, I never knew, because I never Googled them either. It was better that way—cleaner, both of us a blank slate for a few hours, which made the sex hotter.
Except when it didn’t. If I didn’t like anonymous sex anymore, then what kind of sex did I like?
Samantha. In a first-class airport lounge. Suggesting I come back to her hotel with her.
In real life, she was my employee, and I wasn’t even supposed to think about her like this. I tried to stop, and instead I pictured her in a blue dress—she’d look incredible in blue—and those shoes with the goddamned ankle strap. In another lifetime—one in which we hadn’t met—I’d sit next to her and she’d give me a smile, her gaze going up and down me in that quick, unmistakable way women sometimes had. A once-over. And then I’d?—
I blinked and realized I was standing here fantasizing about Samantha while the brunette waited, the empty seat next to her. As I hesitated, another man—brown sweater, shaggy dark-blond hair, affable smile—sat next to her and introduced himself.
She looked at me. I shook my head.
She turned to the other guy, smiled, and said hello.
Good move, Winters. What the hell was that?
I had just turned down sex. Anonymous, no-strings-attached sex—the only kind of sex I ever indulged in. I was going home alone.
All because of Samantha Riley.
I paid for my drink and left the bar. I stood on the Manhattan street, feeling the cool spring night air, scented with the unique New York fragrance of sweat, gasoline fumes, and something deep-fried. I turned in the direction of Central Park, many blocks away, and started walking.
After all, it looked like I had nothing else to do.