Chapter Twenty-Seven
Aiden
I can’t settle. I wish I did have a private jet for this journey because everyone on board keeps eyeing me out of their peripherals.
I understand why. I look like a man on the edge.
That’s because I’m on the edge. My knee is bouncing non-stop and Lyndsey keeps looking at me with her big, sad eyes.
It just makes it worse. For weeks I have dragged her through my family drama, forced her to pretend to love me and attend a fucking funeral, and the whole time she has been suffering. Without feeling like she could tell me.
That’s what hurts the most. The fact she didn’t share with me.
I have opened up to her so much and still she doesn’t trust me.
Hell, she only told me when it got so bad she physically couldn’t hold it in any more.
I have been so wrapped up in my own problems that I didn’t see.
I’ve spent weeks with this woman. Every night alone with her.
And someone was threatening her the entire time. While she was under my roof.
My fingernails are worn down from biting. I haven’t bitten them this bad since the week of my parents’ funeral. I thought I had grown out of this but, clearly, I just haven’t had a situation hit me hard enough to trigger it again until now.
“I’m so sorry.” Lyndsey’s voice cuts through the tension. We are sitting beside each other but we feel hundreds of miles apart. I want to reach out my hand and hold hers but I don’t, instead I ball my fists on my knees.
“Stop apologising,” I tell her for the hundredth time since yesterday.
We rescheduled our journey home and are now sitting on an earlier flight than expected.
We needed to be back in Seattle to fix this.
Lyndsey has apologised over and over no matter how much I tell her to stop. My clear distress is weighing on her.
“I don’t want you to hate me.” She sighs. This time I don’t hold myself back, I reach my hands out until my palms frame her face.
“Hate you?” I shake my head, needing her to understand. “I’m not mad at you, I’m pissed at myself.”
“Well, you should be mad at me, it’s my damn fault.” As she speaks, she pulls her face out of my hands. I want to pull her closer but I let her have some space. I can only tell her so many times that she is wrong until she believes me. Or at least I hope she will eventually believe me.
“No.” My voice is strong. It is the thing I feel most certain about. There are a hundred anxieties in my mind but the one thing I know is that Lyndsey does not deserve this.
“Aiden,” she tries to interrupt, probably to apologise again, but I don’t let her.
“No, Lyndsey, you did nothing wrong. But I’m going to make it right, I swear.
” And I mean it. I’ll do everything in my power to make this go away.
I offered to just pay them the money, but Lyndsey would hear none of it.
I guess she is right. If we give in to them then it will encourage them to do this again.
How could I not see her struggle? I noticed her anxiety around her phone, but I thought she was just reading hate comments from our wedding announcement, which is why I did my best to reassure her otherwise.
How egotistical of me. I’m so famous that everything must be about me apparently.
I was so self-focused that it never crossed my mind that she could be really suffering silently.
I should have learned from Liam and Ellis: he tried to keep her out of the limelight and that only ended with her crazy ex confronting them in public. Cassie is going to kill me. I’m going to need her expertise here, because if I try to do this myself, I’ll probably make it worse.
As soon as the plane touches the tarmac, I’m already calling Cassie.
“Cassie, I need your help with something.” I tell her as soon as the call connects. Lyndsey looks up at me, nibbling on her lower lip. In the last few hours she has gone from dealing with this alone to suddenly more and more people knowing.
“Oh hell, Anders!” I can almost imagine her dropping her head onto her desk in exasperation. “Whatever happened to saying hello?”
“Hello, Cassie, did you know you’re my favourite Spears employee?” I tell her with a sickly-sweet voice. I mean it though. I love everyone who works for the Spears, but Cassie is the one I talk to most after Coach Mitch.
“Good try, what did you do? Am I going to want to kill you?” She laughs. Cassie is a very straightforward woman. She is always using pens as projectiles when people cause problems, but I know how much she cares about us.
“No, but you might have to stop me from killing someone else,” I tell her honestly, refusing to look down at Lynds as we start to collect our bags and disembark the plane.
I don’t want to see if she is disappointed with me.
It’s why I don’t want to deal with this alone.
I don’t know how I will handle it when I find out who has been harassing my wife but I doubt it will be sunshine and rainbows.
“What the hell? What’s happening?” As calm as she tries to sound, I hear her fingers clacking on her keyboard furiously on the other end of the line.
“Look, we are going through the airport and then we will come straight to you. We are going to need a PI.” It will be easier to talk to her in person, plus I don’t want everyone in this airport knowing our business.
My disguise of a cap pulled low on my head isn’t exactly amazing.
It would take one person recognising me and hearing what is going on and it would be all over the internet within the hour.
This needs to be on a need-to-know basis.
“Are we in some kind of spy novel?” She laughs, but when I don’t join her the laughter dies as quick as it started. “Fine! Okay, I’ll be waiting, with a private investigator apparently.” I can hear her keyboard going crazy again as she tries to get everything in order.
“Hey, Cassie?” I want to lighten the atmosphere before I end the call. I know this is a stressful situation. Especially as she doesn’t really know what is happening.
“Yeah?” she asks, her voice quieter than before.
“Am I your favourite Spears employee?”
I hear her swear on the line before she ends the call without answering.
Lyndsey has been watching me. When she sees my smile at Cassie’s outburst, I see tension flow out of her.
I know that as long as we are honest with each other from here on out, we will be able to get this sorted.
There is still a lot of work to do. After Lyndsey fell asleep last night I thought of a million questions I still have but I don’t want to ask.
I’m scared of her answers. I want to know what they have on her.
Does she have any idea who it could be? My front runner is her ex.
She told me to stay away and a few months later Lyndsey and I were married.
That would be enough to anger anyone. Still, I don’t want to know the truth.
Because it could be so much worse. If Lyndsey has no idea then it means we are at square one.
This person has given her two weeks so we have to find them before then.
I can’t risk letting them get away with this. Not without some repercussions.