Dirty Little Secrets

by Lizzie Shane

  Still, he hadn’t been able to focus and he’d left the office as soon as he was able, disregarding speed limits and avoiding a ticket by sheer luck as he hurried to Benjamin Franklin’s vet. When he finally burst into the vet’s waiting room, the sight that greeted him hit him right in the chest.

  Samira was reading aloud on her tablet, her voice soft and gentle. Stella sat on her lap, her head tucked on Samira’s shoulder, while Maddie lay curled in the seat beside her with her head pillowed on Samira’s free leg, seemingly asleep. His heart stretched at the sight, aching at the rightness.

  His family.

  Not just the girls. All of them. He didn’t know when Samira had become part his family. It felt like she’d always been there, but he knew even just a few months ago he wouldn’t have thought of her that way. But somewhere along the line, she had become everything. Her presence as necessary as breathing.

  He’d had a nanny growing up, back when his father was working at the embassy in Venezuela. Diana. She’d been nice enough, he recalled in the vague, disjointed way of distant memory, but not family. She’d left when he was seven and he hadn’t grieved the loss the way he knew his girls would if Samira ever left them.

  It would be a blow to him as well if she did.

  He’d hated the silence this week. Unlike the comfortable silence they’d once had or the oblivious silence before that, this one was like nettles in the air, making his skin itch. A tense, rigid silence. Full of awful awkwardness and all the things they didn’t say.

  His feelings for her were evidently a lot more complicated than employer/employee. Or even friends. She had become a huge part of his family. Not just a woman he was attracted to, but the woman who was, for all intents and purposes, raising his daughters. He’d always known that she was good for them, but this was more. It complicated things, but somehow simplified them as well. It was right that she was family. That knowledge resonated deeply, somehow changing everything and nothing at the same time.

  She looked up then and her words trailed off as she met his gaze. He didn’t know what she saw there. Didn’t want to ask. Stella looked up to see why she’d stopped reading. “Daddy!” She scrambled off Samira’s lap, bumping into Maddie and waking her so when he crouched down he had both of his girls flinging themselves into his arms and immediately bursting into tears.

  Samira grimaced, meeting his eyes over their heads. “It’s been a hard wait.”

  “No word yet?”

  She shook her head. “He’s in surgery now and they think he’s going to be fine, but the x-rays showed what looked like your entire sock drawer in his stomach.”

  He grimaced. “Impressive.” Benjamin Franklin had upped his game.

  “They told us they would call us when he was out of surgery, but the girls wanted to stay and wait here. The vet thinks they’ll probably want to keep him overnight, give him fluids and keep an eye on him, but the girls didn’t want to miss out if there was a chance to see him, even if he’s still sleeping.”

  “Sorry it took me so long to get here.” He straightened, lifting Stella when she continued to cling to his shoulder, and went to join Samira at the chairs. They were the only ones in the waiting room—but it was after the vet’s regular hours, so that wasn’t surprising. “Now that I’m here, you don’t have to stay. I can look after the girls and wait for news.”

  “No, I’m good here,” Samira said, unsurprisingly.

  He and the girls settled in beside her to wait—and he was glad he had his arms full with Stella and Maddie. It would have been too tempting to put his arm around Samira and tug her against him—and that wasn’t his right. She might be family, but she was still off limits. Everything changed, and nothing changed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The girls both fell asleep in the car on the drive home from the vet. It was an hour before their bedtime, but with the stress of the day, Samira wasn’t surprised. Benjamin Franklin had come through surgery with flying colors and the girls had cooed over him, delighted when he thumped the tip of his tail for them even though he was still mostly sedated. The vet had given them a plastic baggie filled with an impressive quantity of partially-digested socks. Evidently, Benjamin Franklin had been stealing them from Aiden’s bedroom floor for weeks.

  Samira pulled into the garage, Aiden pulling in alongside her in his car, and climbed out without waking the girls. Holding a finger to her lips as he climbed out of his car, she nodded to the backseat and he went still, his expression softening at the sight of the girls, slumped over in their carseats.

  She froze herself, caught by the look on his face. He was such a good father. Such a good man. Always trying to be everything to everyone. But who took care of him?

  She opened the rear car door to unbuckle Stella and lift her out of her seat as Aiden did the same thing with Maddie on the opposite side, and Samira carried Stella up the stairs, Aiden with Maddie at her heels.

  She’d been so grateful when he showed up at the vet’s office—not that she couldn’t manage by herself, but as soon as he’d walked in, she’d felt lighter, more confident that everything was going to be okay. He was strong and steady and just his presence made her feel light and fizzy.

  So much for ignoring her crush. At this point it was stupid to keep denying it.

  Not that acknowledging it did any good.

  She glanced over at Aiden as they worked side-by-side, changing Stella and Maddie into their pajamas and tucking them into their beds. He’d discarded his suit jacket and tie while they were waiting for news on Benjamin Franklin. The top few buttons of his shirt were undone, exposing the strong line of his throat. When had a man’s throat ever been so sexy? And why did his have to be so gorgeous? Why did he have to be so nice? Why couldn’t he be an ogre and an ass?

  He held the girls’ bedroom door open for her, gently closing it after she stepped through. She could have just stood there and stared at him all night, but she forced herself to walk through the playroom toward the stairs, navigating around the dried dog sick on the floor. “I should clean that up,” she murmured.

  “No. I’ve got it. You shouldn’t have had to deal with any of this. I should have been here.”

  She shot him a look. “Aiden, you aren’t clairvoyant. It’s not like you planned when Benjamin Franklin was going to be sick. You couldn’t have known.”

  “Regardless. I’m cleaning it up.”

  She conceded, but only because she’d seen the half-chopped vegetables in the kitchen when they’d carried the girls through and had her own cleaning up to do. She returned to the kitchen and the evidence of an afternoon interrupted, doing whatever she could to reset her life back to normal, even if it was just cleaning the cutting board.

  He found her there fifteen minutes later.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. At the vet, she’d fed the girls granola bars and fruit chews that she always kept in her purse just in case, but neither she nor Aiden had eaten and it was well past the dinner hour.

  “A little,” he admitted, moving to the refrigerator before she could. “Sandwiches?”

  “Works for me.”

  He began removing ingredients from the fridge as she went to the pantry for bread. The house was even more quiet than usual without Benjamin Franklin’s toenails clicking on the hardwood, but for the first time all week the silence didn’t feel oppressive. The heavy weight in the air between them had lifted—at least temporarily.

  They worked comfortably without speaking, with the familiarity of two people who navigated around one another on a daily basis, but she was intensely aware of him beside her—strong and attractive.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there today,” he said when she was seated at the island with her sandwich and he was standing at the opposite side with his.

  “Aiden.” She shook her head. “You aren’t Superman. You can’t be everywhere at once. No one can.”

  “I still should have—”

  “What? Teleported yourself to my side at the exact mo
ment I needed you? You’re too hard on yourself. You already do so much.”

  His eyes darkened. “It’s never enough.”

  “Says who? You’re one man, Aiden.” And what a man.

  He grimaced and she knew she hadn’t actually gotten through to him. He wasn’t the sort of man who ever accepted his own limitations. She’d seen that within her first week of working for him and Chloe. He was determined to singlehandedly save the world or kill himself trying. She wasn’t sure she’d ever known him to sleep more than four hours in a night.

  “You’re allowed to be human, you know.”

  “I know that.”

  She arched a brow. “Do you?”

  Another grimace. Then, after a pause that made her instinctively brace herself, “I’m sorry about the other morning—”

  “Please don’t. That wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have—you know I would never infringe on your privacy. I thought you’d said come in—” Her mind caught on the memory again, his head bent, tendons straining, the growled come on as his arm worked a rough rhythm.

  “What were you coming to talk to me about? I never did find out.”

  She blushed at the memory—the moment the night before had been completely dwarfed by the embarrassment of the following morning, but she remembered it now. Vividly. The stretching, aching moment between them when she’d been certain he was about to kiss her if his phone hadn’t rung. Her panic that somehow that almost kiss was going to blow up her life. Her desire to reclaim that moment…to see if he would kiss her this time…

  “Nothing,” she lied. “It was nothing.”

  “I guess it would have been more surprising if you had remembered what you wanted to talk to me about after that,” he said with a self-deprecating twist of his lip—as if the sight of him was so horrifying it had wiped her brain.

  But she could never tell him the truth. If she admitted her crush, admitted her awareness of him, it would change everything.

  They finished their sandwiches, the silence falling comfortably around them again. It was still early, but by unspoken agreement they headed toward the stairs. Samira automatically flicked the kitchen light off until the only light spilled down from the top of the stairs.

  The dark seemed to wrap around them, making the moment stretch, but all too soon they were at the foot of the stairs—where she would go up to her room and he would either go up to the master or into his office. Each of them back where they belonged, with a proper distance between them.

  Suddenly she just wanted to grab him and kiss him.

  She’d always been reserved, even as she admired the women who knew how to take what they wanted. The ones who were bold. Brave. Grabbing a man by his tie and dragging him in for a kiss.

  She’d never grabbed a man’s tie in her life.

  Aiden wasn’t even wearing a tie. She stared at his open collar, the line of his throat. She could kiss him there, working her way down to his shoulder and then the dip at the base of his collarbone, unbuttoning as she went to give herself more room—

  She snapped out the fantasy, grateful for the darkness that concealed her blush, when Aiden paused at the foot of the stairs and faced her.

  This was her boss. She couldn’t be having these thoughts about him.

  “I missed you this week,” he said, his tone somehow both intimate and businesslike.

  “I missed you too,” she admitted, knowing there was nothing businesslike in her own tone.

  “I’m glad we can be friends again,” he said—and she tried not to wince.

  He was right. Friends was best. So she forced a smile that felt like it showed too many teeth. “Me too!” Her voice was a little too cheerful, but he didn’t react to the dissonance. “Good night, Aiden.”

  “Good night, Samira.”

  *

  “I had a wonderful time tonight.”

  Samira resisted the urge to cringe as her date gazed at her, his eyes limpid and warm.

  To ameliorate Samira’s dating discomfort, Jackie had suggested a double date with her and Amal—which had only made it worse because apparently the battle between Amal and Jackie about the baby was ongoing and still causing ripples in their matrimonial bliss. Amal, who wasn’t usually as garrulous as Jackie, but certainly not shy, hadn’t said more than two words all night, forcing Jackie and Len to carry the conversation.

  Len seemed like a nice enough guy—a couple inches shorter than Samira was, which would have been nice to know before she wore heels tonight. He did something relating to computers for some government agency and had been part of Amal’s kickball league for two years before a herniated disc had ended Len’s kickball career—a story Samira had heard in intimate detail tonight. She also knew a great deal about Len’s Korean grandmother and his life growing up in Baltimore.

  He didn’t have any trouble filling silences—which should be a good thing. Samira certainly wasn’t going to fill them. But when he took her hand on the front step of the townhouse and leaned toward her, murmuring, “I’m so glad Amal introduced us. I really like you, Samira,” all she could think was, But you don’t know anything about me.

  They’d hardly said two words directly to one another all night. Len had entertained the table—and he was entertaining—but he hadn’t asked her a single question about herself and she certainly hadn’t volunteered anything.

  “I feel really connected to you, Samira,” he said—filling the silence again—and she just thought, You do?

  But she didn’t say a word. And she didn’t do a thing to stop him when he leaned in, cupping her face gently in his hand, and tipped it down to his.

  She didn’t know why she let him kiss her.

  Maybe to see if it would shake loose some kind of emotional reaction. Maybe because she was always trying to be what her date wanted. Maybe because she was desperate for something to take her mind off Aiden.

  But all she could think, over and over again as he made little mmm noises, was why am I doing this? Len’s lips pressed into hers, moist and just sort of there until, unable to get out of her head, she broke away.

  “Good night, Len.”

  He smiled—and his lips looked too wet, glistening like he’d just put on a fresh coat of gloss. Samira stifled the urge to offer him a tissue and unlocked the front door. “Until next time, Samira,” he said, with admirable confidence. There was so much to like about Len—so why couldn’t she make herself like him?

  He’d talked about connection, but her connection to Aiden was a thousand times more vivid even though they’d never kissed.

  Though she had seen him naked—the memory of which was forever seared into her brain.

  She opened the door with another muttered goodnight and rushed through, coming close but not quite slamming it in Len’s face.

  She heard the click of Benjamin Franklin’s toenails approaching to greet her, moving a little more slowly since his trip to the vet last week, and looked up—her gaze colliding with Aiden’s amused one. “Was someone chasing you?” he asked, his tone light.

  And her heartrate kicked up from the gleam in his eyes in a way it hadn’t even when Len had her mid-kiss.

  *

  Aiden stood from behind his desk where he’d been pretending to work for the last hour while he waited up for Samira. When she’d told him she had another date, he’d barely stopped himself from intentionally getting home late so she’d have to miss it. He may have no claim on her, but that didn’t make his feelings any more rational on the topic. He still wanted her, even if he had no right to. He may be too civilized to get in the way, but that didn’t mean he liked that she was on a date with another man.

  The overwhelming relief on her face when she shut the door on her date was a little comfort.

  She flipped the lock, shucked her jacket and hung it on the coat tree. “I believe we’ve established I suck at dating.”

  He approached, meeting her in the doorway of his office. “Maybe you’re just dating the wrong people.”

&
nbsp; She gave him a look, but continued toward the kitchen as he fell into step beside her, Benjamin Franklin weaving around their legs.

  “So. Not a love connection?”

  She grimaced as she opened the freezer and reached into the back for the Haagen Dazs she kept hidden from the girls. “He did kiss me.”

  A hot knife sliced into Aiden’s chest, but he managed not to hiss at the sensation as he got out two spoons. “Oh?”

  Samira blushed, accepting the spoon he extended to her. “I don’t know why I told you that. I just… I haven’t been kissed in a while.”

  His gaze fell helplessly to her lips. Thank God her eyes were on the ice cream container she was opening or she would have clearly seen the raw want on his face. He had his expression schooled by the time she dug out her first spoonful and extended the carton to him so he could do the same, forgoing bowls.

  “Me too,” he said as he got his own decadent spoonful.

  She looked up, catching his gaze then. “Chloe?”

  He blushed, weirdly embarrassed to admit, “A woman from work. Company party. She…” Why was it so important to him that Samira know he hadn’t initiated it? “It didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Neither did this,” Samira said, nodding toward the front step. “Obviously.”

  He forced himself to swallow the ice cream that wanted to stick in his throat before he said, “You know you can… have gentlemen callers here. I know you’ll be discreet around the girls—”

  He broke off when he caught the dancing laughter in her eyes. “Gentlemen callers?”

  He groaned at his own expense. “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t want any, Aiden.” But there was something in her eyes, something he couldn’t decipher. Some unspoken message he couldn’t interpret.

  He should change the subject. Talk about something safe, like the girls, but instead he heard himself asking, “So no chemistry with the new guy?”

  Her gaze slid to his lips for a long moment and Aiden’s heart thudded hard. Did she know what she was doing to him with that look on her face? “No chemistry,” she confirmed, but her voice was a little too breathy. “What about with your work lady?” She dug into the cartoon for another spoonful.