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CHAPTER FIVE
AIDEN listened to her running footsteps up the stairs and along the landing, and heard the slam of her door. Then he took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.
Well, hell.
There was movement from his side and Mick turned the camera on him for a close-up.
‘Go away, Mick.’ Aiden didn’t even look at him as he spoke the words. ‘Give me a second, here.’
‘No can do. My boss would kill me.’
‘Your boss will thump you if you don’t.’ He glanced up at the lens. ‘And you know I pack a mean punch.’
Mick grinned behind the camera. ‘Touchy today, aren’t we?’
‘Mick—’
The glare would have been enough to make most grown men step back at least a couple of steps. But Mick merely continued grinning. ‘It’s in my contract to film everything. Them’s the rules.’
‘I wrote the damn rules.’
‘Well, you dug yourself a bit of a hole there, then, didn’t you?’
With a shake of his head he looked past Mick’s shoulder to the courtyard beyond. ‘Remind me never to hire you again.’
The camera continued rolling as Aiden stared off into space. Then, after several minutes’ silence, Mick spoke with a soft voice. ‘Finding this one tough, huh?’
He smiled a small smile. ‘She’s not what I expected, I guess.’
It was an interesting dilemma. He thought back over the brief he’d originally put together for the show and the plan he’d formulated from it. He’d had a type of woman in mind from the start, but Caitlin Rourke was a surprise to him. She was—more than he’d expected.
‘More complicated.’
‘You expected some party girl who would see this all as some big fun game?’
‘Maybe I did.’
There was a second’s pause. ‘A bit like Caitlin just said, in a way.’
After another brief glare Aiden closed his eyes and sighed. ‘Probably.’
‘But it’s not a game to her.’
‘Yeah.’ He opened his eyes and smiled sarcastically. ‘Because owning a fancy place of her own is such a big deal.’
‘And that’s wrong in your eyes?’ Mick frowned slightly as he asked the question. ‘Is it wrong for her to get that because she’s so young, or something?’
‘Things that matter that much are sweeter when you work hard for them. When you’ve had to make sacrifices along the way. It makes it more worthwhile when you achieve your goals.’
‘More honourable than lying your way there? Or fooling the people that you care about along the way?’
‘I happen to think so.’
The camera continued rolling.
‘She’s had an easy go of it up ’til now. Everything all neat and tidy.’
‘Apart from Liam.’
Aiden looked up at the lens again. ‘Was that his name?’
Mick nodded without moving the camera an inch.
Aiden mirrored the nod. ‘That had to hurt.’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘Still does, by the looks of things.’
Hell.
With a frown he pushed his chair back from the table. Standing up, he looked at the camera again. ‘I don’t suppose I can persuade you two to stay here while I go grovel?’
Two heads shook in unison.
‘Caitlin?’
There was silence from the other side of the closed door.
Aiden glanced at Mick and Joe, who both stared back at him.
‘Look, I didn’t mean to upset you about your fiancé. That wasn’t what I was aiming for.’
The silence continued, and another sideways glance saw Mick shrug his shoulders and Joe smile weakly.
Then a small voice sounded from behind the pine door. ‘What exactly were you aiming for, then?’
He thought his answer over carefully before stepping closer to the door. ‘I was just trying to point out that you can’t plan for everything. Neither of us can.’
The answering silence was deafening.
Aiden leaned his forehead against the door as he tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t put both his size tens right in it again.
‘I just don’t know how else to get through this if we don’t plan it out. My family knows me too well.’
The restaurant obviously meant more to her than he could possibly understand. In a small part of his mind he wanted her to have the guts to get it by herself. To fight and work for what she wanted rather than having it handed to her in some get-rich-quick scheme. He knew only too well from recent experience that she had enough backbone to stand up and fight against him when she believed he was out of line.
So where was that mettle when it came to fighting for her dream? It didn’t make any sense.
But he had opened an old wound and he felt guilty about that. The best way to get rid of that ugly feeling would be to try and make amends.
‘Tell me how you were with him.’
The bed creaked a little, and he could imagine her turning to look at the door.
‘With Liam?’
‘Yes, with Liam.’ He leaned back from the door again and waited, his breath held still inside his chest.
‘We flirted a lot.’
Aiden smiled and let the air escape in a small burst of laughter. ‘You don’t like it when I flirt with you.’
‘You said you weren’t flirting.’
Turning around, he grimaced slightly at the camera and then sat down on the floor with his back against the door. ‘I may have lied about that. I did say I could lie when the cause arose.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Lie to you or flirt with you?’
‘The second one.’
He leaned his head back. ‘Maybe I’m just a flirtatious kinda guy.’
Her smile came through in her voice. ‘Nah, not you. You’re too sullen for that game.’
‘You think I’m sullen?’ A glance at his crew found them both smiling. ‘All right, I guess I can be—a little. But maybe you bring out the flirty side of my nature.’
‘You don’t even like me, Aiden.’
It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. That was one of the things that probably bugged him the most. Having spent all morning alone in her house, he’d done a bit of an investigation and found everything from photograph albums to family videos. He liked what he’d seen just fine. That wasn’t the problem.
‘I think I’m maybe a little envious of you…’ The words made their way out into the big wide world of their own accord. ‘Of all people like you.’
She went silent again for a brief moment, then, ‘Why?’
‘Because not everyone’s had this fairy tale of a life that you’ve had.’
‘Losing Liam was hardly the best thing that ever happened to me.’
‘I know.’ He softened his voice. ‘And I know that’s something you’ll probably never completely get over. But you were right in what you said. You were lucky to have found it in the first place. That doesn’t happen to many people these days.’
When silence followed his words again he let the words keep coming. ‘And you have a great family—a close family who are all there for you. It’s why the show chose you. To see if you could manage to make all the people that know you so well believe in a lie.’
‘And why did they choose you?’
They hadn’t. He’d chosen himself. Because the role he had to play was so complex and only someone who had produced the thing from the very beginning could know what to do when things got difficult. To get the dramatic result they wanted. To make things difficult for Caitlin.
But in volunteering he’d also managed to fulfil another major criteria. He was as opposite to Caitlin Rourke as it was possible to be. In practically every way.
‘Because I’m the flipside of you.’
‘In what way?’ There was barely a heartbeat of a pause before she figured it out. ‘You don’t have a family, do you?’
He frowned hard.
‘None at all?’
The pity in her voice made him sick.
‘Aiden?’
‘What are you going to do about it, Caitlin? Adopt me? I’m a little past the age for you to do that.’
The bed creaked again and her voice sounded a little closer to the door. ‘That’s why you have no experience of fairy stories and your face being scrubbed?’
‘Don’t go crying on me in there.’ He turned his head towards the door a little. ‘There are millions of us around the world who didn’t have a family of their own. I was one of the lucky ones. I had loads of families.’
‘That’s why you spend you life drifting around. No serious relationships, no long-term career. Because you have no grounding in those things.’
Actually, she was wrong on that one. He had a career. A damned good one, as it happened. He’d worked hard to get to the top of his game and he was hell on legs at it. But he couldn’t tell her that or he’d blow the whole thing.
‘I’ve been in serious relationships—’
‘Serious relationships last longer than six months.’
‘Not if they don’t work out, they don’t. Just because they’re short doesn’t mean they weren’t great. That’s life.’
‘And why didn’t they work out?’
He vaguely noticed that her voice sounded very close as he answered, ‘They just didn’t.’
There was a sliding noise against the door as Caitlin sat down on the opposite side of their protective barrier. ‘What were you like with them?’
‘Flirtatious, sullen, jealous, happy. More of everything. More alive. The usual share of things in any good relationship.’
They sat in a silent understanding after he spoke.
Aiden closed his eyes again for a few moments. Stunned by how much of himself he was giving to her in such a short space of time. He knew that reality shows often brought out an unusual level of intensity in people’s relationships. But he really hadn’t been prepared for it happening to him. It surprised him. But what surprised him more was that it didn’t feel as if he’d just had teeth pulled. It felt somehow right. As if by being honest he had lifted some kind of barricade that he hadn’t even known he’d been carrying around.
It was just weird that it was with someone like Caitlin.
Her voice was low, so quiet that he might not have heard it if he hadn’t been a mere door’s width away from her. ‘Then that’s how you need to be with me.’
‘And how you were with Liam is how you need to be with me.’
‘So that we can fool everyone into believing we’re in love?’
‘Yes.’
Her voice sounded different to his ears—uncertain, a little nervous. She was going out on a limb. Veering from her habit of a lifetime that had things all laid out and every eventuality prepared for. It was a big step for her, and Aiden knew that as soon as the words left her lips.
‘Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll look at each other and see the great things we saw in the people we cared about. And we’ll make believe as it comes along.’
Aiden felt a wave of something resembling fear cross his chest. ‘Yes.’
CHAPTER SIX
WITH Mick and Joe assigned to Aiden the next day Caitlin found herself in the company of John and Louise—aka Lou.
Caitlin was more silent in their company. But not because they weren’t nice people. It had more to do with a distinct lack of a decent night’s sleep.
After their ‘truce’ Caitlin and Aiden had spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening looking at photos and videos of her family while she explained who they all were. She’d talked about growing up with her sister and two brothers, about childhood holidays and what they were all doing with their lives now, as grown-ups. And all the while she’d been aware of the fact that he didn’t have memories like hers.
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