Aaron: Casanova Club #7 Page 5

  I giggled, unable to help myself, and nodded. “Yes. I may or may not have found them at the back of some cupboards. I hope I didn’t overstep. I just wanted to create a fresh space for us to start the month off together. Is that strange?”

  “Not at all.”

  I exhaled a little sigh of relief as Aaron put two pieces of pizza on his plate and nodded toward the living room. “Shall we sit and just make ourselves comfortable?”

  “Works for me.”

  Aaron and I took our pizza into the living room. He went about pouring us each a drink, rum and cokes, and I found napkins and set them beside our plates on the coffee table. Then we both sank to the floor and sat cross-legged across from each other to eat.

  “I think I dropped the ball,” he said. “If I hadn’t fallen asleep, I could have put something together for our date.”

  “Don’t worry. This is perfect. Pizza works for all occasions.”

  The pizza was heavenly, thick cheese, mesquite barbeque, caramelized onions, green peppers, and the perfect dash of pineapples. I was quite aware at the time that I ordered it that I might be botching it with the pineapples. But they were magical, and Aaron seemed to agree as he picked a stray one up off his plate and popped it in his mouth.

  “So, what’s all this about?” I asked, picking up a piece of paper covered in text and scarred with a red pen. “It looks like a crime scene.”

  Aaron finished chewing a rather large bite of pizza and washed it down with a swish of rum and coke. “I started some edits on a book I’m working on for my publisher.”

  “Oh?”

  Aaron gave me a weak shrug. “Yeah. I talked to her on the phone earlier today, and she wants me working on this instead of the other book.”

  “Why?”

  “She hates it,” he said, chuckling softly. But there was no humor in his laugh. Not at all.

  “She hates it?” I asked incredulously. “Are you sure you sent her the right file?”

  He laughed in earnest this time. “Yes. Quite sure. I should have known that she wasn’t the right person for me to send it to. She wants me to stick to what she knows I’m good at, which is writing love stories.”

  “But if that’s not what you want to do anymore, isn’t that your call to make?”

  He eyed me from across the table and didn’t say anything.

  My cheeks started burning. “Sorry. I don’t know anything about your work or the publishing business. I just… I guess I can’t wrap my head around you putting that story in a drawer somewhere and never finishing it all because your publisher is focused on earning a pretty penny.”

  “There’s no point in pushing it. She won’t represent it.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he said slowly, “why write something that is never going to get out there?”

  I gnawed on my bottom lip. “There are other, more unconventional ways of publishing your work. What about self-publishing? I hear that’s a thing these days. And your name is already going to bring readers to your work. You can put a disclaimer that it’s not what they’re used to reading. Why follow the rules of someone who isn’t interested in helping you create the stories you want to tell?”

  Aaron leaned back against the sofa and draped one arm over the cushions. He had sprawled himself in a casual, comfortable way, and I didn’t realize I was tracing the lines of his body with my eyes while he spoke. He had the sort of forearms that made a girl weak in the knees.

  “I’ve worked with Marcy a long time,” Aaron said, like that answered my question.

  “Yeah? And? If a relationship doesn’t serve you anymore, why stick around? You’re the one doing the heavy lifting. The least she could do is try to meet you halfway.”

  Aaron took his glasses off, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and set them down on the coffee table. “I suppose.”

  “You’re too gracious.”

  “Business is business.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Aaron smirked. “I should hire you as my agent to handle my negotiations with Marcy.”

  I laughed and shook my head before taking a sip of my drink. “I don’t think I’d find this conversation as easy to have face to face with her. I don’t like confrontation. And let’s be honest, I don’t really know what I’m talking about here. I guess I just can’t fathom how your story can’t be told. You need to write it. Don’t you feel the same?”

  “Yes.”

  “So write it. And figure the rest out later.”

  “Is it that easy?”

  “Why can’t it be?” I asked.

  Aaron reached for another slice of pizza. “I don’t know. It used to be. But things changed when my career took off. I guess I kind of lost sight of why I was writing to begin with.”

  “Which was?”

  ”To… I don’t know. Find the space to breathe.”

  That was an answer I wasn’t expecting. I cocked my head to the side and sipped at the edge of my drink. “It was therapeutic for you?”

  “Very. As a teenager, I struggled with trying to find my identity. I felt lost a lot of the time. Like I didn’t belong. When I was home I was happy, but at school, I was constantly bombarded with reminders that I didn’t fit in. Then a teacher in my high school suggested I start writing things down. He told me to ignore rules and just write. Whatever came out was valid. So I did. And then I never stopped.”

  “That’s actually really beautiful.”

  “It was effective,” Aaron said. “I owe a lot to that teacher. My whole career.”

  I suddenly had the sense that he was no longer in the living room with me. His mind had wandered back to those days with his younger self. Had I known him any better, I might have pushed him to tell me more about his adolescence. But things between us still felt fresh, and I had no idea where the boundary between us was. I’d already been pushing him pretty hard as it was. I didn’t want to overstep and go as far as to make him pull back.

  “Well, your readers are reaping the benefits of it,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  Aaron smiled at me. “Thanks, Piper.”

  Chapter 8

  Aaron

  Piper leaned back against the sofa and let out a contented sigh while rubbing her hand over her lean tummy. “That was so good. I’m stuffed.”

  “Pizza was a good call,” I agreed. Her big brown eyes followed me as I got to my feet and collected our plates and empty glasses. “Care for another drink? A glass of wine, perhaps?”

  “Wine would be lovely,” Piper said, her voice sounding a little distracted.

  I glanced over my shoulder as I slid our dishes in the dishwasher. She was busying herself with collecting the loose pages of my destroyed manuscript, covered in red ink from my copy-editing session earlier in the afternoon. She organized them by page number as I watched, packed them into a neat stack, and then set them down on the corner of my desk.

  Then she caught me watching her and blinked. “Oh. Sorry. I just thought—”

  “Stop apologizing for being helpful,” I told her. “You’re welcomed here, Piper. Please. You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me.”

  She visibly swallowed. Even after the time that had passed, she was clearly still a little uncomfortable. That was my fault. I had to do better to make her feel comfortable and put her at ease in my home. I wanted this to feel like a home for her as well.

  I could only imagine how hard things had been on her, hopping from place to place over the last five months. She probably missed her home dearly, and if I could get as close to providing that feeling for her, then I would consider this month a success.

  Of course, anything that happened on top of that would be gravy.

  The wine rack offered an array of selection; reds and whites from all over the world. I selected a full-bodied red, a pinot noir, and brought two glasses and the bottle into the living room where Piper had flopped down on the sofa. After pouring us each a glass, I sat down on the opposite end of the sofa and wa
tched her sip from the edge of her glass.

  She had the most intoxicating lips I’d ever laid eyes on. They were the first thing I’d noticed about her when we first met back in December.

  Her lips. Her eyes. And those legs of hers. Long and strong and worthy of my dreams.

  “Aaron?”

  “Yes?” I looked up at her, hoping I hadn’t been ogling her as obviously as I believed I was. The black leggings she wore hugged her thighs and calves in my favor, and her loose gray T-shirt was cut a little low in the front, flashing me full cleavage and milky-white skin that had my mind reeling.

  “Can I ask you something a little personal?”

  I arched an eyebrow in surprise. “You can ask me anything you’d like.”

  She ran her hand along the seam on the couch, tracing the raised dark thread with the tip of her index finger. “In the name of getting to know you better, can you tell me a bit about what it was like for you growing up?”

  Oh. So we’re getting real personal.

  It felt fast to me.

  But realistically, this wasn’t all that fast at all. Especially not with a dating service like the Casanova Club. The whole idea was to get to know each other quickly, see if there was anything real there, and potentially pursue it if there was.

  I’d be a fool not to open up to her and let her in. Sure, it might sting a bit, but Piper was a trustworthy woman, the sort of woman who, just by looking at you with those doe eyes of hers, made a man feel like he was worthy of her affection.

  Even if he was not.

  I took a couple of sips of wine for encouragement. “Sure. And then you tell me about how you grew up. Deal?”

  She nodded eagerly, tucked her legs up under herself, and shimmied closer to me. “Deal.”

  Where did I begin? I was a storyteller by nature but talking about my own life always felt a little lackluster. I craved the stories that were woven with unbelievable elements, not the cliché that was my history.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be as interesting as I might have made it seem,” I warned her.

  “I don’t care how interesting it is. I want to know you, Aaron. Where you came from. What made you. That’s all.”

  I smirked. “You could be a writer yourself, Piper.”

  She flashed me a big white smile. “Don’t flatter me just to postpone the inevitable.”

  I laughed. It was impossible not to. Her charm and her wit were a perfect combination. “All right. All right. You win. I don’t know where to start. My childhood was pretty average. I am an only child. My parents had a small two-bedroom house in a neighborhood packed with other young kids. I played a lot outside, which was good for my folks because they didn’t have all that much money to keep up with the technology the other kids at school were becoming more and more consumed by every day. I preferred paper and pens, coloring, and writing shitty stories about talking dogs. It was a way to entertain myself.”

  “That’s adorable,” Piper said, resting her cheek in her palm.

  “Things were good. Standard. Boring. I dealt with some bullying at school, but I guess we all go through that at some point or another.”

  “Who bullied you?”

  “A kid named Steven Meers.”

  “Sounds like an asshole.”

  I laughed. “He was. And I was an easy target, always tucked away on my own writing in a corner somewhere. He roughed me up a couple of times. Nothing serious, but enough to get my mother into the principle’s office in a spitting rage. I’ve never been so in awe and terrified of her all at once in my entire life.”

  “Mothers are formidable when provoked. Did the school handle things with Steven?”

  “Not well. He was still there picking at me all the time, which made me angry. My parents didn’t know how to handle the anger. It came out in spontaneous bursts. I couldn’t control it either. That’s when I started to really write.”

  “Because of your teacher, right? Who was he?” Piper asked.

  “He was a gym teacher. Which was funny because I hated gym. But I responded to his no-nonsense ways, and when he told me to write down why I was so angry all the time, the words just started flowing. He pushed me to keep writing. Never to stop. What was an outlet for my anger became the one thing I love more than anything else in the world because of him.” I laughed and ran my fingers through my hair. “I know how dumb that sounds. Crazy writers, am I right? Always saying silly shit about writing.”

  Piper reached out and put her hand on my knee. “I don’t think it sounds dumb at all. I think it’s beautiful. And that teacher sounds like a wise man who was in the right place at the right time.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. He was. My anger and depression would have been far worse had he not intervened and pointed me in the right direction.”

  Piper let her hand fall from my knee. “Do those feelings ever come back?”

  I met her gaze. “All the time.”

  “That’s rough.”

  I shrugged. “Part of the artist MO, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  With a sigh, I sipped my wine and leaned back on the sofa. “Well, that’s my dramatic teenage history. It’s your turn, Miss Casanova. Please tell me all the things that made you into this.”

  Please tell me how you turned into such a beautiful, smart, kind woman.

  Piper turned a glorious shade of pink and set her wine glass down. “I think it’s going to fall a little short compared to yours.”

  “Compared to cliché teenage angst?” I barked out a laugh.

  “Yeah.” She blushed an even brighter pink.

  “Tell me your story, Piper.”

  She lifted her chin. “Well, I guess it was pretty normal. I was born and raised in New York City. My parents opened their business there when I was just barely one, and they named it after me. A restaurant called Piper’s Paradise. It was their safe haven for a long time, and every day after school, I’d walk home and come to the restaurant. When I was little, my mother would set me up at a table with crayons and coloring books, and me and my little brother Phillip would entertain ourselves for hours. When we were old enough to start helping out, we were put to work. The first job I ever had was waiting tables at the family restaurant.”

  “Did you like it?”

  Piper dropped her gaze. “No. Never.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was never a choice. It was expected of me to step into the role of working at the restaurant. My folks…” She trailed off as if looking for the right way to phrase it. “They’re wonderful people. Kind. Generous. Patient. But their struggle for what they have now has given them a very particular perception of how things should be. They think—no, they believe—that it is mine and Phillip’s duty to carry on with the family business like it’s their—no, our—legacy.”

  “But you don’t want it?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Do you feel guilty for that?” I asked.

  She nodded. “All the time. We’ve had arguments about it. My education has been tricky to come by since—” She abruptly stopped talking and shook her head. “Never mind. That stuff doesn’t matter.”

  “It all matters.”

  “I just… I don’t come from money, Aaron.”

  “So?”

  “So,” she said, refusing to meet my eye. Finally, she looked up at me. “So, all I am is a poor waitress at a shitty restaurant, and this whole Casanova thing has me putting on a charade that I think I’ve started to believe. I’ve lost sight of the woman I was, in favor of the woman I wish I could be, and it’s all getting so muddy. Sometimes, I wish I’d never gone to that audition. I wish I’d just stayed where I’m supposed to be so I could be home with my parents and my brother doing what they need me to do.”

  “Piper.”

  She stared at me. I could have been wrong, but her eyes looked glassy. This was eating her up inside.

  I took her hands in mine. They were small and cold. I
gave them a reassuring squeeze. “You deserve to be able to do something for yourself. And what’s more, you deserve to give yourself permission to grow. You’ll always be your parents’ daughter. Always. No matter where you are in the world, no matter what you choose, restaurant or something else, you are Piper James. The only person you owe happiness to is yourself. Don’t throw it away on other people’s expectations and plans for you.”

  Her eyes flicked back and forth between mine. For a minute, I couldn’t read her expression. I thought I might have blown it and said the wrong thing.

  Then she cracked a wide smile and arched an eyebrow at me. “You mean like how you’re letting Marcy bulldoze your desire to write your book?”

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  Piper snickered. “You walked right into that one, buddy.”

  The smile stretching my cheeks was nearly painful. But she was right. “I deserved that.”

  Her hands were still clasped in mine, warming up between my palms. I gazed into her deep brown eyes and wondered how such a magical person was built within the confines of a struggling New York City restaurant.

  She was the sort of girl worthy of writing a book about.

  Chapter 9

  Piper

  My bedroom was bright with sunlight on Tuesday morning when I came out of the bathroom after having my shower. My hair was done up in a towel, and I was wrapped up in the robe Aaron had purchased for me and left hanging on the back of the bathroom door. It was white, like a hotel robe, with a Henley pattern, pockets, and soft lining.

  I stripped out of my robe and changed into some workout clothes with the full intention of going for a walk or a brisk jog to kick off my day.

  And then my phone rang.

  Phillip’s name flashed across the screen, and I was grinning as I lifted my phone to my ear. “Hey there, little brother. What’s shaking?”

  “Hey, Pipes,” he said, his voice warm and full of gusto. “I didn’t think you’d answer.”

  “Of course I would. Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t know. Figured you’d be snuggled up with whatever beau you were with this month.”