I pointed in the direction of my bedroom and nodded. “It’s in there.”

He disappeared through the door between my living room and kitchen a second later, and I took that moment to let out my own shaky breath. My head had started hurting just a little bit at some point, and I knew it was the result of hunger and tension. In the kitchen, I grabbed my now-cold sandwich, and leaned over the sink while I took a few bites out of the grilled cheese.

I wasn’t even halfway done eating when Aiden appeared, leaning against the doorway that led from the kitchen into my bedroom, crossing his arms over his chest. If I wasn’t in such a shitty mood, I would have appreciated the breadth of his shoulders, or how his arms were perfectly proportionate to the rest of his massive size. I didn’t need to look at his thighs to know those things had the width of a redwood tree.

“I’ll pay you,” he said while I was not checking him out.

Ready to tell him one more time that I was fine money-wise, Aiden kept going before I could.

He laid the bomb. “I’ll pay off your student loans and buy you a house.”

I dropped my sandwich in the sink.

Chapter Eight

To say that I had an Achilles heel would be an understatement.

Growing up in a family with five kids and a single mom, money had always been tight. So, so tight. Scarce, really. Crayons in elementary school were those off-brand ones that didn’t color so well. I’d worn mostly hand-me-downs exclusively until I was old enough to pay for new things myself, and that hadn’t been until I was with my foster parents.

But if there was one thing that having so little for so long had taught me—it was the value of money and appreciation of belongings. No one respected money more than I did.

So, it had been to my utmost horror, when I applied to college and received zero scholarships. None. Nada. Not even $500.00.

I was smart, but I wasn’t an extraordinary student. I was shy in school. I didn’t raise my hand much in class, or joined every extracurricular activity available. I didn’t play sports because there wasn’t disposable income lying around to buy uniforms, and there hadn’t been any for us kids to join league teams either. My favorite thing had always been hanging out by myself, drawing and painting, if I had paints. I didn’t excel at anything that could have gotten me a scholarship. My high school hadn’t had a fine arts program worth anything; the closest class I’d been able to take was Wood Shop and I’d excelled at it. But where did that lead me?

There was a very clear memory of my high school guidance counselor telling me how average I was. Really. She’d said that to me. “Maybe you should have tried harder.”

I’d been too shocked to have to count to ten after that.

All As and a couple of Bs hadn’t been good enough. Yet I’d still been horrified and disappointed when I got accepted to every decent school I applied to, but received no financial help other than a federal grant I qualified for because of my financial need, but that only covered 10 percent of my total yearly tuition.

And, of course, the school I wanted to go to was out of state and incredibly expensive. I’d loved it more than I loved any other one I’d gone to check out with my friends the fall of my senior year.

So, I did the unthinkable. I took out loans. Massive student loans.

Then I did the next most unthinkable thing in the world: I didn’t tell anyone.

Not my foster parents, not my little brother, or even Diana. No one knew except me. There was no other person in the world who carried the burden of nearly $200,000.00 on their conscience but me.

In the four years since graduating with my bachelors, I’d been paying off as much as I could from my loans while also attempting to put money aside in savings to eventually be able to dedicate myself full-time to my dream. A debt as large as the one I had was a bottomless pit that you had to accept like it was Hepatitis—it wasn’t going anywhere—but it only served to make me work harder, which was why I didn’t mind going to work for Aiden, and then doing my design work well into the middle of the night afterward. But there was only so much you could take, and I’d saved and paid off a significant enough of a chunk to get to the point where I felt like I could breathe for the first time in years… as long as I didn’t let myself look too closely at the loan statements I got in the mail every month.

But…

“What do you think?” the big man asked, leveling his stare right at me as if he hadn’t just busted out the greatest secret in my life.

What I thought was he was out of his damn mind. What I thought was my heart shouldn’t have been beating so quickly. What I also thought was no one else should have known about how much money I owed.

Mostly though, a small part of me was thinking there was a price for everything.

“Vanessa?”

I blinked at him before looking down at my poor, contaminated sandwich sitting in the sink. Then I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and opened them once more. “How do you know about my loans?”

“I’ve always known.”

What? “How?” I felt… I felt a little violated honestly.

“Trevor did a background check on you.” That sounded vaguely familiar now that he mentioned it, even though it was disturbing to hear they knew something I’d tried so hard to keep to myself. “There’s no way you’ve managed to pay them off,” Aiden stated.

He was right.

Vomit. Vomit. Vomit.

“Whatever you owe, I’ll pay it.”