Page 71 of Heat Exchange
Thanks for the heads-up.
There was a lot more she wanted to say, but she could almost feel the impatient stares drilling into her back.
Busy now.Talk to you later.
Coming over?
She hesitated, but somehow it didn’t feel right tonight.
Not tonight.But I’ll text you.
Good night.
As she put her phone away and plastered a smile on her face, Lydia wondered how upset Aidan would be that their secret was out. And she wondered if, like her, he’d feel a good amount of relief along with everything else. She had no idea how this was going to turn out for any of them, but at least the lying was over.
Chapter Seventeen
ATLEASTTHElying was over, Aidan thought as he walked toward the front door of the ice rink. He wasn’t sure what his reception would be today, but at least he wasn’t hiding anything anymore. Maybe they could work through it and salvage their friendship.
They didn’t have a tour scheduled for several days, which would have been nice as a cooling-off period before they had to work together again. But they’d already scheduled this ice time and Aidan wasn’t going to back out at the last minute, if for no other reason than Scotty would see it as a sign of weakness.
He was running a few minutes late, though, having sat in his truck for a few minutes in his driveway, debating on whether or not showing up was the right move, so he anticipated the locker room being empty when he went in.
Scotty was sitting on one of the benches, obviously waiting for him. “I wasn’t sure if you were gonna be here.”
“I said I would be.”
“Ah, that’s right. You’re a man of integrity, right?”
Aidan looked him in the eye. “I never wanted to lie to you. I hated every minute of that, but...”
“But what? I think you owe me complete sentences, at least, after all these fucking years.”
“If I talked to you about her and you told me to keep my hands off her, it was going to be worse because I couldn’t do it. I tried. At least this way, I didn’t outright lie to your face.”
“You’re not too ugly, you’re a firefighter and you don’t live in your mother’s basement. You could bang any chick in Boston, but you gotta mess around with my sister?”
“It just happened, Scotty. It’s not like it’s something I planned to do. But when she came back...it was just different somehow. I don’t know if I was different or if she was different, but there was chemistry.”
“She’snotdifferent. She’s still my sister.” Scott scrubbed his hand over his face, shaking his head. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time. There wasn’t any blonde chick at the market whose name you didn’t remember. That text was from Lydia.”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t have the balls to just come and talk to me like a man about it?”
Normally, Aidan wouldn’t take well to a comment like that, but he forced himself to accept that, in this case, he had it coming. And the only way his friendship with Scott Kincaid would survive was if he took whatever venting his best friend needed to do without escalating it.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. It was just going to be...hell. I don’t know. We knew you’d be pissed, even though she’s an adult and can make her own choices.”
“That sounds like a douche bag way of saying it’s none of my business.”
“I don’t know.” Aidan dumped his bag and stick on an empty bench. “Part of me wants to say it’s not, but I know I crossed a line.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
The door to the locker room banged open and Jeff Porter stuck his head in. “You two girls start your periods or are you gonna play some hockey?”
Scotty, who was dressed and ready, stood and grabbed his stick. “I’m coming.”
