A muscle in his cheek twitched and he ground out, “Please.”

Hell was about to freeze over. He’d said please?

Before I could think about it much more, voices suddenly came from one of the apartments above mine, damn it. Aiden’s big frame was a little too eye-catching, especially when he happened to be a celebrity in Dallas. Just a few days ago, I’d seen a handful of Three Hundreds jerseys around the complex with GRAVES stitched on the back. The last thing I needed was for someone to see him when I had made sure for years not to let anyone find out he was my boss.

“Come in,” I muttered, waving him in quickly before someone spotted him.

He didn’t need to be told twice. Aiden squeezed his way inside with just enough time for me to close and lock the door just as three men came down the stairs. I walked around him and headed into the kitchen overseeing my living room, frustrated with myself for inviting him in.

“You look different.” His comment had my steps faltering for a moment.

“I’ve worn dresses in front of you before,” I snapped a little more bitterly than I would have liked.

“Not one like that,” came the quick, nearly brash retort that came out aggressively enough for me to frown. “I wasn’t talking about your shirt.”

My shirt?

“You look different.”

I sniffed and circled around the kitchen counter. “My hair is a different color, and I lost weight. That’s all.”

Taking a seat at my small table, Aiden’s gaze brushed over the part of my body he could see, my face, my neck, chest, and bare arms. Good lord, he made me self-conscious. Making another sweep over me with those dark orbs, his thick eyebrows climbed up his forehead as he made an indiscriminate noise, like a “hmm.” Like most things with Aiden, another thought immediately forgotten. The next comment out of his mouth confirmed it. “I want you to come work for me again.”

I couldn’t hold back my groan as I turned to the refrigerator.

“I mean it,” he kept going as if I doubted him.

I took my time opening the fridge, and ducked inside to pull out the water jug in there. I was stubborn. I accepted my flaw honestly. But Aiden? Good grief. He had me beat by a landslide; he took stubborn and hardheaded to a whole new level. He was supposed to have just forgotten my existence after a couple of days.

Keeping my attention down as I closed the fridge door, I took a calming breath in and let it out. I knew him, and the way he was acting really shouldn’t be a surprise. It was like spoiling a kid his entire life and then trying to put your foot down once it was too late. I’d let him get away with too much over the course of the time we’d known each other, and I had to deal with it now. “I meant what I said too. I don’t want to, and I’m not going to.”

Silence ticked by, second on top of second, buoyant and endless with the things I thought we both could have said to each other but didn’t.

The chair Aiden was sitting on creaked with his weight. I didn’t want to look at him. “You don’t get on my nerves,” he noted almost as if I’d cured cancer.

I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t even look at him. You don’t get on my nerves. I had to set the jug on the counter, and grip the sharp edge of the countertop with my free hand. How did he expect me to respond? Did he want me to thank him for such a heartfelt compliment?

I counted. One, two, three, four so that I wouldn’t just blurt something out in frustration. Picking and choosing my words carefully, I lifted my head and pulled a glass out of the cabinet. “Tell your next employee that talking isn’t required,” I said as I poured water into my cup.

“I never told you that,” his rough, low voice responded.

“You didn’t have to.” Actions spoke louder than words after all.

He let out an exasperated noise and followed it up by saying something that stopped me in the middle of putting the water jug back in the fridge. “You’re a good employee.”

One, two, three, four, five.

Of all the things he could have said…

I could have smacked him in the face right then. I really could have. “There are plenty of good employees in the world. You pay well enough for someone to not half-ass their duties.” I set the water into the fridge and closed the door. “I don’t know why you’re here. Why you’re insisting that you want me to come back when I don’t want to be your assistant anymore, Aiden. I can’t make myself any clearer.”

There. I’d said it, and it was painful and relieving at the same time. “Do you remember when I first started working for you? Do you remember how I’d tell you good morning every day and ask how you were doing?”

He didn’t reply.

Perfect. “And do you remember how many times I’ve asked you if there was something wrong, or tried to joke around with you only for you to ignore me?” I licked my lips and paused where I was, one shoulder against the refrigerator, able to see him at the kitchen table. “I don’t think anyone could get on your nerves unless you let them. And anyway, I told you that none of this matters any more anyway. I don’t want to work for you.”

The big guy sat forward in his seat, his nostrils flaring. “It matters because I want you to come back.”

“You didn’t even care that I was there to begin with.” Sudden irritation at what he was trying to do set the nerves of my spine on fire. You will not bang your head against the fridge. You will not bang your head against the fridge. “You don’t even know me—”

“I know you,” he cut me off.

Exasperation like I didn’t know gripped my chest. “You don’t know me. You’ve never tried to know me, so don’t give me that,” I snapped and immediately felt guilty for some stupid reason. “I told you I was quitting, and you didn’t give a shit. I don’t know why you care now, but it doesn’t matter. This work relationship between you and me is done, and that was all we had to begin with. Find someone else, because I’m not going back to work for you. That’s the end of the story.”

Aiden didn’t blink, didn’t inhale or exhale; he didn’t even twitch. His gaze was locked on me like his pupils were all-knowing lasers capable of emotional manipulation. For the longest moment in time, there wasn’t a single sound in my tiny apartment. Then abruptly, in a tone that was completely Aiden, as if he hadn’t just heard a single word that came out of my mouth, he said, “I don’t want someone new. I want you.”

I suddenly wished I could have recorded his comeback so I could sell it on the Internet to the hundreds of girls who filled his inbox every week with offers of dates, blow jobs, companionship, and sex.

But I was too busy getting more and more aggravated by the second to do so.

Where the hell was he getting the nerve to say that to me?

“Maybe—and I just want you to think about it for the future—you should consider what other factors are important in employee retention. You know, like making people feel appreciated, giving them a reason to stay loyal to you. It isn’t just about a paycheck,” I replied as gently as I could, even though I knew damn well he didn’t exactly deserve to get handled with kid gloves. “You’ll find someone. It’s just not going to be me.”

His brown eyes sharpened and left an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I’ll pay you more.”

“Listen to me. This isn’t about money, for freaking sake.”

About a thousand different thoughts seemed to go through his head in that instant as one of his cheeks pulled back into what seemed like half a grimace.

I had no idea what he was thinking, and I sighed. How did we get to this point? Six weeks ago, I couldn’t get him to tell me ‘Hello.’ Now, he was at my apartment, sitting at my hand-me-down dining room table, asking me to work for him again after I’d walked out.

It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

His chin tipped back in a determined gesture I was too familiar with. “My visa expires next year,” he ground out.

And… I shut my mouth.

A few months ago, I remembered opening his mail, and seeing something about his visa in an official-looking letter. A letter that I thought he might have gotten again right before I quit, when I’d told him he needed to check the things I’d left on his desk.

I didn’t get how a visa could be used as an excuse for being a jerk.

“Okay. Did you already send the paperwork to renew it?” The words had no sooner come out of my mouth than I was asking myself what the hell I was doing. This wasn’t my business. He’d made it not my business.

But I still wasn’t expecting it when he said, “No.”

I didn’t understand. “Why not?” Damn it! What the hell was I doing asking questions? I scolded myself.

“It’s a work visa,” his words were slow, like I was mentally impaired or something.

I still didn’t get what the problem was.

“It’s subjective to me playing for the Three Hundreds.”

I blinked at him, thinking maybe he’d taken one too many hits to the skull in his career. “I don’t get what the problem is.”

Before I could ask him why he was worried about his visa when any team he signed with would help him get a new one, he cleared his throat. “I don’t want to go back to Canada. I like it here.”

This was the same Winnipeg native that had only once gone back to his motherland in all the time we’d worked together. I’d grown up in El Paso, but I didn’t go ‘home’ much either because nothing really felt like home any more. I hadn’t had a place that made me feel safe or loved or warm, or any of the feelings I figured could be associated with what ‘home’ should feel like.

I glanced at the wall to the side of his head, waiting for the next revelation to help make sense of what he was saying. “I’m still not understanding what the issue here is.”