Page 84 of Crazy In Love (Secrets of Suburbi 3)

Aiden swore he knew me, but I didn’t know him. All I really knew was that he worked for my husband. And that he might be plotting something with Detective Torres. Neither one of those were good things. Neither proved that he loved me. Neither proved that I could trust him even a little bit.

I should have been celebrating my escape. Instead, I was worried that I was just bringing my problems with me. I slammed the volume button, turning the radio back off. Stupid Christmas music.

Aiden’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Not a fan of Christmas music?” he asked. “Good to know.”

“What kind of debt did you owe my husband?”

He licked his bottom lip.

Stop looking at his lips.

“My father was on the wrong side of the law. He needed to disappear. And not just with a sketchy fake ID. He paid half up front, but then skipped town when the other half was due.”

“He left you with his debt?” I thought Aiden must be a criminal. I hadn’t considered that he might have inherited his father’s debt.

“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “Noah threatened to take my mom and sisters if I didn’t work for him.”

“What do you mean take them?”

“Take them to use their identities for his clients.” He pulled his eyes away from the road for just a second. “It’s cleaner to take a real identity when you change your face. He usually killed the originals.”

Jesus. That’s probably what my husband was going to do to me. If I hadn’t killed him first, it would have been me dead. It didn’t sound like reasonable self-defense in the eyes of the law, but it felt right to me. “How much was the debt?”

“Two million.”

“So changing your face to look like my husband…that was worth 2 million dollars to you?” He would have had to pay me 100 million to make me change my face into a monster’s.

“He would have killed my family.”

“But surely you could have figured out another way to get the money rather than doing something so extreme.”

“I didn’t exactly have an inheritance to fall back on, Ensley.”

Ouch. I let the awkward silence fill the car as I looked back out the windshield. A light snow was starting to fall. Normally I would have been thrilled for a snowfall so close to Christmas. But if I was going to head north instead of south, it just made things trickier. I wasn’t fooled by Aiden’s sob story. I believed it, but that didn’t suddenly erase the fact that he’d worked for my husband, doing God knows what else. I couldn’t trust him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. I just…I wish I hadn’t had to go through with it. I can’t even look in the mirror without cringing.”

It was really hard to be mad at him. “You don’t look just like him. You have laugh lines around your eyes. My husband didn’t laugh enough to have those.”

That earned me a small smile from Aiden.

“You knew about Sophia withdrawing the money. And my husband’s plan to leave me. Was he…was he planning on killing me?”

“Yes.”

I couldn’t actually imagine my husband killing me. Hurting me? Sure. But why get his hands bloody if he didn’t have to? Why be plagued with nightmares if you could avoid it? “You said you ran errands for him that he didn’t want to run. Was that going to be one of them? Killing me?”

His Adam’s apple rose and then fell. “I would never hurt you.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question. Did he or did he not ask you to kill me?”

He pulled his eyes from the road. “He did. But I wasn’t going to go through with it.”

“You changed your face to protect your family. I’m a stranger. I know you would have killed me in order to protect them.”

“You’re not a stranger.”

Snuggle Muffins stirred in my lap. He could feel my agitation. He was the only one in this car that really knew me. No, Snuggle Muffins didn’t know what my favorite color was. Or why I fell in love with the white picket fence neighborhood. But he knew me better than the man beside me swearing he loved me. The one saying he was helping me escape. The one saying he never would have killed me.

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