I could practically smell freedom in the air. I’d hit my goal: save up a year’s salary. Two months ago, my bank account had finally hit a comfortable number through sheer willpower, penny-pinching, and working long hours when I wasn’t Aiden’s assistant/housekeeper/cook. I was so close to quitting, I could feel it. Only for a little bit longer though, I reminded myself. It was honestly an admirable quality, I thought, but it was my job to make those requests come true, regardless of whether I agreed with his decisions or not. He was demanding he knew exactly what he wanted and how he liked every single thing in his life. For all his faces and grumbling, he never cussed and hardly ever lost his temper without good reason. They told me no, and then I’d have to figure things out.ĭespite what some people thought, the defensive end of the Three Hundreds, Dallas’s professional football team, wasn’t really an asshole or hard to work with. It wasn’t a big deal? The promoters wouldn’t feel that way, much less his agent, but then Aiden was used to getting his way. I swear they were wide enough for a small person to drape across comfortably. “They’ll get over it,” Aiden said casually, ignoring his nickname, rolling back two immensely muscular shoulders.

“Whatever you want, big guy,” I said with a fake smile and a flutter of my eyelashes, even as I still flipped him off. Ever.īasically, he was an anomaly a Canadian football-playing, plant-based lifestyle-he didn’t like calling himself a vegan-anomaly that was strangely proportional all over and so handsome I might have thanked God for giving me eyes on a couple of occasions. He was the last person I would ever consider polite, and he never apologized. He had only said ‘eh’ in front of me twice, and he didn’t consume animal protein. He was smart, fast, coordinated, and-as far as I knew-had never seen a game of hockey. Apparently, he liked to defy every stereotype he’d ever been assigned in his life. The size of a small building, he should have had these big, uneven features that made him look like a caveman, but of course he didn’t. When he raised his eyebrows and looked at me from beneath those curly black eyelashes, flashing me rich-brown eyes set deep into a face that I’d only seen smile in the presence of dogs, I swallowed and shook my head slowly as I gritted my teeth and took him in. Then again, just about everyone with eyes who happened to also like men, had some kind of a thing for Aiden Graves. He was lucky I had a tiny, itty, bitty crush on him otherwise, he would have gotten the shank years ago.

I knew what it was like to be bullied, and Aiden never crossed the line into being unnecessarily mean. Because of them, most things-most people-didn’t bother me.

That was saying something, considering I’d grown up with three older sisters who all had periods at the same time. Regardless, his crankiness had hit a level not previously documented in the history of the universe.

The winnipeg and me