“Could you find him?”

Aiden seemed surprised by the question. He gave a jerky nod and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I did. We had a talk.”

Antonia set down her glass and started on the next. Part of her wanted to respect his privacy... But my god, was she going to have to pull the details out of him? He’d driven to another town to get answers from a man who wronged him twenty-years ago and all she could get was we had a talk? “How do you feel?”

Aiden propped his chin on his knuckles and stared at her. His forest-green eyes glittered in the pub’s low lights. “Exhausted.”

She nodded. Okay then. His expression shifted from tired to pensive in a flash. He had something else on his mind, she just couldn’t decipher the answer in his eyes.

“Darling, I thank you for being with me during an especially low point,” he said through a forced smile. “But I don’t want to spend any more time on my da when we have other issues.”

Antonia averted her gaze, doing a quick scan of the pub patrons. Everyone had nearly full drinks. The patron who sat before her, required her full attention and she couldn’t bear to give it to him. She finally understood what was bothering him. It was them.

“We have to talk about it at some point,” he said in a soft voice. His fingers grazed the top of his small glass as he stared at her, his expression drawn.

“I liked it much better when we could keep pretending.”

“I did too,” Aiden admitted. “But I’m finding it hard at the moment.”

When she finally met his gaze, she exhaled. “I got an email,” she said. “From another publisher.”

He only nodded.

“They’re buying out my old company and they’d like to interview me for my boss’s old job. I would be running an imprint.”

Aiden swirled the contents in his glass before taking a sip. “When?”

Antonia waited a beat before answering him. “Thursday.”

He looked down at the bar, fiddled with his coaster, and nodded again. What she hadn’t told him was that she’d already searched the flights. She found a way to exchange her return flight for a straight shot from Shannon to Chicago and saved it. She’d held off purchasing it because she was frightened of leaving him. “You should go.”

Her heart stilled.

“If you’ve got a job to return to, I think you should take it,” he continued. His demeanor shifted into something harder. He regarded her like he had his father. The bar became a giant chasm between them.

“I don’t even know if I’ll get it. They need to interview me like anyone else.”

He shook his head. “In my experience, they do that to complete the necessary paperwork. If they’re really in-house hiring for a new division, they’re going to take the most qualified person for the position. You’re it, love.” Aiden tossed back his drink.