Aligned: Volume 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a car I would pick out.” Dammit! I have to work on filtering myself before I ask her questions about her past that she obviously doesn’t know the answers to.   She opens the glove compartment searching through the papers until she finds what she’s looking for.  
    “Last year. It’s just in my name so I would assume I picked it out.” She thinks for a moment. “This is the only car I found. We lived in downtown NYC before the accident, and if Ethan were anything like his mother, he would have preferred to hire a driver to drive us around.”  
    “But not you?”  
    “I don’t know what I was like back then. I’ve been told that after a brain injury like what I experienced, personalities can change. I might not be the same person I was before, but the now me likes driving my own car.”  
    I smile at her, the excitement in her eyes as she talks about the car. If I had to make any bets, I would guess she liked cars before, too, if she spent the money to buy this one.  
    I look over at her a minute later to see her fidgeting nervously in her seat.  
    “What’s wrong?”  
    “Nothing. Just thinking.”  
    “What are you thinking about?”  
    “These last couple of weeks. I saw the pictures. It looks like you and Caroline had a good time in Seattle.” She tries to hide it, the jealousy behind her sad eyes and too bright smile, but she doesn’t fool me. She’s jealous, or she wouldn’t have brought it up.  
    I can’t help it; it makes me happy to know she’s jealous of Caroline. “We were just celebrating her movie premier as friends.”  
    “It looked like more to me.”  
    “Caroline is a friend who used to be more.”
    “How did Caroline break your heart?” she asks. My hands tense on the steering wheel.  
    “I don’t want to talk about her.”  
    “That’s not really fair. I told you all of my secrets,” she pleads sticking out her pouting lip.  
    “I’m not talking any more about her.” If I told her the truth about Caroline and me, I’d never see her again. She doesn’t need to know.  
    “Fine, then I want to go home.” She looks out the window not looking at me as we drive for several minutes. My heart races as I try to decide what to do. I don’t want to take her back to the condo yet. I want more time, but I don’t want to share my past, and I don’t want to lie. I reluctantly go for the lie I’ve told the media many times before.  
      “I met Caroline my senior year of college. She was a sweet Southern girl. Smart. She was a finance major. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I needed to finish college, needed to keep writing music, but I didn’t have a chance. I fell in love with her hard and fast. We were inseparable. We moved in together the next semester. She loved my music, which made me love her even more.”  
    I glance over at her, and she nods for me to continue.  
    “When I got signed to a music label three years later, she wanted me to pay her for the work she did. I paid her. I would have done anything for her. I loved her. A couple of months later, she wanted more. She wanted to get married, so I proposed.”
    I watch as she gasps. She hadn’t realized that I had been engaged or possibly even married. Her chest stops moving before she asks, “Did you want to propose?”  
    “Yes, at the time. I loved her. It was her idea, but I would have eventually come to the same conclusion myself and asked her anyway.”  
    She frowns in her adorable way. I want to laugh at how cute she is, but I try to hold back. A small chuckle escapes making her frown deeper, her face growing red with jealousy.  
    “Did you get married?”  
    I raise an eyebrow at her jealousy before continuing. “Caroline started planning a big, fancy wedding. Drew convinced me to have a prenup, but Caroline didn’t want the prenup. When she realized Drew wasn’t going to let me budge on the prenup, she blackmailed me to keep a negative story out of the tabloids.