The Bachelor's Promise (Bachelor Auction) Read Free

oddity in their midst. Heat blazed up her neck and poured into her face, but she jacked her chin higher, dragging on the I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude she’d acquired early on in life.
    Ahead of her, Aiden greeted the redhead who had won the date with him. He lifted one half of that beautiful mouth in a teasing, flirtatious smile that still haunted her. The seductive gleam in his green gaze caused the breath to stutter in Noelle’s lungs, and it wasn’t even aimed at her. He clasped the woman’s hand, but as if sensing the tension whispering through the ballroom, he glanced up.
    The warm light in those brilliant eyes dimmed, replaced by a coldness that sent a shiver tripping down Noelle’s spine. Her slow tread stumbled, halted. Go , a voice urged. Keep going. But her body, frozen by the shock and growing rage in his hardening expression, paralyzed her muscles.
    Well, Aiden had finally noticed her.
    And now there would be hell to pay.

Chapter Two
    There were times in life when a person had to take a deep breath, step back, and analyze a brewing situation with calm, logic, and a cooler head.
    This wasn’t one of those times.
    As Aiden Kent regarded the petite, denim-and-leather-clad woman standing several feet from him, the viselike band strangling his lungs and chest couldn’t be described as calm or cool.
    It’d been six years since he’d last laid eyes on Noelle Rana. And never again would’ve been too soon.
    Memories bombarded him with brass-knuckled fists. His mother, wan and thin, trudging in the house from an extra shift at the nursing home. His mother, sitting at the kitchen table, bent over her checkbook, robbing Peter to pay Paul because her long-time boyfriend had once again wasted bill money on booze or another get-rich-quick scheme.
    His mother, lying on a hospital bed, her body wasting away with cancer, her tired gaze shifting to the door, waiting for the man she loved to walk through the door and be by her side before she died.
    Aiden, standing in his mother’s home two days after her funeral, staring at the wreckage her boyfriend and his son had left behind after they’d ransacked it.
    Aiden, sitting in a motel parking lot as his fiancée knocked on a first-level door—room 132—and watching as she kissed the man who appeared in the doorway. The man who happened to be Tony Rana, Noelle’s brother.
    And jumbled amid those images were ones of Noelle. Her face lighting up with relief and gratitude when he’d busted into a house full of blaring music and drunken college students. Noelle, laughing as she watched a DVD during one of their movie nights. Noelle…her blue eyes bright with desire, golden skin flushed with the heat Aiden ignited in her… Only once had he lost control and touched, and it still had the power to haunt him. Fuck . Fury, grief, resented arousal, and an overwhelming sense of helplessness pounded at his temples and pressed against his sternum. Just one glance—one goddamn glance—at the daughter of the man who’d stolen his mother’s youth and broken her heart, the sister of the man who’d betrayed Aiden with his fiancée, and he was right back there. Immersed in the past he’d left behind. Doused in the pain and powerlessness that had strangled him. Wrapped in the suffocating embrace of guilt that squeezed the breath from his lungs.
    “Really?” The redhead who had bid on and won a date with him tsked, her lovely face scrunched up in a distasteful moue.
    Aiden didn’t bother responding. Yeah, Noelle couldn’t be more out of place in this room of gowned and jeweled guests than a frog in a pond of golden koi. But it wasn’t the hip-length leather jacket that molded to her slender torso, or the tight denim and black boots that appeared painted on her long legs, that he objected to. He didn’t give a damn that with her clothes and long, tousled black hair, she’d shown up looking like a pinup, biker-chick version of Snow White.
    He gave a damn that she’d just.