“You don’t want to pull another three-class day?” she teased.
“Hell no.” I arched my back, which was still sore. “Not when I do two the day before. I’m too old for this shit.”
“You’re twenty-five, Iz.”
“Yes, but my attitude is so, so much older.”
Aiden approached the front desk, eyes on a small piece of paper in his hand. His arms were still sweaty from his session, and I wondered—just a teeeeeeny tiny bit—what they’d feel like if I trailed my fingers down the curves of his biceps.
“How many people did you have in class last night?” Kelly’s voice pulled me out of my little stare-fest, which was good because so far, I’d done nothing to abjectly embarrass myself. My current streak felt very, very impressive, all things considered.
“Ummm, hang on.” I clicked the mouse a few times, leaning in to see the tiny numbers. Maybe I needed glasses. “Thirty.”
“Oh, you bitch, my highest is twenty-five for that time slot.”
I laughed under my breath. “Anything else, Kell? I need to get some work done before a training session.”
“Nope! Love you, bye.”
I was shaking my head as I hung up. Aiden’s eyes flicked to my face as he set the paper down next to the phone. “Kelly’s ankle doing better?” he asked.
I nodded. “She can’t teach for another week, but I should be fine with coverage.”
Aiden folded his arms over his chest. “How often do trainers get injured like that?”
“Not often,” I told him. “I think she aggravated an old injury.”
Without realizing what I was doing, I stretched my wrist out and flexed my hands. He noticed.
“What is it?”
My hand stopped. “Oh. Nothing. Still just a little sore from yesterday.”
He looked like he was going to say something, opening his mouth, then closing it with a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Very slowly, he and I were treading onto more neutral ground.
“My elbow,” he said, after another pause. “Hyperextended this more times than I can count. Worst one was my second to last year fighting. Cortez caught me in an armbar, and that asshole would not let go.” He unfolded his hand and tapped the side of one thumb. “Comminuted fracture in one of my early fights. I swear, I still feel it sometimes when it gets really cold.”
“I remember,” I said quietly before I could stop myself.
He studied me carefully. “Do you?”
Turning the chair back to the computer, I started randomly clicking … things. “Kind of. I watched a lot of fights.”
My neck went damp with sweat because the injury had ended the fight, and to this day, I remembered worrying about his future fighting after they’d announced the bone had broken in two places.
There was no response from him, but he didn’t move away either.
We weren’t alone in the building. About half a dozen people were working out on the equipment. But even with those people sharing space, I had to remind myself that we weren’t alone. Ever since my long-hidden vixen decided to bombard me with all sorts of fantasies involving me and him and dark rooms and whatnot, it was almost impossible to be this close to him.
With the perfectly reasonable amount of space between his shoulders and mine, it felt almost as if he were slowly winding a string. The string, in my mind’s eye, was invisible to anyone but me, which meant I couldn’t sever it, couldn’t apply any boundaries to the way that my body wanted to sway gently in his direction.
“You post about the open positions?” he asked. The clear subject change had me breathing just a little easier.
“Yeah. I’ve already gotten a few applicants.” I brought the schedule back up so he could see. “But unless someone gets sick, we’re good with this until Kelly can come back.”
As Aiden glanced at the schedule that I’d pulled up on the computer, I closed my eyes and let out a slow breath.
If I could manage one entire day without doing something stupid, I’d feel like it was something I could get control of. If only my imagination would cooperate. For a virgin, my imagination was very, very good.
When I opened my eyes, he was squinting at the screen, and it made me smile. He noticed.
“I can’t see these tiny numbers,” he muttered, leaning over my shoulder.
“Me neither,” I admitted.
“Molly Ward,” he said quietly, his finger tapped the screen for the training session I’d popped into the calendar. His arm brushed against mine as it did. “Relation or coincidence?”
“My oldest sister.” I gave him a sideways glance. “She paid, if you’re wondering.”
“I wasn’t.” He moved away from the desk, and I found myself losing a bit of that closely-held tension. “You make your sister pay, huh?”
I exhaled a laugh. “She can afford it.”
Aiden stared out into the parking lot, but I couldn’t tell if he was going to say anything else by the way he held himself.
“My brothers think they should be able to work out for free,” he said. “I thought about being nice and saying yes.”
My attention stayed on the computer screen as I tried to decipher what he was trying to get from me. Small talk was not something we’d mastered. Which made my fantasy life even worse, the more I thought about it. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to know about him. I did. But it was so obvious that the more I knew of Aiden, the more I’d want him.
But this tenuous thing we were doing by walking a strange tightrope of tension couldn’t continue.
Finally, I glanced at him. “Depends on how many brothers you have.”
“Too many.”
His dry answer had me smiling. His brows dropped, like my reaction confused him.
“Did Amy ever look into getting a key scan set up on the door?” he asked.
At the change in topic, my eyebrows lifted. “A couple of years ago. At the time, we couldn’t swing it.”
“Okay.” He glanced at a big black watch on his wrist, and I had to fight not to allow my eyes to trace along the veins that mapped his forearm. I wanted to lick them like they were candy. “I have to go pick up Anya from my brother’s. Your sister is here after open hours are done, right?”
I nodded.
He gave me a pointed look. “Lock that front door.”
“Will do,” I answered quietly.
It would have been easy to dismiss him or tell him that I would be fine if I was here with Molly. That I’d be fine even if I was here alone. It would have been easy to take his words for something deeper than face value, like they were meant for me alone, but the hard truth was that he would’ve said it to Kelly or Emily. He would’ve told our male trainers that too. My heart wanted to soak up his words and let them bring life to the rest of my body, but my pride slammed the wall shut. Because that would help nothing.
While he gathered his stuff from his office, I kept myself busy. One of our members flagged me down, needing help with his form, so I wasn’t even watching when Aiden left for the day. By the time the open gym hours concluded and the last person left, the late summer sun was still bright in the sky. Because the glass front of the gym faced west, it was my favorite time to do work in view of the windows. While I waited for Molly to arrive, I sat on the floor with my back braced against the front desk and started scrawling out ideas for the self-defense class.
Immersed in those ideas, which I’d been thinking about for months before Aiden ever took ownership, I didn’t even notice Molly’s car pull in. It wasn’t until she pulled open the front door and shouted, “I’m so sorry I’m late.”
I jumped, hand slapping my chest. “Holy shit, Molly.”
She eyed me. “Didn’t you see me peel into the parking lot?”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.