But as I stood and walked back to my office, I think, even then, I knew I was lying to myself.
Chapter Nine
Isabel
“You coming back anytime soon?” Phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, I waved at the guys leaving as they finished a group training session with Aiden.
Involuntarily, my eyes strayed over to where he was wiping down the equipment they’d just used. Each flex of his arm had my body humming some happy little tune. Gawd, I needed a hobby.
Or a better vibrator.
Or a dog.
Or a new brain.
Kelly sighed, yanking my attention back to our conversation. “Doctor wants me to stay off my ankle for one more week, then I can try teaching. As long as I’m not going crazy.”
“Boo.”
“I know.”
I pulled up the schedule, squinting at the computer screen. “I can probably shift around a couple of people so no one takes on too much to cover you for one more week.”
“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?”
“Apparently not.” I tossed my notebook aside and stood.
Her hair was tumbling out of a ponytail, her chest already glistened with sweat, and I tilted my head to the side as I studied her workout tank. “Is your shirt on backward?”
She glanced down. “Ummm …”
“Oh, my word. That’s why you’re late?”
Molly laughed.
“You know what I keep thinking?”
“What?”
“You’re not even newlyweds, and you and Noah are already nauseating. What’s it going to be like when you’re actually married?”
She blew out a hard breath. “Please. We’re basically having our honeymoon before the wedding. He was all worked up after training camp today, so … ” She shrugged. “Gotta get that tension out somehow, you know?”
Nope, sure didn’t.
“Honestly, I don’t want to think about you and Noah and the kind of activities you get to have right now.”
Molly laughed again, sitting on the bench in front of the window as she tugged on her workout shoes. While she wasn’t looking, I studied my older sister. Made me wonder about how it must feel to have someone in your life like that.
And because I was me … I didn’t ask.
“Where are we starting first?” she asked.
I blinked. “Umm, I have some bodyweight exercises mapped out. Arm day today.”
“Oh, goody,” she muttered.
While she made her way over to where the ropes and bands were laid out on the rubberized floor, I cued up some music.
We worked our way through a few things, and like I usually did, I worked out alongside her.
Molly and I were shoulder to shoulder, passing a medicine ball back and forth after twisting to the side, when I asked a question that later, I’d really, really wish I hadn’t asked.
“You get all your RSVPs back?”
With a twist, I handed the black ball to her, and she mirrored my movement with a grimace. My quads were burning as I held the squat and waited for her to give it back. But when she turned back toward me, I caught a look … just a glimpse of discomfort.
“What?” I asked. I took the ball and twisted again.
When it was in Molly’s hands, I stood. She did the same, setting the ball down at her feet.
“Nothing.”
But she didn’t make eye contact when she said it.
“Molly.”
“Isabel.”
“You had a look, and don’t even pretend you didn’t. Is Noah still on that let’s invite the entire team kick?”
She exhaled a laugh. “No. Too many guys travel during the bye week anyway.” Molly paused, her eyes finally locking on mine. “But we did end up sending out a last-minute invite this week. And … and I don’t think you’re going to understand why.”
My head reared back. “What do I have to do with it?”
Before she answered, Molly leaned down to snag her water bottle, and she took a long sip. By the time she set her water down, more than ten seconds could’ve elapsed, but it felt like an hour.
“I know we have some complicated family dynamics,” she said slowly, “but I feel like we can’t avoid some of it.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I know. And Logan told me that we had to be nice to Nick even though we haven’t seen them once since they moved to the East Coast,” I said, referencing our other half-brother, who was a total a-hole. Thankfully, we rarely had to see him and his wife. There was about a minute, back when we were younger, when he challenged Logan for custody of the four of us. Gawd, what pricks we’d all be if he’d been the one to raise us.
Molly’s eyes searched mine. “I wasn’t talking about Nick.”
“Okay. Who?”
“Noah and I decided to send an invitation to Brooke’s last known address,” she said, lifting her chin.
My skin went hot. “What?” I whispered.
She nodded, and my skin went ice, ice cold. The change was shocking, bracing, and my heart went wild in my chest. I felt like Molly had taken a crowbar to my rib cage, prying me open like I was on a hinge.
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” Molly said calmly. “But Noah agreed that it was the right thing to do.”
“Why would you want her at your wedding?”
“Because … because this is a big deal! Getting married is a big deal. We’re all moving on to these chapters of our lives, and to me, it felt like an appropriate gesture to make, considering how happy I am with Noah.” Molly set her hands on her hips and exhaled heavily. “Maybe I’m handling this wrong.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have invited the woman who abandoned us.”
Even to my own ears, it sounded like a childish reaction, on par with dumping coffee down the drain, but just like I had with Aiden, the thought of facing her also had teenage Isabel roaring back in charge of my brain. But this was not the teenage Isabel who had crushes and cut out pictures. This was the past version of me who lashed out at anyone who might hurt me, and oh, how good I’d been at that.
It was the version of me who felt like she had no control over any part of her life.
Molly inhaled slowly. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy to hear this, Isabel, but it’s my olive branch to extend.”
“She doesn’t deserve an olive branch,” I said hotly. “Last known address, Molly. She can’t even be bothered to update us on where in the hell she lives, but you think she should sit in the family pews at the ceremony?”
Molly held up her hands. “If you want to bait me into fighting about this, I won’t do it.”
I set my hands on my hips. “I’m not trying to fight. I’m trying to understand why the hell you think this is a good idea. You have no clue how she’ll act or what she’ll do, Molly. Don’t you want this day to be perfect?”
Just the thought of it, of Brooke walking into the room, had my hands and fingers and arms racing with pins and needles. I didn’t know how she’d aged. I didn’t know what she’d say. If she’d pretend everything was fine. And all of those unknowns snapped and snarled in my head like a rabid dog on a rusty chain.
My temper didn’t come out often, but this was the one single thing that would make me explode faster than anything else in the entire world. If my reaction to Aiden made me feel off-balance and out of control, then my reaction to Brooke turned me into a walking nuclear bomb.
The combination of them—the first building up for weeks and the second dropping without warning—wasn’t pretty.
To my horror, Molly’s eyes welled up. “Yes,” she whispered. “Of course I want this day to be perfect. I am marrying the love of my life. Don’t you think I’ve thought through every angle of this? I’m inviting Brooke for me, Isabel. Not for her.”
I exhaled a laugh, shoving my fingers into my hair. “What could you possibly gain from this?”
Molly shrugged helplessly. “Peace, Isabel. I gain peace from knowing I’ve forgiven her for leaving, and she realizes it. Maybe Brooke has stayed away all these years because she doesn’t know how she’d be greeted.”
The look I gave Molly could only be described as incredulous. “We’re making excuses for her now?”
“No,” she answered simply. “I’m not making excuses, but I won’t hide
behind some arbitrary wall of anger either. I know therapy was bullshit for you, but it wasn’t for me. And sometimes, sister, you figure out a way to forgive someone because it’s what you need. Not because you’re letting them off the hook.”
With every word she said, I felt this overwhelming urge to flee. I wanted to slap my hands over my ears and stop listening. It was the same sensation I felt before Aiden said he bought the gym, except much, much worse.
This thing Molly had done was, at the very minimum, like yanking open the worst scar I could think of and watching someone pour saline into the torn flesh. And what that felt like … well … it brought out the very worst version of myself. I hated this side of me. This hot-wired, reactionary person who couldn’t control what she said or did.
I’d worked really hard not to be her. To let that instinct take me over. And everything in my life seemed to be instinct-driven lately, the wheel spinning wildly in a way that I couldn’t stop, couldn’t get a hold of.
I swooped down and picked up the bands we’d used, then tucked the medicine ball under my arm. “I think we should end here.”
“Isabel, come on, don’t be like this.”
I stopped, spearing her with a look. “How long have you had to process the idea of this?”
Molly swallowed before she answered. “Three weeks.”
“Great.” I nodded. “Sounds about right for me too. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to put this stuff away.”
When I returned from putting the equipment away, my playlist hit the end, and Molly was in the front area, slowly packing her bag. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not, but I was too upset to stop and ask.
Which was a big deal because anything that made my sisters cry made me want to punch things repeatedly.
And now, it just made me want to run.
Because at the moment, the only thing making my sister cry was me.
Well, me and our mother.
Fucking Brooke and the damage she’d caused with her selfishness.
Molly paused before she left the gym and gave me a long look. Thankfully, her eyes were dry.
Forbidden: A Ward Sisters Sisters Novel Page 9