All I Want For Christmas Is You - Penelope Ward Page 0,51

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There were tons of single weights on the ground. Barbells. Flat plates. And each time the music stopped for the first twelve rounds, I managed to find a weight that I could lift.

Except for the second to last round.

When Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stopped playing, I found myself in front of a seventy-pound dumbbell that I had zero hopes in picking up.

Right next to a very tall, much larger than I remembered, Soren.

He grinned down at me wickedly.

I’d been so caught up in the game that I hadn’t realized that he’d been very much aware of my presence until right then.

“Can you pick that up?” he asked, waiting for me to say no.

I pursed my lips, then glanced down at the weight.

Yeah, with my line of work, I didn’t need to be chancing picking that up.

But I wanted to try, based solely on the fact that I was really competitive and wanted to win.

“Uhh,” I hesitantly said. “No, I don’t think that I can.”

“I can, Ren!” a girl behind me called.

I looked over my shoulder at the woman who was obviously a Ren fan.

She, like Ren, was in great shape. She was tall, blonde, and had a six-pack set of abs that I could only dream of. Okay, let’s be real here, people. I like eating food way more than I like the idea of having abs.

So my body would never look like hers. Not ever.

“We know you can, honey.” Soren rolled his eyes and turned back to me. “So that means that you’re done?”

I shrugged and looked down at the weight one more time. “Yep.”

Then I stepped over the weight and walked to the sideline where the rest of the disqualified people were standing, watching the show.

When Madden came in and effortlessly picked up the seventy-pound dumbbell, throwing it off to the side as if it weighed nothing, I flinched.

Geez, to just so effortlessly pick something like that up and toss it like it was nothing!

Three more people were left, with the three heaviest weights.

And, when next Soren just moseyed around, seemingly not in a hurry to win, he waited for the girl who’d said she could lift the heavy dumbbell to try the barbell with what looked like more than my body weight and fail.

Then, grinning wickedly, Soren picked it up and proved his worth.

Then effortlessly dropped it, causing it to slam and clang, before pushing it off to the side, leaving him with one last man.

One that looked a whole lot similar to him in build, but not in hair color.

Mostly because the man didn’t have any hair. He was bald as a baby’s ass and didn’t seem to care that he was.

“That’s Soren’s brother, Johan,” Sophia whispered. “Spelled with a J, not a Y.”

“Johan pronounced Yohan, got it.” I paused. “They’re both very lovely looking.”

“Lovely?” She snickered. “You mean, hot as fuck?”

I felt a flush rise in my face at the use of her words. “Yes, hot as fuck.”

Sophia snickered beside me. “I’ve had a crush on Johan as long as I can remember. He’s fourteen years older than me, and though I’m twenty-one, he looks at me like I’m still the snot-nosed kid I was when he first arrived here.”

I looked down at her. “You don’t look twenty-one. When I first looked at you, I would’ve bet that you were sixteen at most.”

She batted her eyelashes at me. “Good genetics, I guess. Dad looks super young, too, but he’s thirty-five.”

I started to add up the numbers, coming up with her father being fourteen when he’d had her.

But instead of saying anything, I chose to keep my mouth shut and keep my nose out of other people’s business. See, when I’d become a doctor, I’d come across a lot of tremulous situations, and this was definitely one of them if the set of her mouth was anything to go by.

I looked over at Madden who was leaning against a garland wrapped metal upright. He was grinning as both Soren and Johan circled around the bar.

“All right,” Madden announced just then. “We’re just going to see who can clean the most and call the winner.”

I had no clue what that meant.

Not until each of them added weight to the bar and then started to lift it up off of the ground and stop with the bar right around their shoulders.

At one point, Soren even picked it up and allowed it to bounce off of his collarbone, and I winced.

“This sport looks rough,” I admitted. “Like, they might