Forbidden - Karla Sorensen Page 0,23

she liked to sing. I knew she was thinking about that fucking list the moment she said that.

“You’re doing it again.”

This time, I didn’t look at Clark. “Can’t figure out my manager.”

In my peripheral vision, I saw his pencil slow, stop, and then start again. He always thought best when he was either drawing or building. “Why not?”

“I can’t get a read on her,” I said slowly. “But I feel like she’s … uncomfortable around me.”

Clark stopped drawing, spinning in my desk chair until he faced me. “She do a good job?”

“Yeah.”

As it always seemed to, without my permission and without any approval or forethought, my attention strayed to her. She was an irritation under my skin, not because of anything particularly vexing but simply because I felt like she was hiding something. Hiding herself.

And I didn’t like how that felt.

Because it lit the fuse on an urge that I’d long since buried.

Interest.

Everyone else at the gym had made a concerted effort to seek me out and get to know me. And it was the exact opposite with her. Maybe that was why I found my gaze drawn to her.

The softness she’d shown my daughter was the most disconcerting of all. Before that, all I’d seen of Isabel were shifting pieces that I couldn’t pinpoint, like she was standing in front of a fun-house mirror.

Clumsy one moment, graceful the next.

Impenetrable with a client, blushing in the next interaction.

Kind with the employees, refusing my kindness in turn.

Warm with those who knew her, candidly wary with me.

She was beautiful, as my daughter had said. Rarely smiled, rarely laughed. Not that I’d seen yet.

And I hated, more than I could’ve put into words, that I wanted to figure her out.

Hated that I’d checked her employee file, musing uncomfortably over the fact that she was a decade younger than I was yet seemed so much older than her age.

None of those things would I verbalize to my brother, who was already watching me with that analytical brain of his. I’d probably said too much as it was.

Because the second I saw her making Anya laugh, the second I watched them interact, the very first thing in my mind was absolutely terrifying:

Not this one. It can’t be her.

For a host of reasons. Too many to count.

Before I knew what Anya had asked her, I’d mentally cataloged each piece of Isabel that I knew. When she came up as the opposite of each thing Beth had listed to our daughter a million hours earlier, I felt the impact of it like a blow.

Disappointment.

“Aiden?” Clark asked.

“Forget I said anything,” I murmured. “I’ll get over it.”

I had to.

Chapter Seven

Isabel

“Could you possibly be more of a bitch?”

Not a single person at the table blinked when Molly glared at me. I smiled because surrounded by the sheer chaos of our family, I was in my happy place.

“Because of this?” I lifted my fork, each tine loaded to the edge with rotini noodles. My gaze stayed right on Molly as I sniffed deeply. “Mmmm, the sauce smells so good, doesn’t it?”

Her eyes narrowed. I shoved the entire bite in my mouth and groaned. Molly picked up her own fork and stabbed her salad like it was a teeny tiny Isabel voodoo doll.

My sister’s fiance, Noah, rubbed her back and set a small piece of bread onto her plate. “You can have some carbs, Molly.”

“Yeah, Molly,” I said, “you can have carbs.”

She threw the bread at me, and I caught it with a laugh.

Paige sighed. “Isabel, don’t poke the carb-deprived bear.”

She set her jaw, my happy, kind, friendly sister who was so carb-deprived angry that she looked like she was plotting my death. “Easy for you to say, you work out for a living.” Then she glanced around the table. “Oh my gosh, half the people here work out for a living. This is bullshit,” she grumbled, spearing a piece of asparagus.

She wasn’t wrong.

Logan held up his hand. “Don’t include me in that. Coaches don’t have to be in shape.”

“You sure expect your players to be, though,” Noah grumbled between bites of his own pasta.

Logan exhaled happily. “Great conditioning today, wasn’t it, Griffin?”

Noah gave him a long look.

“Speaking of people working out for a living,” I said, “where’s Bauer?”

Claire sighed. “He’s up in Vancouver for some training thing that he couldn’t miss.”

I held my fist out across the table. “Hey, now I’m not the only single one at the family dinner.”

She bumped my fist. Our nephew, Logan and Paige’s ten-year-old son Emmett,