Forbidden - Karla Sorensen Page 0,26
October wedding in a family of athletes?”
Molly raised her voice right back. “I knew it was a bye week, okay? You try to book the venue of your dreams when half the people in your family play in some sort of professional sport.”
Paige laughed.
She wasn’t wrong. Juggling the schedules of my sisters and their significant others was a nightmare.
“Lia will be gone at an away game with Jude, and Claire is going to be up in Vancouver with Bauer while he trains.”
I waved off Paige’s explanations. “It’s fine. Plenty of time to request the weekend off.”
“New guy won’t mind?” she asked.
My gaze stayed locked onto my phone. “I can’t see why he would.”
Emmett ran into the kitchen and dumped his plate into the sink with a crash. Paige rolled her eyes.
“Am I staying with you when they leave, Iz?”
“I think we’ll stay here if that’s okay.”
He nodded. “Totally. Your apartment is so boring.”
“It is not. I just don’t require seventy-plus inches of my wall space dedicated to television viewing like some people I know.” I gave Logan a look.
“Yeah,” Emmett said, “that’s why it’s sucks. You’ve lived there for two years, and you watch on your dinky laptop.”
Paige nudged him out of the kitchen. “Go do your homework before she changes her mind, you little punk.”
“And quit saying sucks,” Logan called after his retreating back.
“If that’s the worst he says at the age of ten, he’s doing better than we were,” I reminded him.
He rubbed his temples. “I listen to cursing athletes all day at work, and sometimes, I think the worst language I’ve heard came from the four of you as you were growing up.”
“That’s why you love us.”
“And that love is why I am going prematurely gray.” He sighed.
Paige patted his stomach. “My sexy silver fox,” she purred, leaning up for a kiss.
I could handle PDA from about two percent of the population, but when he grabbed her ass, I shuddered.
“And on that note,” I said, walking from the kitchen with a hand covering my eyes. “Bye, everyone,” I said, with a wave to the group at the table.
“You’re leaving already?” Molly asked with a pout. It did not escape my notice that Noah had slowly ripped off pieces of his bread to the point where she’d eaten his whole slice. No wonder she was nicer now.
“I’m beat,” I told her. “And I have to teach three classes tomorrow with Kelly gone.”
“I’m going to come work out with you,” Molly said after blowing me a kiss.
“’K. Just shoot me a text so it goes in the schedule. I don’t want anyone else booking me for a time that works for you.”
Lia made a pouting face. “Aw, I was hoping we could go through boxes after dinner and find all your I heart Aiden paraphernalia.”
The look I gave her had Lia cackling, but honestly, if she wanted a guarantee that I’d hightail it out of there, she’d just done it.
Because somewhere just up the stairs, she could find it if she looked hard enough. The metal box, with that damn letter, was in the spare room, no doubt underneath a pile of books and papers that Paige refused to organize. For a moment, I glanced up the stairs and thought about smuggling it out.
Maybe destroying the letter, seeing the ridiculous level to which I’d obsessed over him, would purge him from my system, and I could get back to normal. It sounded so good.
And so terrible.
I said the rest of my goodbyes and got an extra tight squeeze from Paige. But before I left the house, I paused, and without trying to overthink it, I took the stairs two at a time, striding straight for the spare room. It was a mess, but in the large bookshelf toward the back of the room, surrounded by spare furniture, clothes that needed to be donated, piles of toys, and all the random shit we’d accumulated over the years, I saw the black metal edge of the lockbox.
Holding my breath, I curled my hand around it and slid it out from underneath the pile of books that had hidden most of it. It was heavier than I remembered, and when I clutched it to my chest, I wished I could call Nan and tell her about Aiden. She wasn’t related to me since Logan and I didn’t share a mom, but in all the ways that mattered, she’d taken us under her wing after my dad—her ex-husband—died.
She’d want to know all about