Forbidden - Karla Sorensen Page 0,33

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,