No Rep (Madd CrossFit #1) - Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,26

with me.

He was all about Taos.

Taos held him, didn’t care when Vlad pulled his beard, and ultimately only forced himself even deeper into my heart until I knew that I was in love with him.

I wanted him. Badly.

And I had a feeling that he wanted me, too.

“How do you feel about a couple’s competition?” he asked, looking at me with a gleam of excitement in his eyes.

I frowned. “What?”

“Couple’s competition. Two people, girl and boy, compete among about fifty other gyms in the area,” he explained.

I frowned. “But Taos, I don’t have half the moves that would be required to do that yet.”

He shrugged. “Either partner is allowed to shoulder however much of the workout they want as long as both partners complete fifty percent of the load. For instance, if we were doing double-unders—which you have—and bar muscle-ups, you would just do all of the double-unders, leaving me with all of the muscle-ups.”

I was already shaking my head, but inside I was excited as hell that he’d asked me.

“I…” I paused.

“I’ll do it with you.” Maria sauntered up, her breasts practically falling out of the shirt that she was wearing.

I moved until I was closer to Taos, practically touching him, and placed one hand on his chest to get his attention once again focused on me.

“I’ll do it under one condition,” I said.

“What?” he asked, his breath fanning across my face.

I leaned up until my lips were practically pressed against Taos’ ear—and oh, God, did he smell good—and said, “You promise to never, ever, never think that you did something wrong there. She was the one who left you. More’s the pity. She gave away something that was beautiful and didn’t even realize it at the time. Now, it’s too late.”

He pulled back, a look of happiness in his eyes. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

I shrugged. “I know enough to know that she was stupid. She let you get away.”

CHAPTER 10

Don’t rush me. I’m waiting for the last minute.

-Coffee Cup

TAOS

The next day, it was storming.

In fact, it was storming so badly that nobody in their right mind would be out in it.

However, I owned a gym, and we had a class scheduled that I again had been conned in to teaching. It wasn’t like I could just decide to stay home because the weather was bad, but no one had shown up for the five am class and it wasn’t looking good for the six am class.

In fact, they called for the storm to turn into ice by midmorning, and that was a pretty big deal seeing as it hadn’t snowed or iced in Paris in about seven years.

We were in a weird spot in Texas.

See, the north part of Texas got it all the time. But with us being more mid-Texas, the possibility of it getting cold enough here was something that didn’t happen all that often. Hence the reason for no snow in seven years.

Why did I know that it was seven years? Because that was all Fran had talked about last night during the workout.

How excited she was for it to snow.

Which was funny because she hated being cold.

If I asked her to run outside, the girl hated it because it meant that she would be cold.

Which was hilarious to listen to.

That, and even her whining voice was sexy as hell.

Maria’s had literally felt like claws raking against the inside of my skull.

I hadn’t been able to stand listening to her whine, and the bitch did it a lot.

I hadn’t realized how much she’d done it until we were officially divorced, and I realized that there was a direct correlation between the number of headaches that I got, and the amount of time I spent with Maria.

I stood at the windows that separated the outside from the inside of the gym on the off chance that Fran was crazy and would arrive.

When the clock struck thirty minutes after five, there still wasn’t a single soul in the building besides me and the cat.

“Well, looks like I get to go home after all, Rogue,” I said to the cat. This weather would keep everyone inside today.

The cat picked his head up from the seat of the nearest rower and yawned before dropping it back down to his front paws.

I rolled my eyes and waited some more, convinced that nobody was coming.

Thinking I could go ahead and get some work done, I cued up some music and started to go through a series of stretches