“Guess I got your order wrong.”
I froze. His voice came from right behind me, all low and growly. My eyes fell shut because holy shit, I was destined to get off on the wrong foot with this man, wasn’t I?
Blowing out a slow breath, I turned to face him. His eyes betrayed the slightest hint of amusement that he caught me, but everything else about his face was even and steady. In fact, every physical feature that made up Aiden Hennessy seemed carved straight from stone.
Not just his face, which was handsome enough, but his shoulders and arms, the veins running down toward his massive hands.
I’d seen the gracefully inflicted violence his body was capable of, the speed and strength.
And as he towered over me, I hated that I had to lift my chin in order to meet his gaze.
“The order was fine,” I told him. “Drank too much already this morning.”
The sound he made in the back of this throat was so ambiguous that I had to physically chomp down on my tongue to stop from defending myself. When the front door opened and a group of members walked in for Kelly’s class, his attention moved from me to the sound of their bright laughter. Immediately, the pressure on my lungs eased. There was some magic voodoo he had going on, and I did not like it one tiny bit.
“Seems like the classes are always well-attended,” he said. His gaze left the group of women and came back to rest on my face.
I nodded. “Especially on the weekends.” I sucked in a deep breath and held his eyes. “I hope you don’t intend on getting rid of those.”
He shook his head. Nothing else. Just a shake of his head.
“Good.”
His lips twitched just a fraction before they settled back in a firm line. “Glad I have your approval, Ward.”
My cheeks were flaming, and I hated it. My hand lifted in a small gesture toward the door. “I have to … I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Aiden nodded, and as I turned to go, I knew he was watching me.
“So let me get this straight …”
“Yes.”
Molly paused. “You don’t know what I was going to say. How can you say yes?”
Even though I was behind a dressing room curtain and she couldn’t see, I rolled my eyes. “I already know what you’re going to say.”
“You just left?”
“Yes.”
“Isabel!”
Angling to the side, I slid the zipper of the sky blue dress up and huffed when I couldn’t get the eye hook closed. “What? It’s not like I expected him to be standing over my shoulder like a giant hulking shadow, and yes, I just … left.”
“Guess I know who’s not going to win employee of the month …” Her voice trailed off. I stuck my hand out from behind the curtain with my middle finger raised. She swatted it back inside. “I never knew you to be a chicken.”
Instead of arguing with her over something so stupid, I simply rolled my lips between my teeth and tugged one last time at the zipper. As I studied my reflection in the mirror, I couldn’t decide if the dress just wasn’t right for me, or if my body was so used to workout gear that it now actively rejected any finer materials.
“Are you dressed yet?”
My hands fell by my sides. “Yes. I don’t think this color works on me, though.”
“One, I find that highly unlikely, and two, show me.” Molly tugged the curtain aside, and when she caught sight of me, her smile was massive. “Iz, I love it. You look so pretty!”
With a skeptical glance at the mirror, I tugged at the drapey things over my shoulders. “There are frills. On my body.”
She laughed. “You don’t have to choose that style. I’m just trying to decide on the colors. I like the blush pink, but it might be too summery for a fall wedding.”
“The blue,” I insisted. “I will feel naked in that pink one.”
“Definitely blue,” Lia called from across the space.
Our two youngest sisters, Lia and Claire, separated by all of two minutes at birth, were sharing a dressing room. “Come on, you two,” Molly called. “Iz is already dressed.”
“Hang on. Lia’s new mom boobs are huge, and she can’t get her dress zipped.”
Molly and I grinned at each other because really, they were. She’d given birth about eight weeks earlier, and honestly, she had the rack of a centerfold if I’d ever seen one.
While we waited, Molly pulled out her giant wedding binder and made some notes after flipping to a bright pink tab. It was no surprise that Molly was the most organized bride-to-be on the planet, and also no surprise that she had zero Bridezilla tendencies so far, something that was making this whole “watch my big sister get married” thing a lot easier.
“Where’s Paige?” I asked.
“She had to stay home with Emmett. He wasn’t feeling well, and Logan is at training camp.” Molly held up her phone and snapped a picture of me. “But I promised I’d send her pictures.”
As her fingers tapped out a text to our sister-in-law, I took a seat on the large ivory ottoman in the middle of the room. No one else was in the dress shop with us, so I leaned back on my hands and listened to the laughter of Lia and Claire as they struggled to close up Lia’s dress.
Out of nowhere, I felt very, very lonely sitting in that room with my sisters.
Molly was getting married.
Lia was living with her boyfriend, Jude. With the addition of their son, and Jude’s new gig playing soccer for Seattle, I knew it was only a matter of time before they made it official too.
Even Claire, the shyest of the four of us, found her person in bad-boy snowboarder Bauer Davis.
And none of this was new; none of their relationships were new. Was I allowed to blame Aiden for this? I tried to imagine his face if I came back to work in a rage.
Yo, bossman, seeing you has me all twisty inside, and I don’t like it. And when you’re nice and thoughtful, it makes it worse, and I start feeling like a lonely petulant teenager around my very wonderful, happily-in-love sisters because I’d rather gouge my eyes out than explain it to them. Please stop. Thanks.
“What are you smiling about?” Lia asked.
Belatedly, I noticed all three of them staring at me.
“Nothing.” I cleared my throat.
Molly nudged Claire. “She’s terrified of her hot new boss. Did I mention that yet?”
Lia’s eyes widened. “Oooh, are you?”
“How hot is he?” Claire asked.
Molly held up both hands, all ten fingers wiggling. Claire laughed.
I gave her a steady look. “Are we deciding on dress colors or not?”
Lia held her hand out to help me off the ottoman. “Sorry, Iz. We’ve never been able to tease you about a man before.”
Molly snickered. “Yeah, because normally, she eats them alive once she’s done with them.”
The words I muttered under my breath would’ve set a nun’s ears on fire. Lia was the only one who heard and started laughing. The idea of me as a man-eater, casually licking my fingers after I’d had my way with them was so laughable. But immediately on the heels of that was a startlingly clear mental image of Aiden lying on a bed, spent and wrecked with me equally spent and wrecked next to him. My heart rate jumped at the vivid picture in my head. But that kind of inner-vixen reaction would be welcome after how I’d started off with him.