AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d said she needed to stretch first. She could do that too.
Stripping off her jacket, she let her eyes go to the photo framed on the wall. It was of a young girl smiling. Mandy thought maybe she was about eleven years old. She looked so happy.
If she looked hard enough, she could see Ted in the young girl, around the eyes and mouth.
Was she his sister?
Mandy didn’t know anything about him. But she’d believed him alone in the world because she’d never heard him mention family. But then, she didn’t talk about herself either, so maybe he was the same.
Reading the note a last time, she started with stretching. Five minutes, Ted said. After that she got on the treadmill.
“Come on, Mandy, you’ve been on this, it can’t be that hard to start.” She pushed the large green arrow. The conveyer began to move slowly. “Well, all right then.” Putting in her earbuds and turning up the volume on her cell phone, Mandy searched for a button that made the machine go faster.
A snail could walk faster than her about now. Randomly pushing buttons, she stopped the machine twice, then found the increase button and was soon moving at a good pace.
Ted came in when she was finishing up her ten minutes and raised a hand. He started on the rower.
Mandy pulled her eyes from the muscles on display, ignored the butterflies in her tummy, and went to the stepper.
She’d walked in when he and Buster were arm wrestling, but it was Ted who drew her eyes. The power in his body had caught and held her attention.
Looking at the panels on the stepper, she thought they seemed even more complicated than the treadmill. A large hand reached over her and turned it on, then got to a level she could cope with.
“Thanks. Did someone give you those? She pointed to the two bands of wooden beads around his wrist. She’d only seen them a few times, but they hadn’t seemed to her like something Ted would wear.
“No problem, and yes.”
She waited but he didn’t add anything, and Mandy wasn’t the type to push for an answer.
He rowed, she stepped, and it was surprisingly comfortable for all she was alone in a room with Ted Hosking, the large, disturbing male who had once kissed her. The man she was aware of for no reason she could fathom than he fascinated her.
Mandy was surrounded by handsome men. The Trainer brothers, Fin, Dylan, and many more. So why was she aware of this one? The tycoon who was so different from her it was weird that they even inhabited the same world.
“You ready to do your weights now?”
She tripped and would have landed on her face had he not grabbed her and settled her gently on her feet on the floor.
“Thanks.” Mandy pulled out her earbuds. “You surprised me.”
“Sorry about that. You ready to do some weights?”
“About that, Ted. I’m not really sure what you meant when you wrote all that stuff down.”
His smile had never been large like others, but it still packed a punch.
“How about I show you the first time, then you’re set.”
“Thank you, but I’m not really sure I want to do many weights.”
“They’re for strength, not muscle definition, Mandy. They’ll help you grow old stronger.”
“Really?’
“Your aunts have hand weights, I’m sure. Those two pretty much do most things.”
“They do them with the other seniors down at the hospital on Wednesdays and Fridays.”
His mouth twitched.
