Inhibitions

by Mattie Bowman

  “I…” Presley’s voice trembled.

  “It’s all right, Presley,” Grant said, kneeling before her. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. Walking in on the act…seeing it as you did, that is a trauma. Someone you loved, who you thought was loyal to you and would protect you, left you vulnerable and exposed to a horrible pain and you didn’t deserve it. It is perfectly acceptable to still be dealing with a trauma like that.”

  A lump formed in my throat, guilt attacking my insides like a virus.

  Presley cleared her throat. “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “Understandable. I’m only suggesting if you ever thought about it, thought about the need to put an end to it completely, then now is the time.”

  “Ugh,” she said and scrunched up her face like she’d tasted a lemon. “I’d rather be taken again and swung from that contraption your staff strapped me in.”

  I chuckled, and Grant patted her knee before he stood up. “That, my dear, we can arrange if you’d like.”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “I need to breathe before the final fantasy.”

  “Of course,” he said, and I squeezed her leg.

  I wouldn’t have been the one to admit it, but I needed a good rest before whatever awaited us next. There was no telling with Grant, not after the last one, and while I was beyond excited and curious to find out, I also looked forward to the rest we had from now till then—which would happen sometime in the last eight days we had left.

  “Well,” Grant continued as Presley and I rose from the couch. “If there is anything else you need in the meantime; you know you only have to ask.”

  “Thanks,” I said, the first words I’d spoken out loud in the entire session. I hadn’t needed to talk as much as Presley clearly had. And it seemed Grant wasn’t after me on the emotional front like he was with her, understandably. Lucky for me. I didn’t need him poking around and digging up trouble I didn’t need, not when happiness was so close for us.

  “What shall we do today?” I asked, wrapping my arm around her waist as we walked down the hallway. Presley sighed and I nudged her. “Little heavy in there today, yeah?”

  She leaned into me as we past the restaurant. “I wouldn’t say no to a lounge day. Nap, Jacuzzi, food, you.” Her lips turned into a devious grin. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’d like to scope out the gym while you nap if you don’t mind.”

  “I wondered how long you could go without hitting something.” She chuckled.

  “Have to stay solid. Don’t want to pay for it in the ring if I slip out of my routine.”

  “I know.” She trailed a hand down my chest and over my abs. “You are solid, though.” She bit her bottom lip as we started up the stairs.

  “Not napping first, are we?” I cocked an eyebrow at her, loving the woman’s insatiable appetite.

  “No,” she said. “You go work out. I don’t want to hurt your routine by stealing all your energy first.”

  “Ha!” I opened the door to the suite for her. “You aren’t giving my stamina near enough credit.”

  She shoved away my attempts to grab her hips and pull her to me.

  “No,” she said again. “Go. Work out. When you come back, I’ll help you out in the shower.” She winked at me before waving me off.

  I covered the center of my chest with my hand and gazed at the blue sky radiating outside our floor-to-ceiling windows. How did I ever get so lucky?

  15 Presley

  The sleep I’d wished for during my nap evaded me like I was trying to catch smoke. Too many thoughts crowded my mind, the session with Grant doing nothing to settle the thrashing response to David’s presence at the resort.

  Slipping out of bed, I contemplated tracking Owen down at the gym and asking him to help me sleep, but I quickly dismissed the idea. He deserved a good workout, especially since he hadn’t had one the entirety of our stay—well, not a boxing workout anyway. A flush raked over my skin as I hurried out of the suite, determined to outrun all of my thoughts if it killed me.

  Luckily, I found Anderson hovering around the front desk area in the lobby and happily crossed the distance.

  “Hey,” I greeted him.

  “What’s up, Pres?”

  “You want the night off tonight?” I asked, already feeling the rush at the idea of cards in my hands again.

  “Yeah? You in the mood to play?”

  I chuckled as he drew his brows together.

  “Yeah, that didn’t sound right,” he said, laughing.

  “In a place like this?” I shrugged. “Pretty fitting.”

  “Touché.” He leaned casually against the wooden front desk. “I think I can gather a game. Will Owen be down?”

  “Oh yeah.” He didn’t love the game like I did, but he could enjoy playing. Unlike David—

  As if my uncontrollable comparison had conjured the devil, he strode across the lobby, heading directly toward me as if I was his destination.

  “Oh, fucking hell.” I straightened when he stopped a foot away from Anderson and myself.

  “Pres?” Anderson asked, immediately on alert. He touched my shoulder, and I desperately wished he was twenty times bigger and could hide me from David’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “I only want to talk, Presley,” David said, reading my panicked face.

  “Talk? Did Grant get to you too?” I had the urge to strangle the love guru with his own incredibly limber arms.

  “No.” David shook his head. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet.” Bullshit. My being her was a curiosity he couldn’t quell. An opportunity to stir up shit I wanted no part in.

  “How much longer is your stay?”

  “None of your business,” I snapped.

  Anderson stepped in front of me. “Would you like me to have him removed?”

  “Well,” David continued as if Anderson hadn’t said anything. “We’re here for two weeks. That gives me plenty of time to make my case. Either way, you will talk to me before you leave.”

  I rolled my eyes. He’d do it too—badger me until I relented. Fuck it. Might as well get it over with. “Fine.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Talk.”

  His eyes jumped from me to Anderson and back again. “Can we go somewhere more private?”

  I scoffed.

  “May I suggest,” Anderson said, holding my elbow and walking me to the right of the front desk a few feet. “The promenade. It offers small tables, but there are plenty of people moving about as the spa and gym are just down the hall.” He pointed to the small quad that rested just outside the spa hallway.

  “Thank you, Anderson.” I moved past David without a glance back. If everyone and their dog was dead set on me letting it all out on him, then fine. I’d get it over with and proceed to enjoy every day of my vacation.

  Pushing through the large glass doors, I took a seat at an available table near the glass wall, in plain sight of the hallway where Anderson hovered at the end. He paced back and forth, and I had the urge to hug him.

  The chair across from me scraped the pavement as David sank into it, resting his folded hands on the small wrought-iron table. “You look good, Presley.”

  “Please,” I said, resisting the need to roll my eyes again. “What do you want, David? If Grant didn’t put you up to this, then what could you possibly have to say to me?”

  “I’d say I was sorry, but I can see you’d have absolutely none of that.”

  “You’d be right.” I sighed, trying to remember Grant’s words from this morning. Maybe this would free me of the memories that haunted me. “Besides,” I said, a little softer. “It’s in the past. There is nothing left between us.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He leaned back in his chair, adjusting the tie around his neck. “We were together a long time. That doesn’t just disappear.”

  “Oh, I assure
you, it does.” I huffed. “Especially when you walk in on your fiancé balls deep in another woman, in your bed. Every feeling I had for you vanished right then, like that.” I snapped my fingers. And though it was a lie—it had taken me months to get over him, to stop blaming myself for what had happened, for thinking I’d done something to cause the event—it felt great to throw that in his face. “Where is she, by the way? Shouldn’t you be with her?”

  “I could say the same thing about you and Owen.”

  “He’s at the gym,” I said, glancing over my shoulder and through the glass where I knew the gym was. “I don’t have to be with him every second of the day.”

  “She’s at the spa.”

  I stared at him, unable to see any trace of the man I’d fallen for all those years ago. What had I seen in him? Why did he have the power to hurt me like he had? Because you’d given your heart to him freely, fully. Not like I had with Owen, though. Not that I’d known loving someone that deeply was possible until him anyway.

  “I miss you,” David said.

  “Don’t.” I held my hand up. “You may be bored with her, but you don’t miss me. Don’t mistake the two.”

  “Can you just hear me out, please?” He snapped and I re-crossed my arms over my chest. After I arched an eyebrow at him, he continued. “I am sorry about what I did, whether you believe that or not. We were great together. You have to remember that, don’t you? Our trip to Paris? The night we spent in Venice?”

  “All proof you have to be in vacation mode to be happy,” I said, remembering those trips as the highlights of our relationship. He was always happier then, softer, more considerate. The second we got home, though? Back to the tense, self-absorbed, entitled man he was at his core. I’d thought after he was promoted it would change, or perhaps after we were married, and the stress of the wedding was over…but no. He wasn’t who he was on vacation; he was every bit the jerk who lived at home from day to day.

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  “Oh yeah? Then why are you here now, huh?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  “Exactly. Are we done?”

  “No!” He slammed his hand down on the table, drawing the gazes of other couples that occupied the tables throughout the promenade. Flattening his hand on the table, he cocked an eyebrow at me. “I wanted to come here to clear the air between us. I wanted to say I was sorry but I assumed you’d be ready to apologize as well. It seems you still aren’t adult enough to admit your part in it all.”

  My mouth dropped so fast I was sure I looked like a cartoon character that needed a window shade cord to snap it back up. “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t deny it, Presley. There’s no use anymore.”

  I blinked a few times, completely aghast. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Really?” He looked at me, incredulous. “You’re here with him, aren’t you? The pair of you are engaged. Why deny it now?”

  “Deny what?”

  “He told me!”

  “Who told you what?” I snapped back.

  “Owen!” David lowered his voice and rubbed his palms over his face. “That last week, I ran into him at a bar…I was with a business client. He told me then that the two of you were fucking behind my back.”

  A bag of bricks dropped in my stomach, its strings attached to my heart. “You’re lying.”

  He raised his arms. “What reason would I have to lie, now?”

  “It’s what you do.” Tears bit the backs of my eyes regardless of my brain telling me there was no way it could be true. Why would Owen say that? He wouldn’t.

  David sighed. “I was hurt. And I wanted to hurt you back, tenfold. The decision was rash on my part. I admit that now.” He placed his hand on top of mine on the table, and I was too lost in my thoughts to pull it away.

  The events of that week replayed in my head, the nights following where I’d stayed at Owen’s. The weeks after when he’d put me back together. He had tried to tell me something, but he always brushed it off. Had this been it?

  “When I saw you last night,” David continued. “I was overcome. We weren’t finished. It shouldn’t have ended the way it did. I’m sure my working late to make partner is what drove you into your best friend’s arms.”

  I yanked my hand away. “We never slept together, David.”

  “What?”

  “Owen and I…we never became an item until after you’d…”

  He slammed his fist on the table again, looking at me like he was trying to decide if I was lying. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He was so convincing.”

  A lump formed in the middle of my throat, my mind going fuzzy around the edges from trying to fit pieces together that just didn’t add up. What would Owen have to gain from that? I shoved away from the table, unable to stand to be around David for another second. “I don’t believe you.”

  He was out of his seat and in front of me in a blink, caging me between his arms against the glass.

  “Move,” I said. I had to find Owen, had to talk to him. I didn’t believe David, but I had to see him. Once I was in his arms, everything would make sense again.

  “No,” David said. “You have to realize who you’re marrying. A liar.”

  “Rich coming from your mouth.” I tried to move, but he didn’t let his arms slip. “You have five seconds before I make a scene and I know how much you hate that.”

  “I’m not the same man I was a year ago.”

  “Five.”

  “I’ve changed.”

  “Four.”

  “Please.”

  “Three.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “Two.”

  “She doesn’t understand me like you did.”

  “One.” I sucked in a deep breath, ready to wail at the top of my lungs until Anderson called security. The scream was on the tip of my tongue when David forced his lips on mine. He held my face in his hands in such a firm grip, and I yelped into his mouth. The onslaught shocked me, freezing me for a few moments before adrenaline surged through my veins and I remembered how to move.

  I jerked my knee up with enough force and aim to hit him dead center in the balls.

  He dropped to the ground, groaning as he clenched his eyes shut, clutching his manhood like it would fall off.

  “I warned you,” I said, tears filling my eyes as trembles wracked my body. What the fuck was wrong with me? A pair of gentle hands gripped my shoulders, and I jolted. “Anderson,” I sighed when I realized it was him.

  “Come with me,” he said, glaring at David who still writhed on the floor. “Security is on their way.” He rushed me into the building, behind the front desk and into what looked like an employee break room. Sitting me down at an empty round table he said, “Don’t move.”

  I didn’t, except for the shaking. “What is wrong with me?” I asked the question out loud when he’d returned with a blanket and a can of Coke.

  “A minor case of shock.” He popped the tab on the Coke and pushed it across the table before wrapping the blanket around my shoulders.

  “He just…he only—”

  “Not only,” Anderson cut me off. “I saw it. He forced himself on you. I’m sorry I wasn’t closer to stop him.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said between quivering lips.

  “Drink that if you can.” He pointed at the can, and I took a fast sip. The icy-cold mixture fizzed in my mouth and I sighed, rubbing my eyes with my free hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, drinking another gulp.

  “Stop it.” He touched my shoulder.

  “I’m sure your other charges don’t have this issue…”

  “We’re friends, remember?” He dropped his hand. “I lost a bet, and you won a friend.”

  A desperate laugh escaped my throat. “I need to find Owen.” I stood up so fast my head spun. Anderson gently nudged me back into my seat.

  “In a few minutes. Finish that drink. Then I’ll
take you back to the suite. Deal?”

  I nodded.

  “Besides, we probably should wait until security figures out what to do with David.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because if you tell Owen what he did…”

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “Yeah, we’ll give it a few minutes.”

  16 Owen

  As far as gyms went, the resort’s was above par. Not only did it have a speed bag, it also had a variety of regular bags, gloves, tape, and a designated area of mats that could’ve easily been made into a makeshift ring—if one were so inclined. Which I wasn’t but I appreciated having the option. Another point to Grant. It almost balanced out his horrible timing with yoga lessons.

  After a quick run to loosen up my underworked muscles, I’d gloved up and hit the bags. I was as fast as usual, but I worried over my power and focused on bringing that up for an hour. Sweat poured down my face and bare chest, bringing that shower Presley promised to the forefront of my mind. The image of her soaking wet and soapy had my dick twitching which normally wouldn’t bother me, but I was wearing gym shorts in a room full of dudes. Nobody wanted to see me turn my shorts into a tent, regardless of what this resort stood for.

  I hit the bag in front of me, pouring through the combos Craig had challenged me with right before I’d left. It was crazy to think how much had changed in a little over a week—my entire world had somehow shifted, but yet, it was the same. The only thing that was different was now Presley would sleep in my bed as opposed to across town and I wouldn’t ever look at another woman again, not that any could hold my interest the way Presley did.

  Sleep in your bed? Had I asked her to move in? Did I want that? I’d never lived with a woman before—though Presley and I had spent plenty of weeks together under the same roof and never had a problem. Maybe I should buy us a house.

  Holy shit. Diamonds. Houses. What more girly stuff could I think about before I turned into a sopping heap on the floor begging to watch a romcom to lighten the mood? I shook out my tired, aching muscles before unleashing on the bag again. The changes could all be credited to Presley, but it didn’t bother me. There wasn’t one thing I’d miss about my life before I’d called her mine—the women, the freedom, the bachelor pad—didn’t matter. She did. I just hoped she’d want the same things I did when we got away from the fantasy of the resort.