Page 21 of Rescuing Tobias

8:36 A.M.

A coupleof good days were all it had taken for him to almost back out of the promise he’d made himself.

Tobias had been closer than he should have been to caving, giving in, and sending Isabella a text to find out how she was doing.

Ten days since she’d walked out of his apartment, and he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

Part of him had been naïve enough to think that out of sight meant out of mind. Just because he couldn’t seem to get enough of her when she was by his side, it didn't mean he’d still feel that way once she was gone, and he knew she was safe and being taken care of.

But he did.

In fact, that night they’d shared ran through his mind on a near-constant loop. It didn’t matter what he was doing, whether he was eating, riding the subway, at the gym, working, at the back of his mind were memories of Isabella’s soft skin, themoans that fell from her lips, and the way she writhed beneath him in the throes of pleasure. It was like it had all been imprinted on his mind, and he couldn’t get away from it.

Most of him didn't want to get away from it either, which only made it worse.

Made it easier for him to talk himself out of his plan not to become a burden to anyone like his mother had to his father.

Then, to have a few days in a row with minimal and totally manageable pain, and he’d started to believe that maybe the doctors were wrong. Maybe with enough time and enough physical therapy, his back had finally started to heal.

If it was healing, then nothing stood in the way of him contacting Isabella.

Last night he’d been so close to doing it. He’d actually sat for almost an hour with his cell phone in his hand, and her number staring back at him. Each time his phone tried to go to sleep he’d touch the screen to bring it back to life so he could keep staring at her number.

Not just her number.

It was definitely a bad idea, and a totally unprofessional one, but he’d taken one of the photos they had of Isabella from before she’d been abducted that was part of the file he and his team had been compiling on her in their efforts to track her down, and put it in his phone. It sat there along with her number, taunting him, begging him to reach out to her.

Would she want that?

He had to believe that she was satisfied having Becca and Connor with her. And she probably had the whole Charleston Holloway clan rallying around her. Given they’d spent the better part of two decades trying to prove their parents weren't traitors, they’d built a unique, close, and strong bond. One that he knew they wouldn't hesitate to bring Isabella into because she was important to one of them.

Isabella was fine.

Had likely forgotten all about him.

He’d be just a note at the end of a horrible ordeal she wanted to forget and move on from. It was better for her if he kept his distance, let her have the chance she deserved to rebuild her life without further complications.

Besides, even if he had been growing weak, giving in to the urge inside him to contact her, when he woke up this morning in pure agony, bad enough that he caved and took some of his pain pills he kept for only when he absolutely couldn’t do without them, this was the reminder he needed.

“You okay today, Tobias?” Chelsea Pierce’s soft voice asked, and he looked across the conference table where they were all gathered to find her worried gray eyes watching him.

Not just her eyes.

As he looked around the table, he saw that everyone was watching him with concern.

Including his boss, Raven Oswald. If anyone knew about pain, it was the second-oldest Oswald sibling. When she was only a teenager, Raven had been almost killed by the two men who murdered her parents. Surviving the ordeal, she and the four younger Oswald siblings all moved from their remote off-grid home to the middle of New York City, a completely different and unfamiliar world to them. She’d married the man she loved, had a child, only to have the then three-year-old snatched away from her.

Never once giving up on her little girl, Raven had done the impossible and tracked the child down, reconciling with her ex in the process after the abduction tore them apart. It had been a fight, but one that Raven never gave up on.

Unlike him.

He’d given in to his fears, let them consume and control him.

Now looking at the woman who was nearing forty, happily married, with her seventeen-year-old daughter back in her life, and a four-year-old son, he knew that she was grateful for every one of those hard moments because she’d fought through them and now had everything she’d ever wanted.

“If you need to take some time off, that’s okay,” Raven told him. “We’ve all been working around the clock on this one, and I'm sure the physical toll you put yourself through joining Rocco’s team has left you in worse shape than you were in before.”

While he knew it wasn't her intention, Raven’s words pierced his heart. She was right. One mission, and he was paying the price for it. What shape would he be in if he allowed himself to start a relationship with Isabella, and the constant sex wound up making his back worse? And it would be constant sex. No way he could be around her and not want to make love to her.

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