Annoying.

And the annoyingly-not-annoying man was over in the fake turf area that morning, hands on his hips, a belt around his waist, facing the cage. I headed over to him, taking in his shorts and the bulge of muscle directly above his knees, branching out to the stacked muscles that made up his upper thighs. The belt around his waist, I saw, was connected to four forty-five-pound weights stacked on top of each other. Sweat covered the cutoff T-shirt that showed off those massive arms.

I didn’t have to look at footage to know he’d been running from one end of the turf to the other with one hundred and eighty pounds trailing behind him.

“Hey, Lenny,” he greeted me.

“Morning,” I replied, standing just off to the side of his workout area. “How’s it going?”

“All right. Getting started with my warm-ups.”

Warm-ups?

“Got a bit of conditioning left, I’m thinking. Eventful morning?” he asked with a cock of his eyebrow.

“It’s more of a pain in the ass morning.”

His hand went to the side of his head, and his smile was slow as he squinted an eye and asked, “D’ya really throw him or did I imagine that?”

I couldn’t help but smile finally, just a little. “You saw that?”

Those white teeth flashed. “Yeah, I reckon everyone did.”

My smile grew a little, and I shrugged. “He’s distracted, and Peter wanted me to show him he was.”

He fucking beamed at me, following it up with a chuckle, surprised and, I was pretty sure, impressed. “It was awesome.”

My half-dead heart thumped once at his compliment.

But before I could process it more, he went on. “You picked him up like he weighed nothing and….” He did this thing where he leaned forward a little and then angled his body to the side like he was showing me a stunted version of what I’d done.

Awesome.

Well, fuck me.

“He’s about a hundred and fifty,” I told him, feeling even nicer with this bonus on top of Peter’s compliment. “I can still pick him up, and it doesn’t bother me too much.”

That wiped the smile off him, replacing it with a frown. “Because of the shoulder you’re always pretending doesn’t hurt?”

What? It was my turn to frown. “I’m not always pretending like it doesn’t hurt.”

His face was a little too smug and knowing.

“I’m not.”

One honey-colored eye squinted at me. “You sure?”

I scoffed. “Yeah, maybe sometimes, but not all the time. And it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to since I don’t use it the way I did before. Thank you.” I wasn’t over here watching how he ran to see if his Achilles was as good as it used to be, was I? Which reminded me I hadn’t once asked him how it was doing. He didn’t seem to favor it at all, but you never knew. I’d known players with genuinely fucked-up knees—knees they could barely stand on—who still competed, adjusting their fights to not leave themselves too defenseless by staying on their feet.

“Sure,” he agreed way too fucking easily, still looking smug, but his eyes were curious. “Been like that for a bit, hasn’t it?”

So he had noticed. Before. “I guess we never did talk about that?” I asked him, earning a shake of his head. “But yeah, my shoulder has been shot for a long time. One more injury and I might never be able to lift my arm up over my head, is what the doctors said the last time.” It still hurt to say that sentence out loud. Less, but the ache was still there. “It’s why I don’t do judo anymore.”

Jonah froze, the lines across his forehead deepening again. “Not at all?”

I shook my head.

His already soft voice got even quieter. “Why?”

“I’ve had five surgeries on just one of my shoulders. Each time they said I was done, and I didn’t listen or give a shit. But now I’ve got someone who needs me, and I’m not going to risk doing something irreparable to it anymore.” I shot him a smile that was still tighter than I would have wanted. I was okay with my decision. Mostly. I had gotten used to the idea. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known the day would come eventually.

I just hadn’t known it would be so soon. Judo was brutal on a person’s body. At the international level, everything was harder. It required more power, more strength, and at some point, your body just couldn’t handle taking the beating or even inflicting it. We all wanted to win, and that meant doing what you had to do to ensure you were the winner.

But…

Well, it still sucked. Eighteen years were gone.

But my life wasn’t over.

“It was my choice, and I would make the same one if I had to,” I told him honestly. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been right. That was fucking life sometimes, wasn’t it?

He watched me with those honey-colored eyes and nodded, but I could see the tightness at his jaw. It made me wonder if he thought he had lost everything, but he hadn’t actually. He just hadn’t known it from the start.

I’d had my dream ended too, and maybe I had been in the literal dumps, but here I was. These people I loved wouldn’t let me mourn and wade in my heartbreak and pity for too long. They would never let me forget what really mattered.

When life throws bad shit at you, you dodge it and throw whatever you can right back.

At least that was how Grandpa Gus had tried to raise me.

“Why? You want me to show you how to do the same so you can start doing that to other players if they tackle you too hard?”

That got me one of those deep laughs that made his face light up even more than his smiles did. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea.” He grinned. “Could you do it to me?”

I felt my eyebrows go up, felt my brain tell the rest of me to go back into the office. To leave right now and quit playing around. We weren’t enemies, but we weren’t friends either.

We were a team. In a way. Because a team worked toward a greater good, and our greater good was eighteen pounds and six ounces.

My subconscious tried to remind me I’d never really been a big fan of team sports. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my future in the hands of someone else who might not give as much of a fuck as I did. It’s why I’d been a good swimmer, a pretty good gymnast, and I hadn’t been a big fan of cross-country running, but I’d been all right at that too. The one and only time Grandpa had enrolled me in a season of basketball when I’d been ten, I’d been asked to leave the team because I hadn’t been a good team player.

And yet knowing all that…

I ignored those instincts that asked me to walk away. “You?” I asked him, to be sure he was suggesting what I thought he was suggesting.

Jonah dipped his chin.

I knew what the answer was going to be, but I didn’t want to kill his sketchy dreams so quickly. “How much do you think you weigh right now?”

“One-hundred and thirteen kilos, usually. Might be a bit more or a bit less,” he answered.

Yeah, that settled it. “That’s going to be a negative then. Five years ago, I would have tried, but even then I could only lift Mount Denali, not”—I waved my hand toward his body—“Everest. I could get you on the ground without throwing you though.”

For once, I didn’t like his laugh.

“You don’t think I can?”

Those cheeks tipped up, and he had the nerve to tip his head to the side like he was trying to be adorable. “I was joking when I asked, I mean.”

I slipped out of my flip-flops and walked over to him.

“I’m sure you could easily have taken a Denali before your last surgery...” He trailed off, watching me too carefully. “I’m an Everest though, eh? Sweet as.”

I ignored his NZ slang that I had started getting the hang of and grinned, actually feeling a little excited. “Are you going to be upset if you get the breath knocked out of you?”

He tipped his head to the other side a little, narrowing those honey-colored eyes. “No…?”

“Are you sure?”

Jonah’s face got warily cheerful again. “Lenny, love, I’ve been getting tackled since I was—”

All right. He’d said it.

I stopped directly in front of him, reached out as quickly as I could, grabbed him by the collar and swept his legs out from under him.

He fell like a beautiful, ancient Redwood tree. The sound of him hitting the turf loud. I mean, literally, it was a boom. The floor wasn’t padded and wasn’t built to cushion falling bodies.

I pressed my lips together as I looked down at him slightly, half expecting him to be pissed, maybe a little shocked even if he was used to being tackled by men bigger than me. But all I got were wide, shocked eyes. He sucked in a breath and then gasped.

Maybe that hadn’t been my best idea ever. He was worth a lot of money when he was healthy. Shit.

“Jonah, I’m sorry—”

This fool fucking burst out laughing. “Bloody hell, Lenny, how’d you do that?”

I’d had a lot of guys react in different ways to getting thrown around, but never, ever had one of them fucking laughed. Never. Not even close.