But that doesn’t mean this lady is here for that, my brain tried to be reasonable.

I made a quick decision. “Just leave her there. I’ll go talk to her.” After I contacted The Not Really an Asshole at All first.

“Okay, I will. Thanks,” Bianca agreed quickly before ending the conversation.

I didn’t waste a fucking second picking my cell up and finding the number I had saved for him, then dialing it. He picked up on the third ring.

“Hello, Lenny.”

I was going to shove that Lenny up his ass if this was bad. “Hi,” I told him, hearing just a tiny hint of aggression in my voice. “There’s a woman here asking for you.”

“Who?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. The sound of a voice coming over what I could assume was a loudspeaker blared in the background. Where was he?

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t be calling you if I did.” All right, that came out totally bitchy. “My receptionist said someone was asking for you, and I’m heading out there to tell her that you don’t work here, so why should I know where you are.” I got up as I talked, heading out of the office and through the building, pushing the door outside open with my hip. I didn’t hesitate to ask, “Where are you?”

“Hiring a car finally,” he answered, his voice still sounding confused. “I don’t know who it might be. The only women who would be looking for me are you, my sisters, my nan, and my mum.” He cut off abruptly, and I was pretty sure he whispered something under his breath that might have been a curse word.

“What?”

There seemed to be a short hesitation before he answered with, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I didn’t like how that sounded, and I had to know. “Jonah, are you secretly married or have a girlfriend or something that you didn’t tell me about?” AKA that you lied to me over?

There was a pause.

And then he let out that deep laugh that didn’t sound like he was genuinely all that amused. Honestly, he sounded more than a little on edge as he did it, and I definitely didn’t like that either. “No.”

I just bit the inside of my cheek and then ground my molars together for a second before punching the code at the door to the gym part of the facility and yanking the door open pretty freaking hard.

“I’ll be there soon,” Jonah said, and then he hung up like Grandpa Gus had been rubbing off on him too.

I swear to God. I swear to God….

I took a deep breath in, let a deep one out, and told myself that I wasn’t going to be fucking pissy. Not over Mo’s dad. Not over the man who said he’d come back to Houston… for me. Not over the man who said he’d been crazy about me and wanted to be my—newest—best friend and asked what prerequisites he needed to get the position.

Nope.

And I kept right on telling myself that as I walked through the building, calling out a grumpy “hey” at a few people who I knew as I headed toward the front desk. At first, all I saw was Bianca standing behind it, doing something on the computer with her back to me. It wasn’t until I was pretty much at the tall counter that I spotted the woman sitting on one of the three benches in front of the giant glass windows that just a little bit of my blood pressure regulated.

The woman waiting around, in dark black slacks and a silky yellow shirt, was 100 percent related to him. There was something so similar about their faces… and she was definitely old enough to be his mom. And as she sat there with her ankles crossed, I could see that she wasn’t in the best mood of her life. She was tapping her fingers on the back of her opposite hand and would press her lips together for a second, pucker them, and start that cycle all over again.

Huh.

If this was Jonah’s mom, why would she be here and he not know? If I had thought about it, I would have picked up on the fact that he had only ever mentioned her in passing before. He had briefly talked about his dad a few times. Two sisters and three brothers too. Both sets of grandparents too. But not his mom.

Fuck it.

I rapped my fingers against the counter and said, “Hey, Bianca.”

The younger girl turned around and grinned at me. “Hi.” She discreetly tipped her head to the side as she said, “The package I was telling you about is here.”

I flicked my eyes in the direction of the woman. “Oh yeah?”

She nodded so slowly I couldn’t help but smile at her and her code words.

“Thanks for telling me.”

I put one foot in front of the other until I stopped just a few feet away from the woman burning a hole into the wall while flexing one foot and then the other.

The new shorter distance between us didn’t confirm any of my suspicions. She didn’t exactly look like Jonah. She was several inches shorter, over a hundred pounds lighter and didn’t have any facial hair. I eyed the designer purse with its two letters stamped all over it and waited the two seconds it took the woman to slowly move her gaze over to me, looking up at me through her eyelashes with her lips flattening.

This was going to go well, I could just tell.

“Hi,” I told her as professionally as I could, which mostly just meant I kept as much attitude out of my tone as I could. “I was told you were asking for Jonah. Can I help you?”

The same honey-colored eyes that Mo had, and Jonah too, looked up at me through at least two layers of mascara, and I could see and feel the way she flicked her gaze down from my face to the black Polo shirt I had on with Maio House stitched onto the breast, to my black pants and low black boots.

I’d gotten slow looks like the one this woman was giving me countless times in my life. Before and during high school. Sometimes when I met fighters’ girlfriends.

It was measuring and calculating and not thinking much of me.

Luckily, I didn’t give a single shit what people I didn’t know thought.

I didn’t even care enough to look her up and down right back. I just stared at her as I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. I had all day.

There were only a few people in this universe who could out-stubborn me. Jonah’s maybe-mom could try her best. I’d been dealing with Grandpa Gus for thirty years. If anything, I’d be impressed if she ended up getting under my skin even a little.

Luckily, or maybe not so luckily, she only did one more sweep of me, pursed her lips, and went with being direct. “Is he here now?”

Yeah, there was the accent.

And oh, hi to you too. I blinked once. “No. We’re not in the business of keeping track of our members, so I’m wondering if there’s something I can help you with.”

It wasn’t my imagination that one of those familiar honey-colored eyes went a little funny for a second before one hand—perfectly manicured—slipped into the purse at her side. In the blink of an eye, a matching wallet was pulled out, and in another blink of the eye, she was handing over a card. Her license.

“I’m looking for my son. I would like to speak to him,” she said, sounding like just telling me this information was a hassle.

It took me a second to process the information on it. Sure enough, Collins was on the license along with a first name of Sarah. The date of birth on the license too showed a year that would have made sense to go along with the thirty-year-old I had gotten off the phone with. Huh.

Why wasn’t Jonah answering her calls? Every impression he’d given me was that he was close to his family, at least some of them. It didn’t exactly make sense.

He’d obviously told her where he was at some point. Given her enough information to come to the gym to look for him, but not the name of his hotel or anything else like that. This wasn’t totally adding up.

“If it isn’t an issue, I have no problem waiting here until he arrives,” the woman, Sarah, said in a snooty voice that didn’t hit me anywhere near the way her maybe-son’s did. Mostly because he didn’t talk like he thought he was better than me.

I handed her back her license. “I don’t have a problem with you waiting here if you want, but it might be a better idea to find him at his hotel.” Maybe I should have said something different, but I didn’t. Fucking attitude.

And then this woman gave it right back. “I would go to his hotel if I knew where it was.”

Was that my fault?

I smiled at her, and it wasn’t anything like the smiles that my best friend—and Jonah, now that I thought about it—handed out like they were candy on Halloween. “I was under the impression that if someone wanted to see you, they would tell you where they were staying.”

Shots fired.

I felt a little bad right after the words were out, but only a little. All right, not really. If this was Jonah’s mom… well. That meant she was Mo’s grandma. Which meant that even if I didn’t like her, she was still her grandma. Which meant that she was family. I had seen enough friends have shitty family members to know how that game went. It had made me grateful on a lot of occasions for how lucky I was that my family was tiny and I liked and loved everyone in it.