What I did instead was sit there quietly and watch both of his dimples flash for one split second. Because of course he had a dimple in each tan cheek.

He didn’t come for Peter.

Yeah right. Yeah, fucking right. God. I had to get through this as quickly as possible. Now, now, now.

I didn’t break eye contact with those honey-colored irises as I looked at him. I could play this game. “I don’t know what you know about Peter,” I said, making sure to keep my features schooled, “but he isn’t a personal trainer. If you want a tour of the gym, I can have the assistant manager show you around.” He knew what Peter did at the gym. I had told him. He was a fucker, but he’d listened. I was sure of it. There was no way he had gotten that mixed up in his head.

But Jonah didn’t say a word as he kept on standing there, so still it didn’t even look like he was breathing.

What a prick.

If he wanted to talk about… things, it was on him. I’d wasted my last phone call and email on him eight months ago. I wasn’t searching out shit in regard to him anymore.

“If you’re looking for a trainer, I can get you in contact with someone who focuses on athletes like you,” I said, hearing myself offering to find him a personal trainer and cringing inside. Really? That’s what I’m doing? I was better than that. I could stand in front of him. I could speak to him. Of course, I could do this. Why had I thought I couldn’t? I could look into his eyes and listen to his voice and ignore those memories of how much I had enjoyed those two things at one point. My mouth kept on going. “No one with any rugby experience, probably, but with football.”

When I had first seen him, I had assumed he was a football player initially. Then, I’d really paid attention and noticed the differences. For his height, his body fat percentage had been too low for any positions he might have been able to play since he was so tall. The cauliflowering of his ears—a deformity, some called it, that made a person’s ear lumpy—was more typical for boxers and the people who trained at Maio House than football players; they wore helmets, their ears were never directly impacted. Then, he’d opened his mouth and confirmed my suspicions.

“Lenny,” Jonah Hema Collins—I had found out his whole name after he’d disappeared—said my name the same way he had before: all soft and nearly cheery and wrapped in his New Zealand accent.

But I wasn’t falling for it. Not ever again. Nah.

“Have a heart,” Jonah continued on like I wasn’t sporting my I-don’t-give-a-fuck face at him. That chest on his six-foot-five-inch body expanded as he pulled in a breath and held it. Those light eyes focused right on me, wide and nervous, and if he had been anyone else, I would have thought there was a trace of hope in them too. “Tell me how you’ve been.”

I could feel my nostrils flare the entire time he spoke. Tell him how I’d been after so long? Was that what he wanted to hear?

Worried. Pissed off. Furious. Scared. Terrified. Moody. Tired. Exhausted. Angry. Resigned. Even more exhausted. Determined. All those things in every combination.

Tension blossomed in my shoulders and neck, like it was telling me to get my shit together before I did something I’d regret.

“Do you want me to get you a number for a trainer or not?” A trainer, I reasoned, he could have easily gotten back in France or New Zealand or South Africa, any other country in the world other than this one, my brain reasoned. Fucking Antarctica based on how his phone and email hadn’t worked for so long.

He wasn’t able to hide the way those big, tanned and scarred hands of his opened and closed at his sides. But Jonah Collins decided he had selective listening by the way he barreled over my question and asked another one. “Can’t you tell me how you’ve been?”

He really wanted to know?

I smiled at him.

“I’ve been great. Is that what you want to hear? How I’ve been doesn’t matter though, does it?” I even flashed my teeth at him with my next smile. “I need to get back to work. I’ll write down phone numbers for two trainers, if that’s why you’re here”—doing God knows what, halfway across the world—“or if you still want a tour, I can get someone to give you one.”

The brown-haired man, with hair just as closely cropped as it had been back in the day, watched me. His Adam’s apple bobbed. His nostrils flared with a breath.

And I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like it either when one of his feet, which I remembered as being huge, brought him a step closer toward the desk. Toward me. Not hesitating exactly but wary.

Did he know that a massive part of me—a part I was trying to ignore—suddenly wanted to beat the shit out of him, and that’s why he was trying to be all cautious and shit?

“Talk to me,” he insisted, even if I had a feeling he was well aware of what I would do to him if I could. “Are you all right?”

The now you want to talk was there, in my throat, on my tongue. Just… there. And I didn’t let it move. I didn’t let it go anywhere.

Those golden honey-colored eyes searched and moved over me as I sat behind my desk, tension clenching everything between my chin down to my butt cheeks, and I wondered for just one split second what he saw. If I looked older. More tired. If he could see how much sleep I had missed out on for a giant chunk of the time we had been… apart. I wondered what he thought about the weight I hadn’t totally lost over the last few months but was still working on.

Then I reminded myself that I didn’t care what he thought or what he saw.

“I’m fantastic.” Hating the way my fingertips started tingling out of nowhere, I grabbed a pen from the cup on my desk and pulled one of my notepads over. I picked up my cell and started going through the contacts as I said sarcastically, “If you don’t want a tour, and you want to keep on ignoring shit, I need to get back to work. I don’t have time for this BS, but here are two numbers for trainers in case you need them while you’re here. If you want a tour of the gym, just let Bianca at the front desk know, and she’ll get you the manager. There’s a really nice gym about twenty minutes away too if this one is too far.”

Fucking fuckface.

I ripped the sheet off the pad and held it out to the man who was honestly just as tall and built as my memories tried to remind me. It was seriously unfair that he was better looking than I remembered. His skin was a richer shade from being out in the sun during the season, a gift from a dad he’d told me was a mixture of Samoan, Māori, and European. Yeh, got my size from him, he had told me once with a bashful smile, like he hadn’t been able to help growing into that frame and it embarrassed him.

Asshole.

Jonah Hema Collins didn’t say anything or take the paper, so I held it up even higher, giving it a shake. He wanted to stall? Fine. I could stall.

I met his gaze with hopefully the blankest expression I could muster. “Take it. And so you know, Peter knows about us.”

That seemed like common sense, but… here was the last man I would ever expect to roll up to my family’s gym and ask how I was doing and look at me like… like I didn’t fucking know. Like he genuinely wanted to talk to me. Like he really cared about how I was and how I’d been.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

We both knew he didn’t. His actions for so long had confirmed all that. I knew how nonexistent my place in his life was.

And if he was here for the reason I thought he was, he needed to take the next step forth. He just needed to know right now that whatever he was planning, I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t thousands of miles away from home anymore.

“I haven’t said anything to anyone. Like I told you the last time I emailed you, I don’t need or want anything from you. I don’t know why you’re here, but you don’t need to pretend anything.” I almost bit my lip but barely managed not to. “We don’t need to pretend anything. But this place is my family—my home—and if you’re an asshole, it won’t end well, all right?”

It was on the second sentence that he flinched. This great, big frown came over that good-looking face that I couldn’t ignore as much as I wanted to. He had been so fucking beautiful to me once, even though he had more in common with a villain than he did a hero, this man who could steamroll over other men like they were bowling pins, which was the last thing I would have expected with his soft voice, those eyes that I’d thought—wrongly—were kind, those freckles over his nose, and those damn dimples.

But he wasn’t anymore though. Beautiful, I meant. He was just a reminder that appearances were only skin deep.

Beautiful people were good. They didn’t do the kinds of things that he had. They didn’t show up to rub salt on a wound that had healed, hoping to reopen it.

Because that’s what his presence here was, regardless of what his reasons were.