“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