really be able to see her. But I knew he would, and I knew we would find a way. Something told me he would see her every second he could.
Jonah Hema Collins was no deadbeat.
Those honey-colored eyes flicked to me for a moment at the end of my thoughts, and the open vulnerability in them shot straight into my heart. “She’ll know, won’t she?”
A frog magically appeared in my throat, and there was no way I could ever lie to him about that answer. “Yeah. She will, Jonah. She’ll know. We’ll make sure.”
The last thing I expected was the hand that moved from a small cheek to the hand I had resting on the top of my thigh. Warm, rough fingers slid over my own like it was totally normal. I’d remember the next words out of his mouth every day of my life. I would remember them each time I thought I had no idea what I was doing being a mom. Jonah Collins squeezed my hand. That muscular shoulder rolled upward, and he said, in a rough voice, gripping my fingers tight, “What a gift you’ve given me, Lenny.”
Chapter 12
1:55 p.m.
Wow, seriously.
Wow: Three months now?
TEXT ME BACK.
It’s really important, dipshit.
Your voice mailbox is still full.
“What the fuck is he doing?” I asked Peter, who was standing beside me on the outside of the cage, peering at the two fighters in the center too. “Watch his arm, Carlos!”
“I don’t know,” Peter replied to me a moment before yelling again. “Grab the leg! Grab the leg!”
He didn’t grab his leg. Or watch his arm.
I glanced down at my cellphone. Thirty seconds were left before the timer went off, signaling the end of the second round for Carlos’s training session with a fighter who had come to train with Peter for the winter. The guy was a light heavyweight named Sven Andersson from Iceland.
And he was kicking Carlos’s ass as Peter and I watched him make one stupid mistake after another.
Rookie mistakes, really. They weren’t even the kinds of mistakes that a person made when they were cocky. He was rushing and being impulsive. They weren’t fighting full-strength, but half or three-quarters could still cause a lot of damage. He was being straight-up stupid.
“Jesus Christ,” Peter muttered as the Sven guy landed a snap kick to Carlos’s face. He was wearing head protection, but we both jerked our heads back and winced at the sight of his skull taking that kind of impact. He was a douche for ratting me out to Noah—I was pretty sure it was him—but I didn’t want him to get his ass kicked during practice either. Peter and I had made faces at each other over the gap in their weight classes and skill levels, but we’d kept our mouths shut when both of them had insisted they wanted to spar.
I held my breath as Sven went for a really hard combo that left Carlos off-balance for a moment before they clashed together, grabbing one another. I glanced down at my phone again. Ten seconds left. “He’s not defending against the clinch at all,” I told Peter. “Keep your chin down!”
He didn’t keep his chin down, and Peter didn’t argue with me. Instead, Sven backed off, and Carlos rocked back on his heels as the other man landed a few more punches that I could tell were lighter than they had been before. Sven knew without a doubt he was winning… and had been the whole time.
The buzzing on my phone had me elbowing Peter who blew the buzzer we had to call time, and the two men in the cage separated.
I met Peter’s eyes, and we both made a face. Again.
He pressed his fingertip between his eyebrows.
I knew what he was going to ask me to do, and I was going to make him ask for it.
He still had his finger between his eyebrows as he aimed a dark brown iris at me. “Help him, please.”
It would be my pleasure and he knew it, so I just nodded at him and kicked my flip-flops off. I made my way up the steps and into the cage, watching Carlos as he crouched, trying to catch his breath. He looked exhausted.
But mostly, he looked pissed.
He’d lost his last fight a few days ago, and he was doing even shittier now. I’d be pissed too if I were him.
“Yoo-hoo,” I said quietly, ignoring the Sven guy sitting a few feet away, trying to catch his breath too.
Carlos glanced