that haircut, but it was the height and that damn body that really struck me.
It was Jonah.
I had seen him every single day over the last four. At the gym either during or after his workout. He would come by my office if I didn’t see him on a trip to the main building. Just yesterday he had gone with me to Mo’s daycare again to pick her up and drop her off with Mr. Cooper, a family friend who babysat his granddaughter just like my own gramps did. And every single night, he would get to the house right around six—when I got home—and stay until Mo passed out.
I wanted to dislike him, I really did. Every single day we were together, I would look at him and some asshole part of me yearned to be mad, to tell him that I didn’t need or want him in my life. I wanted to tell him that he’d hurt me by disappearing, regardless of the fact I now understood why he had. I wanted to ask him if he hadn’t liked me enough once we had time and distance apart, and that’s why the postcards had stopped. Then again, he’d come here without knowing about Mo, so that didn’t make sense.
But…
He had already made his reasons clear. That was all I should have needed or wanted. There was no point in finding out more details. He smiled so fucking much and was so damn polite to my grandpa who was still treating him worse than people treated those with leprosy.
Fuck me, I couldn’t hate him even a little bit, and that was the truth. It was probably the single most annoying thing to ever happen in my life: not being able to hate his ass.
Most importantly, Jonah was so into Mo, how could I?
He never took a night off from seeing her. I’d seen how thoughtful his face became when I told him things: how to dress her, bathe her, tricks that worked about 50 percent of the time for feeding her. And Jonah listened.
All that patience and commitment and how good-natured he was….
It was so bad that Grandpa had whispered to me over dinner one night, sounding bitter as fuck, “You couldn’t have picked a shithead?”
I shot him a look that had him rolling his eyes like he blamed me for him not being a total dumbass we could hate on.
So far, that had been all of our stories where it came to Jonah Collins.
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