I had always trusted my gut. My instincts had never failed me. Not ever.

And those instincts right then were telling me…

That this fucker was being honest. That he had gotten hurt, panicked, became… depressed. He had been hurting back then. And if I were anyone else, I might have not understood how dark of a place that could be… but I did.

And I knew without a doubt that it couldn’t be easy for him to admit this to me. It couldn’t have been easy to do something about it, even if it had taken him months to go talk to someone as he’d put it. Everything in me said he was being truthful.

Asshole.

I had to glance at that open face of his, and I couldn’t wrap my head around him being in the slums. I really couldn’t. At least not by looking at him and seeing all the brightness he carried around in his smiles and even in his damn eyes.

And… I knew exactly what it was like to think that your life was over. That everything you had hoped and dreamed for was gone, just like that.

I thought I was pretty fucking tough, but all that toughness hadn’t been enough to keep me from sobbing into my pillows when no one could hear me because I was never going to compete in judo again and my life was never going to be the same again.

Because I had made a choice that hadn’t been easy, but that I hadn’t been able to find it in me to regret.

Maybe if I hadn’t been injured so much in the past…. If the chances of becoming reinjured weren’t so great, I could have still continued competing. But the risks outweighed everything, and I had a whole lifetime ahead of me to do things with my girl that I wasn’t willing to possibly lose because I’d already pushed my body to the limits so many times.

So… yeah, I understood. I understood very, very well.

Except I hadn’t been a little bitch about it. I had cried into my pillow, but I hadn’t gone off the deep end. I hadn’t run away and hidden.

But I knew one thing, and I knew it well.

If Jonah Collins had tried to feed me some other excuse, I would have thought he was full of shit.

But he hadn’t fed me anything but what my gut honestly believed was the truth, damn it.

What did it say about me that it annoyed some part of me that he wasn’t the total douche I had been thinking he was for the last year? He was just… a human being who thought he had lost the thing he loved the most in this world. He’d lost his shit and didn’t want to be around anything or anyone.

I would never do anything like that, but then again, I wasn’t that sensitive. For me, getting mad made me want to get even with whoever had pissed me off. Anger and grief were an accelerant for me; those things didn’t douse shit in my brain. They made me want to attack. To continue on and persevere.

Yet here he was, this Maybe Not a Douche who claimed he had waited too long to come here, where I lived, to explain why he’d left.

Who knew I’d blocked him.

While it wasn’t exactly relief that I felt at his admission, it did feel like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Off my chest. Even a little off my heart and soul.

There were still a thousand questions I had that I would be willing to ask, but… not then.

Not when it was hard enough to talk about going through a dark period in your life in the first place. I didn’t kick people who were already down. I wasn’t going to start now. One thing at a time.

Sitting straight up, I slid my hand out from under his and then reached over to pluck his phone off his knee.

He gave me a curious look as I exited the app he had open, the one that showed his ride would be at my house in two minutes and took in the default background image on his screen. By the time the SUV had pulled up to the front of my house, I had just finished hitting the Save button.

“I added Grandpa Gus’s phone number to your contacts since you already have Peter’s,” I told him as we both got to our feet. “I saw you still have my number. I’ll unblock you when I get inside so your calls can start coming through again.”

He didn’t move as I took Mo from him, sucking up her warmth and weight and giving her some of my body heat even though she felt nice and toasty, probably from her dad’s body heat.

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I get to work at seven in the morning. I stay at the gym, and then leave work at four unless I have to stay for some reason. Most Tuesdays and Thursdays I work from nine until six, and every once in a while I might stay later, but it’s rare now. I usually work every other weekend and take Monday and Tuesday off on those days. Each of those Saturdays I teach a self-defense class at eight in the morning,” I told him carefully. “You can call me anytime.”

He blinked. And by the next blink, he was nodding. “Ta.”

I didn’t know what the fuck “ta” meant, but I’d look it up inside. I took two steps backward and stopped. “Jonah.”

Even in the darkness without the porch light on, I knew he was listening.

“You aren’t the first person to get injured and think the world was over. I would have understood. I get why you left, but it still fucking sucks that you did that. I thought I knew you, and it hurt that I didn’t because I never would have expected for you to just… leave like that.” I hugged Mo a little closer. “Don’t fuck this up, all right? Don’t make me regret this.”

I know I didn’t imagine the way his shoulders rolled backward, his spine straightening, and his entire body seemed to just… come to life. He grew in front of my eyes. From a six-foot-five monster to one that would give the Hulk a reason to pause.

And he said in that beautiful voice, “I won’t.”

Chapter 11

8:30 p.m

Fucking Christ,

you fucking asshole,

text me back.

JUST TEXT ME BACK.

We need to talk.

I don’t care if you don’t want to.

Don’t be a bitch.

There’s something important

you need to know

“That’s a stupid deal and a stupid fight,” I said into my cell phone as I turned around and backed into the door, opening it with my butt.

The man on the other end of the line said the same thing he’d been trying to sell me on for the last five minutes. “It’s a start—”

“A worthless one. He’s not going to take it, and you’re wasting his time and my time by bringing it up again. It isn’t enough money, and I’ll tell you right now his offer with other organizations is a lot better,” I cut him off, looking around the gym floor as I headed toward the juice bar counter.

“Lenny,” the man on the line groaned.

“Sorry, but you know I’m not going to tell him to take it,” I kept going, taking in the members working out, living their own lives. It only reminded me that I had woken up late, hadn’t meditated, and Mo had peed all over me—and her crib—before seven in the morning. I needed to squeeze in some time on the bike or the Stairmaster today, at least. Maybe during my lunch break. Fifteen minutes of high-intensity cardio was better than nothing. “Offer him more. I know you can.”

My eyes narrowed in on an impressively tall figure standing at the juice counter, chin tucked in, gaze focused downward. That height looked awfully familiar. So did those shoulders, and that haircut and color.