You’re perfect the way you are, he had said, like it was no big deal.

It hadn’t been like I was lonely. I had friends. I had things to keep me busy. I had been a healthy teenager who got curious one night, put my hand over my underwear, and discovered that I really enjoyed masturbating. And that’s what I did, frequently. But I’d never felt the urge back then to have someone else make me orgasm when I could do it myself pretty damn well.

I had enough nonsexual physical interactions with other people that it wasn’t like I missed affection or any shit like that. When I usually thought about guys, I thought about how bad they smelled when their deodorants wore off and how bitchy they got when things went wrong, but that I enjoyed working with them because they were stronger than I was and helped me better prepare to compete against other females who weren’t.

And if there had been a short period in there where I’d thought I might have had feelings for my friend, that was one thing, but I’d come to terms with that real quick, and I’d moved on from that idea just as fast.

As I got older, I hadn’t been hoping to meet anyone. It wasn’t something I thought about period. Not even for sex because I doubted anything could compare to my vibrators or my hand or my toss pillow that I kept hidden on a shelf in my closet.

I didn’t have my first kiss until I was twenty. Only had sex at the same age because kissing had been all right and I was curious if sex was worth all the hype. I’d done it with a friend from college who had been a year younger than me and had been a virgin too. Sex had been like the time I took up rock climbing out of curiosity for a few months. Done and never repeated after those few times.

And then, I’d met him.

If I closed my eyes, I was 99 percent positive I could still picture those massive shoulders capped with rounded muscles. The biceps bigger than my head. The forearms that made my calves look puny. I’d never be able to forget how solid his pectorals had been in profile, or how perfect his flatly muscled abs were as they sloped into a waist that was so trim, most people would have a hard time believing just how much food it could pack away.

Most importantly though, there had been that damn smile. That had done it.

That dipshit… that fucker… had been an awakening that hit me out of nowhere the first time I saw him. Like those kids in videos who get hearing aids and can hear for the first time, and you get to witness their life changing. Or color-blind people who get glasses and can finally totally see all the fucking colors you take for granted because you can’t appreciate having something that seems so natural.

That’s what it had been like to look at him for the first time.

And if that wasn’t enough, that two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body was connected to the face that had had me doing a double take. A forehead dotted with countless tiny scars on it, a nose that was still in great shape considering he had told me that it had been broken multiple times. Then there was the tanned skin stretched tight over high cheekbones, the lightest honey-colored eyes that were almost almond-shaped, and a mouth that was almost fake from how pink its lips were.

A year ago, when I’d been having a really bad night, I’d looked Jonah Ho-bag Collins up online, and in the process, found a list of the twenty-two sexiest rugby players in the world.

Of course, he’d been on it.

Maybe I hadn’t known who he was when we met, but I’d been an exception. There had been no reason for me to recognize him. And as I took him in right then, in that moment, it struck me just how familiar his face seemed to me now. How familiar those features, especially those eyes and skin color, were. I had to hold my breath for a second it hit me so hard.

But this was a face that I hadn’t seen in seventeen months. That mix of rugged yet handsome bones and bright eyes had disappeared on me. That mouth had never called me back.

The face looking back at me in my office hadn’t liked me back as much as I had thought it did.

This face was on a person who had made me cry in fucking fury and disappointment. This face that was the second one to ever make me feel used and fucking stupid. I’d dreamed, literally dreamed, about punching the fucking face looking at me.

Stop.

I knew what was important. I knew what mattered. I knew what I had told myself I would do, even if it were hard as hell.

Most importantly though, I was no weak bitch.

It took a second, but I did it.

I focused, and I clung to it, but I accepted and processed the truth: this stupid face had given me joy… and love—and not a little bit, but a lot. So much that I wasn’t going to instantly chuck my stapler at him like I really wanted to or scream “stranger danger” so someone else could beat him up for me.

I had gotten over the bone structure facing me. I didn’t give a flying shit over the clear, honey-colored eyes that were set into those sockets below heavy, dark eyebrows. I felt nothing good for the man suddenly standing in my office in fitted jeans and an olive-green hoodie that hugged every part of an upper body that hadn’t lost a single pound of muscle since the last time I had seen it.

I wasn’t going to get mad. I wasn’t going to cuss him out or do any other stupid shit. I was going to handle this.

I had promised myself that if this day ever came, I would do what I had to do. With some honor. With some pride.

But that didn’t mean I had to be nice.

And it was because I didn’t feel shit anymore for this specific person—because hating his guts didn’t really count—that I didn’t even raise my eyebrows at his random appearance after seventeen fucking months, even as some part of my brain freaked out at the fact that Peter had literally just told me about him yesterday. Yesterday. The same day I had just read about him not signing his contract.

He was here, in Houston of all places, when he had told me before he’d only been to the United States twice and both times had been for work.

God, I couldn’t believe this fucker actually had the balls to be here.

I took a breath in through my nose and let it right back out. Seventeen months. It has been seventeen months since the last time I’ve seen him, I reminded myself.

I had this.

“Jonah.” I let that sense of I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you flow over my arms and up into my throat, making it easier to say his name. To look at him.

There was nothing he could do that I couldn’t fight. There was nothing he could say that would possibly hurt me. I had prepared for this. I’d warned myself it might happen… one day maybe ten years from now, when, hopefully, I might be hot as hell and living my best life, so I could rub it in his face that I was better than ever. That I hadn’t missed or needed his ass for a second.

This asshole with those honey-colored eyes had the nerve to stand there, watching me, with all those muscles and that face and that green hoodie and those jeans and that closely cropped hair and smoothly shaved jaw, and say, all soft and almost shyly, and in that fucking accent that had been the second thing to catch my attention, “Hi, Lenny.”

Hi, Lenny.

He’d Hi, Lenny-d me.

This fucking long and he was going to go with “Hi, Lenny” like we had seen each other a week ago at the grocery store?

I can do this, I repeated to myself.

If I could have reached my stress ball, I would have, but I couldn’t, at least not without him noticing, and I wasn’t going to give him the gift of seeing me squeezing my ball to keep my shit together in his presence.