“No, we just played patty-cake,” I answered her dryly.
Her phone went down, and I had her undivided attention again. Even her elbows went to her thighs as she leaned forward and asked way too carefully, “No, Lenny, for real. You. Had. Sex. With. Him?”
I blinked. I didn’t need that reminder. “Yes.”
“Him?”
I poked at my inner cheek with the tip of my tongue. “I’m not really feeling your tone of voice right now.”
This bish looked back at the picture of Jonah Collins and shook her head again like she couldn’t believe it. “I just… I mean…” She was stuttering. She was literally stuttering, and I just about rolled my fucking eyes at her.
I mean, yeah, I understood. Jonah was… a fucker, of course… a dipshit, dumbass, motherfucker… but he was beautiful. Handsome in a way that only few men could be, not feminine at all, but sculpted so perfectly from his perfect hairline to his roughly striking face… and then there was that body.
God, I hated his guts, no matter what I told myself about not feeling anything. Hatred. Hatred was a feeling. But it was also a verb sometimes.
“Him?” she asked again in disbelief.
“I think I might be starting to get a little offended by how surprised you sound, Luna,” I told her, totally joking, because really, I did get it.
“I always… you never…” She kept stopping and starting with her words as she grew flustered. “You’ve never said anything about a guy before, Len. Not once in ten years. I just thought you were… asexual or something for the longest time.” Her cheeks went pink as she whispered, “I thought you were a virgin until... you know.”
I blinked at her again, knowing she had a point. “Yeah, no.”
She gasped. “You never said anything! I thought for a while there you had something going on with that Noah guy, but then nothing ever happened, and I know you, if you really liked him, I bet you would have gone for it, and—did you lose it to him?”
My shady-ass past was finally coming to light. “I’m thirty-one. I didn’t lose my virginity to Jonah, Luna. Jesus.”
“Who then?”
There was a reason I’d never brought this up before: I just hadn’t seen the point. On the other hand, Luna had given me some intimate details of her and the guys she’d dated before so… it was the least I owed her. “This one guy I was friends with when I started going to college. He was in a few of my classes.” I shrugged, thinking about the guy that I had liked as a friend.
“Let me see a picture of him.”
I rolled my eyes with a snort. “Stalker, much?”
“Does he look like him?” she asked, shaking her phone at me.
I slid her a look. “No. And stop looking so surprised. You might start hurting my feelings.”
That had her groaning. “You know what I mean!”
I shrugged my good shoulder at her, honestly relieved that I had finally managed to tell her the entire story. At least 90 percent of it. Even though she was my best friend, she didn’t need to hear the bad parts. No one did. I knew there were plenty of things she hadn’t shared with me over the years. The same way I knew there were a handful of other things I had never told her either.
“So he’s back?” she asked, focused back on her screen.
“Yeah.”
Her green eyes went wide as she sat in the chair, eyes moving back to her phone while she processed my news. “What are you going to do?” she asked after a second.
“See what he says,” I answered her simply. “I don’t really have another choice.” It wasn’t like I could pick him up by his ankles and give him the shakedown over the side of a skyscraper so he’d tell me why he was here or what he wanted. Unfortunately.
“What does Grandpa Gus think?”
Fuck me. I straight-up grimaced at her.
That was what it took to get her to shove her phone back into her purse, drop her mouth wide, and gasp, “You haven’t told him?”
I thought about lunch the day before and winced at how I’d talked myself out of telling him anything, even after he asked me if I was constipated from the faces I’d been making. “No…”
“Lenny!”
“I was going to, but he was in a good mood, and I didn’t want to ruin it,” I explained, knowing it sounded about as lame of an excuse as it really was.
Luna’s mouth was still open as she shook her head for about the tenth time in the last ten minutes. I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t believe I’d been that much of a coward either. “You know, I never thought the day would come where I’d be the one calling you a chickenshit.”
I rolled my eyes before glancing back down at the claim I had been in the middle of filing so I could get reimbursed for a faulty leg press that I’d had to pay to get repaired. “You know, I never thought the day would come where I would be calling you a smart-ass, Luna, but look at that, miracles do come true,” I muttered in return… even though we both knew she was totally right.
I was being a chickenshit. A big one.
And she hadn’t been the first one to call me out on it. Peter had too the night before after I’d told him about my surprise visitor, and that was because at this point, other than Luna, he was the only other person who knew what I was avoiding.
That was: telling Grandpa Gus something he should have known months ago.
The truth… not that I had ever technically lied to any of them. I just hadn’t said anything, period. That was the only factor that worked in my favor: that none of them had known. Until now at least.
Grandpa was going to be even more pissed he was the last person to find out.
Luna had canceled on me the night before because her daughter hadn’t been feeling well still, and we’d planned for her to come by the gym in the morning while her father-in-law watched her Ava, which was how and why we were here, in the office at the gym with the door closed, with her making crazy faces at me because I had sex with one of the most attractive rugby players in the world.
Luna Ripley, one of my top five favorite people in the entire world, gaped again before bursting out laughing. “Rip said something similar a few days ago, but what can I say? I’ve mastered my craft by learning from the best,” she said, referring to her husband.
Her husband.
Jesus.
We were old enough to be married now, I remembered, deciding to focus on that for a second. Well, she was married. This was who we were now. Making and canceling plans because of kids. Real, human children.
Fuck, I still hadn’t gotten used to that.
Her comment got a groan out of my throat as I shoved aside this thing with Grandpa Gus and Jonah that loomed over my head. “Bish, I know you’re not talking about my pal Rip like that.”
“Bish, we both know who I’m talking about,” she claimed, bringing a smile onto my face as I signed my signature on the bold line of the form.
“Hey, don’t talk about Grandpa like that either.”
That got her laughing one more time. “I can’t believe it though,” she said after a moment. “How have you not told him? He always knows everything. He knew I was pregnant before I did, remember? Now that I think about, I’m surprised he didn’t hire a private investigator or anything.”
I’d forgotten that, but she was right. She’d been around the ageless vampire long enough to know how the man worked. And he hadn’t hired a PI because I’d asked him very, very nicely.
It hit me then that he had let me get away with not telling him about Jonah.
“After he got mad, initially, he just never asked. Then last night, he left as soon as I got home because it was pickleball night, and I was in my room by the time he got back. This morning he was arguing with the tech people for our internet service, and we barely said two words to each other,” I tried to explain, hearing my own bullshit and cringing at it.
Excuses, fucking excuses. I was a total chickenshit now. Seriously.
This person that was the closest thing I would e
ver have to a sister snorted across from me, thinking the same thing.
It was my turn to make a face at one of the best people in my life. “I don’t know what the hell you’re snorting about.”
She was smiling—she was always fucking smiling—as she glanced at her ancient watch, then stood up and shook her blue-haired head, hand gripping the strap of her purse. “You know what I’m snorting at, Len.” She smiled even wider. “I need to go. I’m meeting up with Rip for lunch, but text me later.” The little shit wiggled her eyebrows. “You know, after you tell Grandpa G about you-know-who. Hehe.”
I scowled as I got up and kissed her on the cheek, getting one back. “Tell him I said hi. Are we still on for lunch next week?”
“I will, and, yes, we’re on.” Luna slid me a smile and held her palm up between us, and I smacked it. “I know he’s an asshole, but he’s a really hot one, Len. Almost as hot as Rip. I’m so proud of you.”
I groaned and waited until she was halfway down the short hall before I called out, “I love you, Luna!”
“Love you too, Len!”
I smiled to myself as I shoved my chair back and looked down at the claim form I’d just signed before grabbing it and heading out of the office. It didn’t take more than a second to find Peter hanging over the top edge of the cage’s walls, looking into it as two men, who I couldn’t recognize from this far, circled each other.
On the way toward the gym next door, I waved at the small group of men and women on the mats, covered in sweat and breathing hard following whatever exercises they had just gone through.
It didn’t take me long at all to leave the building and head toward the one next door. Inside, the ceilings opened up just as high, with row after row of equipment and machines lined up perfectly to maximize the space. I lifted a hand at all the people I recognized as I headed straight toward where the fax machine was at the front desk. It only took about three minutes to send the fax and get a confirmation back—because the company didn’t believe in scanners—and I made a quick stop at the front desk slash juice bar to check on the two employees there and make sure they didn’t need anything. They didn’t. Bianca had bags under her eyes, but that wasn’t saying much since I did too most days, and the other girl looked fine.
At least I had work stuff going for me without issues, I thought, as an image of Jonah’s face filled my brain for all of a split second—specifically an image of Jonah’s face after I’d told him that I didn’t care about his excuses anymore. Just as quickly as that picture entered my head, fucking tiny little freckles on his nose and all, I shoved it away.
Seventeen months.
I had nothing to feel bad about. Nothing.
Back out to the training building, I managed five steps inside my office before coming to a stop.
Someone was sitting in the chair in front of my desk.
Someone with short hair so dark it could have been dark brown or black. Tall, based on how high up he sat in the seat, with wide, muscular shoulders, and a thick neck. Shit.
There were a couple other dark-haired men at Maio House but none of them had shoulders that size or trap muscles that bulky. The tallest man who trained in this part of the gym was six foot three. I took everyone’s height and weight when they first joined. When they were finally forced to start cutting weight—which meant that right before they had a fight, they had to lose a few pounds to make it to their weight class because usually everyone was fifteen to twenty pounds heavier than they needed to be, and that was on the average side—I helped them keep track of it so that it wouldn’t be too much that had to be cut in too short of a time period. I had known guys who had to drop out of fights because they had gone a little too crazy with sodium levels, and no one wanted to lose an opportunity, especially over something so stupid.
But that was all beside the point. Because it only took maybe a second for me to figure out who was sitting there. Think of the damn devil and he will appear, or whatever the saying was.
Jonah Hema Collins wasn’t the devil, but I couldn’t say he wasn’t much further down the list than the red guy was on people I would rather never see.
How the hell had he gotten inside again?
I reminded myself for about the hundredth time over the last couple of days that there wasn’t anything the Fucker could say or do that would hurt me. There was nothing that would change my life too much. There was nothing that could happen that I couldn’t fight, because I would if I had to. I came from a long line of people who were really good at fighting. And that gene hadn’t skipped a generation with me.
The man I’d known hadn’t seemed like the kind of person to do something shitty… but everyone changes. That, and I wasn’t sure I had even gotten to know him that well in the first place, from the way he’d turned out in the end. You know, like an asshole.
I was going to be an adult. I was going to keep allllll this shit to myself and punch my pillow when I got home. That’s what I was going to do. Be an adult, even if a little part of me died from forcing myself to be decent since it wasn’t like that came all that naturally to me.
If I couldn’t make it until then, there were a couple bags right outside my office I had access to.
Seriously, who the hell had let him in?
“Good morning,” the man sitting in the chair said as he turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, like he had either heard or sensed me coming in.
He could take his morning and shove it up his—
There went my speech. But I wasn’t doing this for me, was I? Damn it.
“Hi,” I told him, giving him my best Lurch impression.
I rounded the edge of the desk, knowing my hip was just a few inches away from his elbow as I did it. It wasn’t a big room, but it wasn’t that small either. It was just that he wasn’t exactly what anyone would call a small man unless it was Andre the Giant we were talking about.
Jonah the Asshole didn’t wait until I was seated to say, “I’d like to sign up for a membership.”
Was he trying to piss me off? I wanted to ask him. I would have, if I had known I could get the question out of my mouth without going back on the promise I made myself. Because unlike some people I knew, when I said I would do something, I did it. I didn’t disappear—
Stop.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all, Luna would tell me. But she had never warned me how fucking hard it was to live up to that. And I definitely didn’t have a single nice thing to say about any of this. Especially not for this asshole in my office who was busy looking at me with a clear, guileless, totally earnest and open expression as he gazed at me over his shoulder.
And that just made me madder.
He wanted a membership here? Okay. Fine.
I pulled my chair out, lowered myself onto it carefully and then rolled it forward once more. Then and only then did I look up at him at the same time as I reached out between us, taking in that face that was almost model-gorgeous. Almost. Except he had been too busted up over the years to be something so… basic.
Fortunately for me, it didn’t take much effort to remember that maybe I wasn’t going to be a complete asshole, but that didn’t mean I had to like him. Or that I had to be nice. Just… polite. Out loud. The things I thought in my head were a different story.
Fuckface.
And it was with that thought that I watched as he scooted forward in the seat he had taken without permission or an invitation and reached out with that big, big hand. I watched in slow motion as his fingertips—long and with signs at the joints that said that nearly all of them had been broken at some point—brushed over the back of my hand so gently it might have been nice… if I didn’t borderline hate him.
For the rest of my life, I was going to blame the fact that he genuinely surprised the shit out of me on why I didn’t immediately slap his fingers away.
Jonah Collins took my hand with those strong fingers—while I sat there like a dumbass—flipping
it over in the blink of an eye, so that my palm sat upward on my desk, and then set his own palm on top of it. His hand swallowed mine, making it seem a lot smaller than it actually was. The same way it had so long ago.
Before he’d left.
Before he’d changed my life for the better.
And also pissed me off in a way that was beyond fucking words.
I jerked my hand out from under his.
Fisting my hand, I set it on my thigh for a second before returning it to my desk because fuck it. I wasn’t going to hide shit from him.
He was the one who did the hiding.
Those honey-colored eyes were still on me, and I could see the deep, drawn breath he took in. I didn’t care if I hurt his feelings. He’d hurt mine enough. And he was real fucking lucky I was being this mature. That I was willing to let him be here in the first place.
But before I could say anything else, his shoulders pushed back and his chin went up again in that way I had only seen him do on the rugby field… pitch, whatever it was called. Like he was pumping himself up to deal with me. I ignored how that might have made me feel.
“Have lunch with me,” the Fucker said softly in that accented voice that I wasn’t attracted to anymore.
I said “no” instantly.
His shoulders stayed back as he tried again. “Brekkie?”
Breakfast? Why was he doing this? “What the hell do you want, Jonah?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. The man let his eyes drift over my face slowly, and I was pretty sure he held his breath. “I understand that you’re mad—” That was as far as he got before I stopped him.
“Mad?” I snapped before I could remind myself that I needed to keep it cool. “You think I’m mad?”
If anything, the word pissed would be more accurate for how I’d felt a year ago. Months ago, even. But not now.
He sat up just a little, but just enough to make those big, flat muscles flex under the long-sleeved white T-shirt with a tiny Adidas logo that was gripping his shoulders for dear life. The asshole made sure he was making total eye contact with me, keeping that fucking face nice and even as he responded way too calmly, “Yes. I can see you are, Lenny. You have that face you make when you’re bothered, squinty eyes and all,” the man from New Zealand answered in that way that was so second nature to him, I couldn’t believe I had liked the shit out of it in the past. “I want to talk to you about it. Explain.”
The Best Thing Page 5