I looked at my own treadmill display. 6.8 miles per hour.
I looked at his. 7.5.
Without thinking about it, I bumped my speed up to match.
His reflection showed the corner of his mouth twitch. He'd noticed.
Of course he had.
We ran in silence, separated by two empty machines and everything we weren't saying. The minutes ticked by. Five. Seven. Ten. Sweat was dripping down my chest now, soaking into the waistband of my shorts. My breathing was getting heavier, less controlled. Jace looked like he could run forever—pace never faltering, breathing staying even, sweat running down the cut lines of his abdomen in a way that I tracked in the mirror and couldn't seem to stop.
He caught me looking.
Our eyes met in the reflection and held for three full seconds. Neither of us looked away.
Then he increased his speed.
A challenge, clear as a dropped glove.
I should have recognized it for what it was and shut it down. Instead I bumped my own speed up and kept running.
The sound of our breathing changed—harsher, more labored, the treadmills humming louder. My quads burned. My lungs worked hard. But I wasn't going to be the first one to stop.
Jace's chest was heaving with exertion, his skin slick with sweat. He looked over at me, not in the mirror this time but directly, and there was something fierce and hungry in his expression that I felt in my sternum.
I held his gaze while my heart pounded and my breath came in gasps and every muscle in my body screamed.
He reached down and stopped his treadmill.
The sudden absence of that sound made everything else louder. My own footfalls. My own breathing. The rush of blood in my ears.
I stopped mine too.
We stood on our respective machines, both dripping, both breathing hard, staring at each other across the empty space between us. Then Jace stepped off his treadmill and drifted toward the mats in the back corner, moving like he had no particular destination, but there was nothing casual about the way he moved. When he reached the edge of the mat, he turned back to face me.
The look he gave me was half question, half challenge.
Every rational part of my brain threw up warnings. This was a bad decision. This had consequences written all over it in permanent ink.
I stepped onto the mat anyway.
Jace moved first, a testing feint that I deflected easily. He was fast, but I'd been reading bodies and anticipating movement for twenty years. He came at me again and this time I engaged, catching his wrist and using his own momentum to pull him off balance. He recovered smoothly—his core strength evident in the way he spun out of my grip and reset his stance—and the quick grin he flashed saidso that's how we're playing.
We circled each other on the mat. The fluorescent lights cast harsh shadows that made the angles of his face more severe, more defined. Sweat gleamed on his collarbones, ran down the center of his chest, tracked the lines of his abdomen. I forced myself to focus on fundamentals. Center of gravity. Base. Leverage points. The technical details that would keep this somewhere I could still call professional.
He lunged. I sidestepped. His hand caught my bare shoulder, fingers digging in for purchase, and suddenly we were grappling for real.
That was when I felt it, the first stirring of arousal, unwelcome and undeniable. The contact. The heat of his skin against mine. The way his muscles flexed under my hands when I caught him. I tried to ignore it, tried to focus on technique and positioning, but my body had already logged the information and decided what to do with it.
I hooked my leg behind his knee and tried to take him down, partly to end this before it got worse. He twisted at the last second and threw his weight against mine, and we hit the mat together in a controlled fall that still knocked the air from both our lungs. The impact reverberated through my chest and ribs and pressed our bodies together in a way that made my growing problem significantly worse.
Jace ended up on his back with me half on top of him, my forearm braced across his sternum, his hands locked around my bicep. We were both breathing hard, faces only inches apart.
I could feel his heartbeat through my arm where it pressed against his chest. I could smell his skin, something clean underneath the sweat. I could see the exact moment his pupils dilated, black swallowing up the color, and I knew he could feel me against him. There was no hiding it.
I shoved off him harder than necessary and rolled to my feet, trying to create distance before the evidence became impossible to ignore.
Too late for that.
