Rolling his lower lip inward, he bit down on it in thought before saying, “Not so much stress as… mental wear and tear, I guess.” He angled his head so she could get at another spot. “They pointed out that of all the people in the squad, I made the team at the youngest age—and I’ve been selected nonstop since then.”

Catie had never really thought about it in those terms, but the psychologist was right: Danny had been playing professional rugby since he was only nineteen. On the flip side… “High-performance sports is a young person’s game.” A simple fact of life. Catie would always run, but she knew that her body would—at some point—stop being able to keep up with younger athletes.

That was when she’d retire from competitive running and flow into the next stage of her life. A next stage that she had all planned out thanks to the Esera family’s example and her own mother’s type A genes, which Catie had inherited in a certain measure.

“That’s what I said,” Danny muttered, arms folded. “I told them there was no point in me taking a few months off. I’d just worry about losing conditioning, and that would stress me out.”

Shifting her legs off him, she rearranged herself. “Put your head in my lap and I’ll give you a proper scalp massage.”

He didn’t argue, just did as she’d ordered. Eyes closing, he let her play with his hair, massage his scalp, and she could see the lines fading from his face. “What did they say to that?”

Eyes still closed, he said, “See, that’s the thing.” Tiny frown lines that she rubbed away. “They have an idea that I’m actually considering.”

“What? Are you into cliffhangers now?” Catie pretended to strangle him.

Laughing, he flicked his eyes open, the warm brown of them as familiar to her as her own eyes. “They pointed out that I’ve never done the usual young-Kiwi thing and gone off backpacking somewhere or found a job in a bar in another country while I see the world.” He reached up to tug on a lock of her hair. “You did that.”

“Kind of, sure.” She’d trained in different parts of the world and had always tacked on at least a couple of weeks to explore.

While in high-altitude training in Kenya, she’d added an extra two months; Laveni had flown over to meet her, and the two of them had traveled through several countries on the continent in a battered old Jeep Cherokee that they’d bought off a departing backpacker for the grand total of five hundred dollars. The thing had been losing parts by the time they ended their trip, but they’d still been sorry to say goodbye to it.