He was twenty-four now, and personal trainer was the only job he’d ever held. It was great on one hand, because it was something he was good at, and he wasn’t too badly paid. Plus, it allowed him to run one or two other lines of private business, which were also pretty lucrative. But when he was putting some wimp through his paces on the rowing machine or the grappler, or watching him sweat and cringe as he pumped out the miles on the static bike, and then suddenly learned that the wimp had once worked in a field hospital in Afghanistan, or had flown fighter jets, or had climbed Everest or been to the South Pole, he was the one who felt inferior, he was the one who was intimidated – and that wasn’t great for Nathan.

How could he prowl the gym as he was now, gruffly correcting poor technique, or telling people to put their phones away, or ordering them off the weights if they were going at it solo, when, inside, he didn’t feel like a real man? How could he smarm his way around the girls when the lies he told them about his undercover operations in Russia and Iraq, or his days as a submariner or paratrooper, were paper-thin, based on nothing more than his own imagination?

Of course, at the end of the day, that didn’t stop Nathan looking for girls. When you were as red-blooded as he was, it was impossible to do anything else in a place like FitnessFanatix. They came in by the bucket-load. After the old ladies in the morning and the stressed-out mothers in mid-to-late afternoon, came the late teens and twenty-somethings in the evening, the lookers, the gorgeous babes who fitted their Lycra to perfection, whose skin soon glowed with perspiration. Those were the ones Nathan was really interested in, and the reason he always requested the late shift if he was allowed to choose. Of course, you had to be careful these days, in the age of the #MeToo movement.

Frankly, that rankled with Nathan.

You had to be especially careful in the workplace, where simply hitting on a girl could be seen as exploiting your position and might well be deemed a sacking offence. Looking was still free, of course – that was something, at least. Not that Nathan was content with that. He was bursting to get up close and personal with several of the regular girls here. But even so, for his own protection, he knew that he must win their confidence gradually, over a protracted period. Until then he’d have to restrict himself to feasting his hungry eyes. And right now, there were plenty such meals to choose from. From the blonde on the treadmill to the brunette on the power rack to the raven-haired darling on the dip bars. Above all, though, as always, his predatory gaze was drawn most to the redhead on the cross-trainer.