The Beat and The Pulse Box Set 2

by Amity Cross

  I didn’t want to make the same mistakes with him that I’d made with Hamish. The same mistakes I’d been repeating my entire life. I couldn’t change who he was, and I couldn’t run when things got tough. We were both flawed and damaged by past relationships, but who wasn’t?

  Edging closer to Dean, I kept my gaze forward and on the conference as I reached out and grasped his hand. He didn’t respond, and I began to worry I’d stuffed things up already, but after a moment, his fingers wrapped around mine and squeezed gently.

  Maybe I should’ve been the one who told him I would screw things up because I didn’t know how to be in a proper relationship. I thought I knew how these things worked, but ever since the morning in the gym where he pushed me away, I’d been making the worst decisions of my life.

  Not anymore.

  I had to stick around and be ready for whatever dirty tactic Gabe O’Connell was planning next because it was coming. He would launch another play to tear the Twins apart, and this time, he’d use our kiss to do it. A guy like him wasn’t satisfied once they got the win. No, guys like him thrived on the challenge, not the prize. To Gabe O’Connell, winning was as empty as his soul. He wanted chaos.

  I just didn’t know when the viper would strike.

  16

  Dean

  Easing my cock out of Josie, I fell beside her in bed, my chest heaving.

  We’d left the arena together after the press conference, telling the others we were sharing a taxi back to Bondi. I’d wanted to go with Lincoln and make sure he got home in one piece, but he had Violet. With her by his side, I knew he’d be okay. As they’d walked off arm in arm, I couldn’t help the twist of jealousy that burned in my gut. It’d only been a week, and everything seemed to be falling apart with Josie already.

  Ever since she first laid her hands on me that morning in the gym, I hadn’t thought about Monica once. Everything about Jo outshone the unrequited feelings I’d had for the younger Miller sister, no matter how long I’d held onto them for.

  I wanted to make a go of things with her and only her. I wanted to be a fucking man and love her, but something wasn’t right. Josie was already pulling away, and I didn’t know why.

  “Dean?” she murmured, her head turning toward me.

  I grunted, still slightly pissed at her even after the amazing sex we’d just had—on the kitchen island, over the back of the couch, and finally, in her bed. Passion was overriding everything and slapping my cock in her was just a Band-Aid for all our emotional problems. She liked to think I was dumb, but sometimes, I wondered if I was the smartest asshole of the lot.

  “I’m sorry about before,” she began uncertainly. “I didn’t mean to imply…”

  It was really hard to focus on being the guy with a heart of gold when she was naked beside me, and my cock wanted to go a fourth round. I was trying my hardest to grow the fuck up and be a man because I saw the person she was and wanted to bury myself inside her and never let go.

  She could be stubborn and rash, prone to making decisions based on some wild conclusion she’d jumped to, but she was also passionate, fiery, beautiful, and cared for her friends like a predator cared for their young. There were a great deal of things that were worth loving about Josie Cunningham, but I wasn’t the one who had to believe.

  “I just need to know if you’re in this, Jo,” I said. “I feel like if I make one wrong move, you’re going to split.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t expect to get into something so soon after…” She shut her mouth and ran her hand across my abs, her fingers tracing the rise and fall of my muscles. “I guess I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  Her breath tickled against my shoulder. “Of it being the real deal.”

  I didn’t understand why she’d be afraid when she was the one who’d made the first move. Nothing about us made the least bit of sense.

  “Sometimes, I have no idea what goes through your mind,” I murmured as her touch lowered.

  “Chaos,” she whispered, wrapping her palm around my cock.

  “Don’t let life split your focus, Jo,” I said through a groan as she began to pump.

  “I’m doing my best.” She moved against my side, rubbing her clit on my thigh. “Believe me. You’re not the only one with programming issues.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath as she squeezed, making my balls flare. Damn. “It was real fucking hard not to throw you down in the middle of the press conference and fuck you blind, you know. I wanted to claim you right there and then when I saw—”

  “Don’t say his name when I have my hand on your cock,” she interrupted, shimmying down my body. “I want you, Dean. You and only you.” Her lips lowered toward my cock, and she smiled, a wicked gleam in her eyes. “Don’t let life split your focus.”

  As her mouth closed over my cock and began to suck, my eyes rolled back in my head, and whatever I’d been agonizing over was outshone by the orgasm already starting to build in my balls.

  Whose focus was split now?

  The following morning, the atmosphere in the gym was tense when I walked in.

  Jo and I had decided to come separately, and she’d come straight in while I swung by my place for a change of clothes. We were still trying to keep our relationship under wraps, but I didn’t know how long I could last not being able to touch her in public.

  Dumping my bag, I narrowed my eyes at the sight before me, hardly noticing that Josie had emerged from her office. Coach was kneeling beside Linc, giving him the ultimate pep talk. He’d lost the title and that sucked, but nobody had given me a bloody lolly pop. It was like the world was coming to an end the way my brother was being fawned over.

  “We need to go through the playback so we can see where the holes were,” Coach said, placing his hand on Lincoln’s shoulder. “Once we have a grip on it, we’ll challenge him for the title.”

  “I want the challenge,” I said, but nobody was listening to me. They were all up Lincoln’s ass babying him because he lost. I got the rough end of the stick. Nobody patted me on the back and told me everything was going to be okay. I just picked myself up and got on with it because I couldn’t count on anyone else to give me a hand up. Watching my identical twin get rocked back and forth like a crybaby annoyed the hell out of me.

  “I want the challenge,” I said again. This time, Josie glanced at me.

  “I don’t…” she began.

  “I’m in the right position to take the title from him,” I hissed. “I want it. I want to take it from O’Connell myself.”

  Coach and Lincoln had finally stopped their blubbering and had noticed I was there. Feeling like an afterthought in my own story, I curled my lip.

  “Dean,” Coach began, but I didn’t want to hear his reasoning.

  “I was KO’d!” I shouted. “I fucking lost consciousness! He lost by a split second grapple!”

  “We’re in a tight spot right now, Dean,” Coach said, trying to calm me down. “You’re both coming off losses, and Linc just lost the middleweight title to a fighter who flaunts the rules. You’re both angry right now. Let’s take a few days…”

  “We may look the fucking same, but there are two of us here, Coach.”

  If there was ever going to be a favorite twin in this place, it was going to be Lincoln. He was calm, focused, loved up, clean-cut, and the epitome of a good sportsman. He followed the rules and was a slick professional in and out of the octagon. Then there was me. The wild bad boy who rebelled every chance he got. Of course, Coach would want to put Lincoln up for the challenge five seconds after the loss. Two weeks after my spectacular KO, I was an afterthought. Fucking typical.

  “We can look through the ranks and get you a fight with someone like DeRocha,” Coach went on. “He has to beat one of you to be able to challenge for the title. If you can beat him, that’ll knock him back a few places.”

  “Fuck that,” I spat. “There’ll just be another fighter to take his place.”

 
; “We’ll talk about it another time,” Coach said, putting on his game face. The one that said don’t test me. “For now, we get the screen set up with the replay. One step at a time.”

  My lip curled of its own accord, and I turned away, stalking across the room like a toddler having a temper tantrum. Sinking down onto the bench in front of the window, I stared out across the ocean and kept my seething to myself.

  I deserved the challenge as much as Lincoln did. I needed to beat O’Connell and teach him once and for all that Josie was off limits. She would never go and work with him, and she would definitely not suck cock to do so. She belonged here with us just like the middleweight title did. He deserved neither.

  “You really want it that much?”

  I snorted at the sound of my brother’s voice and rolled my eyes as he sat beside me.

  “Well?” he prodded when I didn’t answer.

  “When the fuck did Coach become the guy who made all our decisions for us?” I asked sullenly. “We decide who we fight.”

  Lincoln shook his head, ignoring my petulant word vomit. “It didn’t seem to bother you that much.”

  “What?” I snapped, shoving my hands into the pockets of my hoodie.

  “The KO.”

  “I punched the guy in the face at the Gala,” I retorted, rolling my eyes. “Isn’t that bothered enough for you?”

  Lincoln was the one to snort that time. “When did we stop talking about everything?”

  I glanced at him, my brow creasing. “What’s that meant to mean?”

  “We talked about everything once,” he said. “Two halves of a whole? Remember?”

  “What do you want me to say, Linc?”

  “How long?” he asked, nodding back toward the gym where Josie was fiddling with the television.

  Returning my gaze to the ocean, I grunted.

  “Dean…”

  I didn’t want an earbashing from the guy who shared one half of an egg with me in the womb. Not today. “When you were out with that shoulder injury, there were months when you were seeing Violet and never told me a single thing.”

  “And you were off blazing up the AUFC ranks, leaving me behind.”

  “You won the title before I did, asshole.”

  “You punched Gabe O’Connell at a black-tie event for dancing with Josie.”

  “You—” I choked on my words.

  “How long have you two been fooling around?” he asked again.

  “A week.” It was no use hiding it from him anymore. If there was anyone I was going to trust in this world, it was my twin brother.

  “Are you the reason she up and went to Melbourne without telling anyone?”

  I sucked in a sharp breath through my nose and began to grind my teeth together.

  “Dean?”

  “She came on to me,” I said after a minute. “I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea she felt that way, let alone wanted to act on it. I might just be her rebound fuck, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to me.”

  “What did Monica say to you when you went to see her?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked, knowing full well it would be the thing that tore Jo and me apart if I let it.

  “It has everything to do with it,” Linc replied. “How long has your cock been hard for that girl?”

  “I know. I fucking know, and I’ve been upfront about it with Josie. After Monica turned up at the wedding, I knew I had to go and find out once and for all where I stood.”

  Linc’s mouth dropped open. “She turned up to the wedding? How am I only finding out about this now?”

  “Because it was Ash and Ren’s fucking wedding,” I hissed. “That’s why. Josie saw her before anyone else did and got rid of her.”

  “And you and Monica?”

  “Me and Monica nothing.”

  Linc raised his eyebrows but didn’t question me any further.

  “Don’t say anything to anyone,” I warned him. “Not even Violet.”

  “That’s a tall order, mate.”

  “This is between me and Josie. Not you and your girlfriend. This is about me and her.”

  “Just be careful, Dean,” he said, rising to his feet. “Josie’s got more than her fair share of issues, but so do you.”

  I knew what he was getting at, and I hated when he got all cryptic.

  “I know we’ve got issues,” I said, trying to convince myself just as much as I was him. “We know we’ve got to take things slow. But we want to try. There’s something there, Linc. If I didn’t do something about it, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. She could be…” I broke off and shook my head, my whole tirade feeling out of character for a guy like me. A hard-ass.

  “Guys,” Josie called out from across the gym. “We’re ready to roll.”

  Linc stared at me thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. Without a word, he sauntered over to the television to relive his horrible defeat against O’Connell. My gaze met Josie’s as I followed my brother’s progress, and she smiled. I could see the blue of her eyes from here and the reassurance she was trying to convey.

  Yeah, it was going to be tougher than either one of us realized when I’d pleaded with her outside of the Gala, but I still wanted to fight. That was who I was at my core. A fighter. That had to mean something more was there. Something worth the struggle despite everything that was against us.

  Josie wanted certain things in a man and had tried to change her last boyfriend to suit her needs but ran away from everything when things got too hard. I was in love with a woman who was rotten to the core and had done nothing but use me for her own ends…and I still loved her despite it.

  Neither of those things just went away because we wanted them to. Sex wasn’t an eraser, and it didn’t help that I had to keep telling myself that. It didn’t help at all.

  What I needed was to fight for my woman. Not be pushed aside so my brother could do it for me.

  I needed to fight O’Connell or die trying.

  17

  Josie

  I sighed, watching the boys pause and rewind Lincoln’s fight.

  Dean had been distracted after his loss to Gabe, but I was pretty sure that’d been my fault. I’d neither been in or out with him and struggling with my feelings the entire time. I’d been a distraction, and now everyone thought he didn’t care about being knocked out in the octagon. I knew Dean well enough to know he was seething about it on the inside.

  He deserved the right to challenge, but so did Lincoln. It was a tough call.

  A little voice inside me began whispering about Gabe’s constant flirting and Dean’s need to protect me from it. Did Dean want to challenge him because of his loss or because he wanted to defend my honor? If it was the latter, I wasn’t sure I deserved it. Maybe that kind of thing would fly at The Underground, but this was the pro leagues. Getting into the cage to fight over a woman wasn’t what the sport was about.

  I wanted Dean to challenge Gabe for the right reasons, and the right reason was taking the middleweight title back. It was as simple as that.

  My phone vibrated in the pocket of my suit jacket and I retrieved it, thankful for the distraction. Things were beginning to get tense in here…and not just in the gym.

  Reading the text from Violet, I smiled. You free for lunch today? I think we need some girl time.

  Hell yes, I replied, tapping out the message and adding a smiley face emoji at the end.

  Meet you at The Kiosk in thirty?

  See you there. xxx

  Glancing across the gym, I focused on Dean’s back, taking in the lines of his strong shoulders. Remembering how easily he’d held me up against the wall of my shower that morning, I shivered. I could still feel the ghost of his cock sliding into me, and the more I focused on the ache between my legs, the more vivid the memory became.

  He was focused on the television, a scowl etched into his sharp features as he was subjected to his brother’s fight with Gabe over and over.

  Sli
nking into my office, I picked up my bag and slipped out of the gym as quietly as I could. Things had blown up so much over the past few weeks, and I was desperate for some proper rest and relaxation. Running off to Melbourne didn’t count, and that whole weekend needed to be expunged from history…stat.

  Truthfully, it wasn’t me I was worried about anymore. Not after this morning. If anyone needed a break, it was Dean Hayes, but try telling him that.

  Saturdays in Bondi were a nightmare.

  People and cars and shit went in all directions, even in the winter months. It was one of Sydney’s top tourist spots thanks to the beach and its hot lifeguards. The boys in their blue swimmers were a sight to behold when they were in full rescue mode, and they even had their own television show. Yep, Bondi had its fair share of excitement.

  As I walked into one of our favorite local cafes, I spotted Violet already waiting for me at a table by the window.

  “Hi,” I said cheerily as I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek.

  She was looking rather cute today in a little T-shirt and jeans, her chestnut hair long and tousled, and her lips pink with gloss. After such a long, tumultuous night, she was looking fresh as a bloody daisy, and I was silently jealous of her complexion. I had to slap on a pound of concealer just to cover my dark circles.

  “Oh my God,” she exclaimed as I sat opposite. “I can’t even operate today.”

  “Yeah, it’s been pretty tense at the gym this morning,” I replied, shucking off my jacket and laying it on the back of my chair.

  “I don’t even know why you went in. They can do it without you, and it’s Saturday! I bet they’re just agonizing over the replay.”

  I laughed and nodded. “You know them well.”

  “Linc’s upset about it, but it was a good fight. It was a real challenge for him. He only lost by a second, so it won’t be that much of a climb to refocus his training. Then he can try to take the title back. I think he’s just sore that it was O’Connell he lost to, not how the fight went.”