by Riley Ashby
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Thank You
I’d done it. After five rounds of knock-down, drag-out fighting, I had won the belt for my division. The ring girls were looping it around my waist as I held my arms in the air, my face bloody but smiling. I couldn’t catch my breath, I was so gassed from the final flurry and exhilarated from the win. But the last of the air completely left my lungs when I looked down to see her standing next to me.
The problem was, the one she really loved was right behind her. He smiled at me too, walking up behind her and placing an arm around her waist territorially. Back off, his eyes said. My generosity will only stretch so far.
Even in my dreams, I couldn’t catch a break.
My ringing phone shattered that fantasy faster than she would have if she knew what I was thinking.
I grabbed my phone to check the caller ID even though it could be only a couple of people at this hour. I groaned at the time—barely after three in the morning. I had to be at the gym for my shift in three hours, and then six hours of work stood between me and my training. I needed all the sleep I could get to allow my body to heal and harden, but Harold McDermott was doing his best to make sure I didn’t get my rest.
“Hi, Ellery,” I muttered as I rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweats with one hand.
“I’m sorry to bother you.” He sounded as tired as me. “He just called her screaming.”
“I’ll take care of it. He’s probably mad he blew all his cash again.”
“Let us know if it’s something worse?”
“Of course.” But I knew what I would find when I got there.
“Her” was Sophie, Ellery’s girlfriend, and my good friend. Harold was her father. After Sophie’s mom left them years ago, Harold had let himself fall into a sad cycle of drinking and gambling. It was gambling that had brought Sophie and Ellery together, much to my dismay. She’d been closed off to relationships when I knew her, but somehow, Ellery had gotten her to fall for him, leaving me alone in our run-down neighborhood having to work two jobs just to stay afloat. But of course, Sophie wouldn’t let me languish for too long, not when she was carrying a baby for one of the richest men in the country.
Ellery covered Harold’s rent, bills, and food, and he was allowed to do what he wanted with his paycheck as long as he held down a job. I don’t know how he managed it, but he’d made it to his shift at the fast food restaurant where Sophie used to work every day for over a month now. It meant he had his own income for the first time in years, supporting his habit himself instead of stealing Sophie’s money to do it. It also meant whenever he got paid, as he had this weekend, he’d head straight for a casino and gamble and drink until he had nothing left.
When he was fresh out of credit and called Sophie to demand she give him some more cash … that was when I stepped in.
I met Ellery the day Sophie told her dad she was pregnant, and he offered to employ me as a contractor to take care of Harold on the side. He paid for me to move into an apartment in one his buildings, and in exchange for rent, I visited Harold each day and was on call for whenever he pulled something like this. He also gave me a regular paycheck that was more than I had made at the cleaning job where I met Sophie.
This routine of calling her in the middle of the night had started after Harold realized I was never going to spot him another hundred dollars. He thought since I was getting paid to babysit him, the money was as much his as it was mine. It was way too much stress for Sophie, especially when she was pregnant, so I was happy to shoulder his anger. But it didn’t mean I didn’t miss the sleep. The money was worth getting out of bed in the middle of the night two to three times a week in order to calm his tantrums, but just barely.
It wasn’t too far from my new apartment to his house. That was one of Ellery’s stipulations, of course, along with the car he was loaning me. As I parked on the street outside of the house I’d come to know all too well over the past few weeks, I reminded myself to be grateful I had enough income from this gig to only work part-time at the gym and spend the rest of my time training.
Harold was half asleep in his chair when I walked in, but he summoned the last of his energy when he heard the door.
“Sophie? That you?”
“No, Harold. It’s Jamie.”
He scoffed and waved me away. “You’re useless. Get my daughter.”
“She’s not coming, Harold.” Why would she? “You need help with something?”
He struggled to his feet and stumbled into the kitchen, grabbing a warm beer out of the case on the table.
“I need more cash. I know she has some.”
Well, you’re not getting any. “Do you want to watch some Jeopardy!?”
That always got him. Some soft spot in his heart remembered the times spent with Sophie watching that show. He mollified instantly, his face falling a little as he looked toward her room. She hadn’t slept there in weeks and never would again, but he still looked for her.
As we watched reruns, he rattled on to me about how close he came to winning it all in his latest card game right before he got fucked over by the dealer. He tried to call in some favors but had none left, so he’d been shoved in a cab and sent home. The fact that he wasn’t sitting in a drunk tank was thanks to Ellery as well. Harold had no idea how much jail time he’d avoided thanks to Ellery’s affection for Sophie.
I knew he missed his daughter. It was painful to see how badly he wanted her around. But he couldn’t wrangle his own demons long enough to see how badly he’d hurt her. The day she and I had reunited had been the day he put up a rather solid wall between them. She wasn’t going to be the one to climb it anymore. If he wanted her back in his life, he had to tear it down.
I fought off sleep myself until he passed out sometime around four thirty. Setting aside his half-empty beer, I gathered all my remaining energy and started to clean the trash in the kitchen. I was over here every day, but the man had an uncanny ability to create messes out of thin air. I scrubbed the dishes in the sink and set them to dry, wiped down the table, and threw all the empty beer cans into the bin for recycling later in the week. There wasn’t a ton of food in the refrigerator, but he wouldn’t starve. I made a mental note to pick up a few things for him when I went grocery shopping even though most of the food I brought into his house spoiled. I started a load of laundry and moved the clean clothes in the dryer to his bedroom, but I drew the line at folding his underwear. Checking to make sure he was still asleep and not about to choke on his own spit, I headed back to my car. Maybe I could grab a little more sleep if I was lucky.
That plan flew out the window when I saw Tori leaning against my car. What is she doing here? It wasn’t like her to show up. The point of me being the one to come out here and take care of Harold was that I lived close by, whereas she lived at their home to be present full time. I had to catch my breath a little as I approached her, the personal security for Ellery and Sophie. She always looked so nonchalant, but I’d come to know a fire that people didn’t see most of the time burned beneath her surface. Others only felt the heat of her anger or sarcasm when she ran out of patience. She went a lot deeper, though. She cared a lot for her cl
ients, as much as a second family, and it would kill her if anything happened to them.
“You didn’t have to come,” I said as I stopped in front of her. She hooked her thumbs on the belt loops of her jeans. She was about as short as Sophie but much stockier. She carried around a lot more muscle than most women her size. I’d gotten a taste of it the few times she’d come by the gym to train. She could have been a fighter herself in a different world. She spent a lot of time outside, doing yoga every morning, and it was obvious by her bronzed skin, though still much lighter than my own.
“It sounded pretty bad. I thought you might like some backup.”
I shrugged. “No worse than usual.”
“He misses her?”
I nodded. “A lot.”
She scoffed. “He could try apologizing.”
“That would require a level of introspection I’m not sure he possesses anymore.”
The sun was coming up over the rooftops, sending slanting light into my eyes. I stepped forward a foot so I didn’t have to squint. “When did you get back?” She’d taken off to New York with Ellery’s sister, Vail, when she was arrested for murder. Sophie went with them, of course. Their group traveled in a pack to most places.
“A few weeks ago. We would have been back sooner, but … there was a complication.”
I raised an eyebrow. It pushed at a bruise I’d forgotten about on my forehead, and I winced.
“One of the other ex-slaves tried to blow her head off in front of us.”’
My jaw fell off my face; I couldn’t help it. “You’re kidding.”
She shook her head and stood straight. Down the street, a door slammed. “Gun misfired, and she almost lost her hand. Ellery had her brought out here to finish her recovery, and she ran into a bit of trouble with her family. That’s all resolved now, though.”
That was the biggest problem with Ellery—he was a genuinely good guy. How could I properly hate the person my crush was in love with when he continued to look out for the people around him, people he had no business caring about? Not to mention, I had him to thank for getting me out of this neighborhood and making sure I was able to properly train. On top of that, he was currently my only sponsor, literally the only person responsible for me having a successful fighting career at this time. Most low-level fighters like me would kill to have his backing.
I glanced at my phone and cursed internally. “I have to be at the gym in an hour for my shift.” No chance of sleep for me, but I had time to run home and down some food before racing over there.
“Want to get breakfast?”
I had to grasp for words. When Tori and I first met, she was suspicious of me and why I wanted to hang around. I’m sure she knew I was still fawning over Sophie, and she wanted to look out for her boss. Over the past few weeks, she had thawed a little, but we weren’t exactly friends.
Still, if she was going to extend an olive branch, I didn’t think it was wise to turn her down. “Um, sure. Where were you thinking?”
She jerked her head back in the direction of my apartment. “There’s a diner over here that Castel and Vail went to a few weeks back. Supposed to be pretty good.”
“As long as they have lean protein, it works for me. Lead the way.”
We loaded into our cars and drove out of the hell I’d called home and was too glad to leave behind. I texted Sophie at a red light to let her know her dad was all right, and she sent back a smiling emoji and nothing else. I grinned to myself before setting down my phone and following Tori the rest of the way, into the heart of the city.
This was dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Because I should be at home, sleeping in on a Friday morning and recovering from my latest escapade into “which woman in my life has disappeared most recently.” I deserved a break, right? But here I was, eating a crepe in a cafe with Sophie’s best friend with a barely passable excuse for why I’d come down here in the first place. I wasn’t sure if he bought it. He would certainly know I was making it up after what I was going to say next.
I needed to get laid. Bad. Everyone around me was pairing up and falling in love, and it was depressing as hell. Not necessarily because I was desperate to get married and pop out a few kids, but because it would be nice to know that a guy in my life liked me for a reason beyond the value I provided as backup. I was short enough that guys would usually peg me as someone cute and fluffy, but the moment I whipped out my snark and revealed I could deadlift as much as they did, they suddenly sent their affections elsewhere.
Everyone except this guy. He was genuinely appreciative of how hard I worked, and apparently not repulsed by me. He’d gotten a full dose of my cynicism the first time we met, and he let it roll off his back like nothing. He was always willing to spar or lift with me at the gym, even when he was in the middle of a session with someone else. He was the one. The one to break my six-month dry spell and (hopefully) give me some organic orgasms rather than self-administered ones. I could suck a dick if it meant I might actually get some in me.
The lucky thing was that he was easy to talk to. We genuinely got along once I decided he wasn’t going to try to break up Sophie and Ellery. So when I caught myself starting to consider downloading a dating app on my phone, I decided to hit him up for it before I risked my life meeting random dudes on the internet.
“There’s a fight in a few weeks.”
I shook my head a little to clear the thoughts from my head. He rarely spoke of anything other than fighting or training if you let him get going. “In LA?”
“Vegas.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s exciting. Are you on the card?”
He shook his head a little sadly, poking at his eggs. “I’ll be out there to support my buddy, but no fight for me right now.”
“Well, I’m sure Sophie will still want to fly out for it.”
He grinned a little. Shit, the boy needed to get laid as badly as I did. The sooner he got her out of his system, the better for everybody. Ellery generally liked the dude, but it was uncomfortable for him knowing they were both in love with Sophie.
“What’s your schedule tomorrow?”
“Training in the morning, then resting.”
I was suddenly extra glad he wasn’t prepping for a fight. If he was, he’d be on a crazy diet and probably not drinking. Cutting had to be the worst part of being a fighter. I couldn’t imagine living on so few calories going up to a fight. Then straight up starving myself for three days before? Sheer torture.
“No evening plans?”
“Just me and the couch.”
I shifted. There was my opening. “I could come over.”
His fork stopped midway from the plate to his mouth. “To my place?”
“If you want company.”
He regained enough of his composure to bring the food the rest of the way to his mouth. He chewed slower than usual and took his time swallowing. “I guess that could be cool.”
I tried not to feel a little stung at his lack of enthusiasm. This was a booty call and nothing more. And he was still in love with another girl, so it wasn’t odd that he would be less than enthusiastic about me showing up. Still. I thought I was pretty good looking. Nice body and all. I sat up a little straighter and pulled back my shoulders. He should be so lucky.
“Well, I should get going. I can’t be late again.”
I knew for a fact he could straight up not show at the gym today and he’d still be forgiven by the owner, but if he needed space, I was all too happy to let him go. I was barely fighting off my own embarrassment right now. That had gone about as smoothly enough, but it was still a little embarrassing.
“You’ll text me tomorrow, then? When you’re free?”
He nodded as he wiped his mouth and tossed some cash on the table. “Looking forward to it.”
I stared after his back as he jogged out to the sidewalk and up the street to where he parked. He did have a nice ass. This would be a good hookup. Nothing more.
Tori was at the gym later tha
t day and Saturday, though we didn’t get together to spar like we usually did. Granted, I was busy helping Alonso prepare for the fight, but we still usually made time to talk to each other even when I was occupied with other tasks. The gym was on its way up, especially with Alonso as a client, but Coach—I didn’t know his real name—had done well to keep the homey feel inside. The equipment was nice, but not too new. We kept things clean, but it certainly didn’t look like a health club. Coach hired his fighters as workers instead of outside help, which surely cut into his profits, but he wanted to make sure the people who used the space were also the ones taking care of it. He said it contributed to the family-owned vibe he was going for. He was kind enough to give me a job when I came looking for it, and even though I had the sponsorship now, I still needed the extra income to cover my expenses. This paycheck allowed me to spend more on high-quality food and personalized nutrition, and I’d already seen a decrease in my body fat percentage in the past few months. My abs were more pronounced than ever, and I’d admit to flexing a little more than was necessary in the mirror at home.
Harold called as I was leaving the gym, so I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to clean my place as well as I thought was appropriate for Tori to come over. I wasn’t sure how much effort I should put in to getting the place ready for her. I knew she didn’t like me all that much—if not because she was leery of my feelings for Sophie, then because she just didn’t like very many people in general. So what was she doing inviting herself over to my apartment?
Carbonation crisped into the air as I popped open a beer to calm my nerves. I’d cut back a lot on drinking, in the hopes I might get called up for a last-minute fight, but I stopped by the store to grab a six-pack today because I figured she would want to drink. As I downed a few gulps, I figured the benefit of relaxing a little was worth whatever slight dip in performance I might see at the gym tomorrow. I was already stressed as hell, and she wasn’t even here.
I watched a few episodes of an adult cartoon before my phone beeped with a text from Tori telling me she was outside. I’d given her a code earlier for the door downstairs, and her knock sounded on the door of my apartment a moment later.