Breaking Her Rules
Page 24
It was a habit left over from the days when he lived at his family home—a three bedroom bungalow just outside of Las Vegas. Every day since he’d dropped out of high school at fifteen, he and his father would make the early morning drive to the gym—to train, to prepare, to get him ready to continue the family’s legacy of the best in the world.
Going into the bathroom, he turned the shower to hot and stepped in a moment later. The water stung his sore, torn knuckles as he washed the dried blood away. His hands were his weapons and they took a beating every day to prepare for the battle inside the cage.
Returning to his bedroom, his MFL light heavyweight championship belt caught his eye, lying flat on the top of his closet. In the same place for three months, since the moment he removed it from around his waist as he’d stepped out of the octagon after winning the sought after title. It hadn’t yet found its way into the championship display case in the gym downstairs. It didn’t deserve the spot yet.
He needed to defend it first.
And in two months Tyson would get that chance and feel worthy of the heavy gold belt that for now felt like a crushing weight on his shoulders, forcing him to struggle to the surface for air in a sea of self-doubt. The object of obsession that made sleep torturously slow in coming, and the next day’s training all he could focus on.
Tomorrow he would be that much stronger, that much faster, that much more ready. Tomorrow, then the next tomorrow, and each tomorrow from now until the cage match were all that mattered. All he cared about.
He turned off the lights in his bedroom and set an alarm he knew he wouldn’t need, then he lay there in the silence as his mind replayed that day’s training. The only thought quieting his mind—tomorrow I will be better.
***
Sitting at her laptop, coffee cup in hand the next morning, Parker tucked one foot under her on her chair as she opened Google Search. She started typing MMA gyms in Las Vegas, then stopped. Brantley had been a huge fan of the sport . . . he’d even dragged her to several fights when they were held in L.A. and every P.P.V fight night, she could expect him to be out with the guys at whatever strip club was showing the fights. So she knew a little bit about the sport.
Brantley’s favorite fighter was some light heavyweight fighting out of Las Vegas. She’d watched several of the guy’s fights . . . What was his name? It was the same as some other well known boxer . . . Mohammed—no . . . Mike? Tyson!
Tyson Reed.
Typing his name into the Google search, she smiled when she saw the second listing to appear, right under the MFL’s website—a site for Punisher Athletics. The man had his own gym. Perfect.
Opening the website, she clicked on the location page and typed the address and phone number into her phone. Located just off of the strip, about twenty minutes from her home. She clicked on the Reed Family page. An image of an older man standing next to Tyson appeared above the text. The photo description read Alan “The Steel Fist” Reed and his son Tyson at the Grand Opening of the family’s first gym. She leaned closer to peer at the image of him. He was exactly what one would expect an MFL champion to look like—tall, muscular, shaved head, tattooed. He wasn’t smiling in the picture. His expression was one she couldn’t really read—confident, strong, yet reserved.
He was a great looking guy. The kind Hollywood would recruit for action movies to get the best of both worlds—someone who could do all of their own fight/action sequences and still have the hot hero look that would make women flock to the theatres.
Next she clicked on the training schedule. There had to be a women’s class. She’d taken Boxerfit aerobics once at a gym in L.A. It wasn’t so bad. But there were no women specific classes listed. Weird. There was just the same breakdown on each day of the schedule—cardio, conditioning, strength, grappling, boxing, Jiu Jitsu . . . The classes ran from nine to nine each day, seven days a week.
Wow, these guys were hard core.
Clicking on the fighters’ page, she scanned the profiles. Scrolling, she saw only men. Did they even train women at Punisher Athletics? At the bottom of the list she saw two female names. Two out of thirty. Obviously the sport hadn’t caught on with women as much as she’d thought. Or was it just that Punisher Athletics wasn’t eager to train the female sex?
Well, either way-it didn’t matter. Clicking back on the photo of Tyson, she smiled, taking a sip of her coffee. “Hello new trainer.”
Jennifer Snow writes contemporary romance fiction. She is a member of the RWA, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, SheWrites.com and the Canadian Authors Association. The first book in her small-town Brookhollow series, The Trouble with Mistletoe, was a finalist in the 2014 Golden Quill Contest and the Aspen Gold Contest. She is also a freelancer, with articles appearing in Romance Writers Report magazine, Mslexia, Southern Writers Magazine, Westword, and Avenue magazine Edmonton.
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