On The Ropes: Tapped Out Book 3

by Quinn, Cari

“Did you do it?” I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

  He didn’t answer for so long that my head started to pound with my trapped heartbeats. This close to him, there simply wasn’t enough air.

  I was sure he knew that. Exploited it like he’d exploited so much else.

  The corner of his mouth curved. “Of course.”

  A knock sounded on the door behind me and I jumped, colliding with his impossibly hard chest. He caught me and turned me toward the door, opening it without missing a beat.

  My sister waited on the other side, her mouth pursed. “You need help getting that bandage on, Costas?”

  “Nope, Daffy’s all set.” I held up my hand as proof, amazed it didn’t shake.

  I’d only just found out the guy I’d slept with three times—four if I counted the club—was practically a murderer.

  Eight

  Dinner was hell.

  With the way the evening had started, it wasn’t as if I’d expected much. I’d walked in to blood, then Carly fainted and awakened pissed and shaky.

  I never did well with shaky women. They made me react in one of two ways. Either I hovered too much, or I goaded them into being so annoyed at me that they forgot to be unsteady.

  Carly usually seemed to bring out the second reaction.

  I had no right to talk to her the way I had. Her boyfriend—or whatever he was—wasn’t my business. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and after what she’d been through the other night, I never should’ve stooped so low as to taunt her about being aroused by me.

  So what if she was? I didn’t want that. The timing was horrible, and I wanted her safe. Even if I was jealous as hell about that other fucker, and even if I couldn’t stop thinking about being inside her, her well-being had to be my first priority.

  No matter what.

  Instead of ensuring she was doing okay after the trauma she’d suffered, I’d only ended up inflicting more by throwing out that attempted murder bullshit. It was all true, but context was important, and I’d deliberately left that part out. I’d hoped she would think the worst so she would steer clear of me, not look at me with challenge in her eyes as if she was even more intrigued.

  Damn inexplicable woman.

  Then we’d sat down to her delicious casserole and the salad Mia had massacred. Carly had been right to worry about her tomatoes. Mia had just halved a bunch and thrown them in the bowl.

  Carly spent the entire meal whispering and giggling with Jenna, who was supposedly slightly older but seemed ridiculously young. Even worse than Carly.

  I felt like I was tainting them by sitting at the same table. Carly, I wanted to taint, in spite of how hard I fought against my urges in that direction. Jenna, I wanted to lock up in a convent before some dickhead came along and killed that youthful joy in her big green eyes.

  It was hard to focus on the rest of the dinner conversation when I was so busy trying to overhear what they were up to. They were plotting something, I just knew it. Girls that age were nothing but trouble.

  Girls of all ages, but that one especially.

  “I guess now’s as good a time as any to spill the beans.” Fox shot me a glance. “I’m going to fight again. One night only. Against that fuckwit at the other end of the table.”

  Silence reigned.

  Predictably, Mia broke it first. “Say the fuck what?”

  I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “It’s no big deal. Just like Fox said, one night rematch for our fight in January. Then he’ll go back into retirement with his pockets a little fuller and his chest a little more pumped up—if he kicks my ass as he claims he can.” Out of the side of my mouth, I added, “Doubtful.”

  Mia glanced at Fox. “Since when do you want to fight again?”

  He leaned back in his chair and hooked an arm around the back of it. We were all crowded around their small kitchen table, though luckily, Mrs. Knox was out so there was one less person there than usual. But Jenna had taken up that room and how with her incessant laughter with Carly.

  Times like this I realized how very young she was. Not just chronologically, but in other ways too. I didn’t doubt she’d seen difficult things, some more difficult than even I could guess, but she was still a young girl in so many ways. And I wanted her to stay that way, not become a hardened shell of a person like me.

  “I don’t want to fight again,” Fox said finally, catching my eye. “You could say I was persuaded by very effective means.”

  “What means?” Mia narrowed her eyes in my direction. “I knew you were up to something the last few months. Trying to make us think we were all buddies now, ingratiating yourself, dragging Tray into dangerous situations.”

  She forgot to add getting her sister in trouble then fucking her senseless, but she didn’t know that part.

  “Hold it there, fighter girl.” Fox no longer looked amused. “I’m not twelve, and he didn’t drag me into anything. And trust me when I say the terms he offered will benefit you too.” He gave her a thin smile. “Assuming you don’t nag me to death and make me not want to have sex with you again for the foreseeable future.”

  “Ha. Like that’d happen.”

  Coughing into my napkin, I glanced at Carly. And found she was staring at me openly, speculation written in every line of her beautiful face.

  “There is no trick,” I said quietly, to her as much as Mia and Fox. More so, probably. “I have my reasons for wanting to have a rematch with Fox, but they aren’t sinister so much as self-serving. He stands to make a good amount from the bout, and the attention will—”

  “Son, I told you once. I don’t give two fucks about attention. I’m happy slinging drinks, teaching people to fight, and taking sports medicine classes. My glory days, such as they were, are over. And I’m glad.”

  Mia speared a tomato chunk. “One night only.”

  “One.” Fox leaned forward and grabbed her wrist across the table, halting her tomato’s progress on its way to her mouth. “I’m not asking permission. I’m happy to talk it out, but I’d assume you’d give me the same courtesy I gave you when you started fighting again.”

  She inclined her chin at her bandaged arm. She’d broken it on her first fight back out of retirement while fighting Evie Pierce, a former hotshot from Europe who’d been sidelined after an injury herself. “Still not fighting yet.”

  “Yeah, but that cast is coming off this week, and we both know then you’ll be back training full speed ahead. Hell, you’ve been doing leg work straight through.”

  “Nothing is wrong with my legs.”

  “No, and soon your arm will be back to full strength. And I’ll be outside the ring watching you fight, week after week. Because it’s what you want to do, and I support you. I may not always love the idea of it, but I’ll always love the idea of you doing what you need to do for yourself.”

  She sighed. “The fact that you’re such a good person is a constant trial to me, Trayherne.”

  His only response was a grin.

  “Guess the sex is back on again?” I forked up some of Carly’s casserole and caught her eye again, sharing a smile with her before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to. Being friendly with her was absolutely not part of the plan.

  She needed to hate me, even if I kept finding ways to sabotage that at every turn.

  “I still have questions, Costas. Like your self-serving reasons for staging a rematch with Tray, and if they have anything to do with your unsavory associates.”

  “More soda, anyone?” Carly jerked to her feet so fast that she nearly upended the white lace tablecloth she’d thrown on the table at the last minute before serving the meal.

  “Your glass is almost full,” Mia pointed out.

  “Yeah, but Jenna’s isn’t.” She grabbed Jenna’s half-full glass before Jenna could respond. “Anyone else need a refill?”

  “I’m actually go—”

  “Okay, everyone’s set then.” Carly spoke over Jenna and carried her friend’s glass into the kitchen to “refill” it.


  Guess she didn’t want to be around while I discussed my associates, unsavory or otherwise.

  “If I fight Fox, I make money.” I relaxed in my chair and placed my fingers over the top of my own half-empty glass, in case Carly decided to offer me more refreshments as well. “Simple as that.”

  I’d also get Marco and his band of merry men betting in huge amounts, and betting in huge amounts would be more likely to lure Roberto Andretti out of his hidey-hole. As would the supposed loyalty I’d proven the other night by being with Carly.

  They figured she wouldn’t cry rape because of her stripping—patently unfair or not, her character would be brought into question in court—and I wouldn’t, because I was over the rack if I wanted to be a man of honor in their organization. I was already bucking every established protocol that one family’s men didn’t cross into another, but I’d been very convincing when I’d told them I couldn’t stand my father.

  It wasn’t a lie.

  He’d run my mother into the ground with his lifestyle and his loyalties, ones he’d claimed paled in comparison to his love for his wife. Bullshit. She’d hated every minute of worrying and knowing she might not see her friends again if they crossed some invisible line within the organization. And then she’d gotten sick, and I’d had to watch her shrivel away into a fragment of the warm, wonderful person she’d once been.

  I put all of that at Vincente Costas’s doorstep.

  Some days it was a toss-up which of the two men I hated more—Emilia’s father, or my own.

  “It’s never simple with you.” Mia reached for the basket with warm Italian bread inside. Carly went all out for a meal, no doubt about it. My mother would’ve adored her. “And if you’re spending time with those men, either you’re lying to all of us about your intentions or you’re lying to them. There’s no way you can stand on both sides of that particular fence.”

  “Mia,” Fox began.

  “You damn well know I’m right. After what they wanted me to do—” She broke off and shook her head. Then she bit into her bread.

  I leaned forward. “What did they want you to do?”

  “Nothing.” She took a quick glance over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. “Just forget it.”

  “One has nothing to do with the other,” Fox said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Fox quieted, because I supposed he didn’t.

  Even though I had no idea what additional weight Marco and his men had put on Mia, she was right to assume the worst of me. I was the worst. I was doing my damnedest to become enmeshed with my enemy so I could end him.

  Maybe that would mean ending myself. If so, it would all be worth it.

  “You have no reason to trust me.”

  “No, she doesn’t.” Carly returned to the table and set Jenna’s glass in front of her. “None of us do. Yet you keep sniffing around.”

  “I wonder why that is.” Jenna stuffed a piece of bread in her mouth when Carly aimed a dark look her way.

  “Fox is my friend. I take friendship very seriously.” The words were out before I had time to realize how fucking stupid I was being.

  Wanting to convince them I wasn’t dangerous was idiotic. Coming to dinner in the first place was the king of idiotic decisions.

  And why? Just so I could watch Carly?

  Then she turned and sashayed out of the room with some excuse about “having homework”, and I realized, that, no, my most idiotic decision wasn’t coming to dinner to keep an eye on her. Nothing Carly did could be predicted from one moment to the next, and someone had to have her back. Since no one else at this table knew what she’d gotten herself into at the club—with the exception of maybe Jenna, who hadn’t given me one dirty look tonight, which made that possibility more unlikely—I had to be that person.

  I had to be the one who simultaneously pushed her away and pulled her back in by confusing her with my attention. All because I wanted to keep her alive.

  My most idiotic decision was ever allowing her to follow me to the club in the first place.

  Nine

  I didn’t want to go back to the club. To the pit of my stomach, to the soles of my feet did not want to ever walk through those doors again.

  But I’d promised Nancy I would cover for her, and I couldn’t back out now. So I would go armed and prepared, and then I would give my notice and that would be it.

  I’d be done with that place and all of the men who frequented it.

  I just didn’t expect to be shanghaied outside my very own apartment building. I should have, but I didn’t.

  Halfway down the block, the same route I took to the subway two nights a week when I headed into the club, I noticed the Escalade. It wasn’t surprising that it was parked on my street, since Gio had been at dinner. What was surprising was that the lights were on and the engine was idling.

  And when I say surprising, I meant not at all, if I’d even given it a second thought. As if I truly believed he’d allow me to go to work under my own steam and without an escort. It wasn’t as if I was an adult who just happened to have a recording app I used for class cued up on my phone and a can of pepper spray and a set of throwing stars in my purse.

  Mia would never notice the stars were gone. Probably. She was the one who’d taught me how to use them, so it was only fitting I’d borrowed hers.

  This time, if anyone tried to push me, I would take action. That sick exhibitionist side of myself that found some kind of shameful thrill parading in front of those men had been put to rest.

  If they tried it again, I’d be claiming someone’s balls.

  Briefly, I considered walking past the truck as if I didn’t see it. Good luck with him following me down into the subway. Then annoyance got the better of me and I stalked up to the passenger window to rap on the glass.

  He rolled down the window and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Why aren’t you inside?”

  “Why aren’t you?” he countered, letting his gaze drop to my attire. I wasn’t wearing anything scandalous. At least that he could see.

  In deference to the cool October night—and the fact that I was wearing a tiny halter dress that barely contained my tits and my other bits—I had on a short belted trenchcoat, patterned tights, and knee-high boots. The only way I’d made it out of the house without getting the third degree was because Mia had been occupied playing some video game with Fox. Jenna was cheering both of them on.

  That was Jen. Never liked to pick sides.

  Eventually, Mia would look up and realize she hadn’t paid much attention to my hurried “gotta go, see ya, bye!” and I’d get a text, asking if I’d be home tonight. Which, of course, I would be, because where else would I go?

  Not to Gio’s, though he was eyeing me like a steak that had been grilled to perfection, and he couldn’t wait to dig in.

  “What are you wearing?” His voice sounded like sanded glass, all gritty and rough.

  “This is called a coat.” I held up my foot. “These are known as boots.”

  “You better have fucking underwear on under there, or we’re going to have a problem.”

  I couldn’t help the shiver that went through me. Absolutely couldn’t. But I managed not to do anything but smile. “Good thing you won’t know either way, now will you?”

  “You’re going to dance tonight.”

  Glancing away, I crossed my arms. Up the street, a cluster of guys were huddling near the entrance of the bodega. That made me shiver too, for a whole other reason.

  I hated that I was afraid now. That I’d put myself in a position to be harmed. That I was doing it again, out of duty or spite or stubbornness. Or just plain stupidity.

  “Carly.”

  His gentle tone brought my gaze back to his. But I didn’t speak.

  He let out a breath and slowly, carefully, wrapped his long, blunt-tipped fingers around the wheel. Looking at those hands made me ache. They were capable of such violence, and such beauty when they to
uched me. And I hated not knowing if I’d ever have them on me again.

  I shouldn’t want them to be. He’d been up for attempted murder, for God’s sake. Mia had dealt with his people, and whatever had occurred wasn’t good. He was hiding things, and he operated in a world that had already proved extremely dangerous.

  Yet I still yearned.

  “Get in the truck,” he said finally. “I’ll drive you and take you home afterward.”

  “It’s not necessary—”

  His quiet stare silenced me and made me tighten my belt before I opened the door and climbed inside.

  “Thank you,” I said after a moment. I’d been raised to have manners, and even if I didn’t need a chaperone, I had to admit I wasn’t eager to walk back through those doors alone.

  Or at all.

  He drove to the club silently, barely sparing me a glance. I kept fussing at everything—my seatbelt, the hem of my dress, my hair. I’d done it in a messy updo, and the curls were tickling my neck.

  “Relax.” He reached over to still my hand when I again reached for my dress. “I won’t let anyone near you.”

  The part of me that was like Mia bristled. I was supposed to be able to take care of myself. But the other night I’d failed spectacularly.

  I shut my eyes and turned my hand over in his, gripping his fingers. I expected him to pull away, to curse that I was being pigheaded and he needed to save me from myself.

  Instead, he just held on, as I did, as he drove us through the darkened, busy streets. New York never slept, and since last Friday night, I didn’t either. Sunday night, I’d crashed, but every night after, I’d laid awake to watch the numbers count down until dawn.

  We parked in the same garage as he had the other night. After we got out and met behind the vehicle, he pulled me against his side and tipped up my face to his. My heart rocketed in my chest from his nearness, but this move wasn’t meant to seduce. It was to remind me he was calling the shots.

  “As far as the men in the club are concerned, you’re mine now. They won’t touch you, unless they want to tangle with me. And they don’t.”