by Josie Kerr
Junior barked a laugh. “So, where are you going and who you going with?”
“Dig’s going to take me on a bike ride. We’re supposed to look at a waterfall and some little German town or something.”
His eyebrows arched higher. “You are going with DiGiacomo on a bike ride to Helen? You do realize that’s like two hours from here, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s not like I have to talk to him when we’re riding.”
Junior tapped his fingers on the table.
“What? Just spit it out. He’s going to be here soon.”
“You know I like Dig, right? He’s a great fighter and a good guy, but the man’s a player, Nanda.”
“It’s not like it’s a date, Junior. Sheesh. You’re always bugging me to get out and do stuff.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how I feel about you doing stuff with Dig.”
“I’m a big girl. And like you said, he’s a nice guy. It’s not like he’s going to take advantage of me.”
Junior and Nanda stared at each other, and then with a big sigh, Junior nodded.
There was a knock on the door, and Nanda pointed a finger in warning at Junior, who held up his hands in surrender and made a zipping motion over his lips.
Nanda opened the door, and dammit, Dig managed to look even better than yesterday. No leathers today, but a tight Henley and well-worn jeans that fit him perfectly made Nanda’s breath hitch and her mouth water.
“Hey.”
“Hey, Nanda. You ready?” He grinned at her. “Oh, hey, Junior.”
Junior nodded once at Dig, his big arms crossed over his chest. He looked every inch the menacing older brother. Nanda rolled her eyes.
“Let’s go, Dig.”
Dig followed Nanda down the stairs and almost ran into her when she suddenly stopped.
“You have a queen seat?”
Dig shrugged. “Yeah, of course. It wouldn’t be comfortable for you on that long of a ride.” He handed her a helmet. “There’s a Bluetooth headset and intercom in the helmets so we can talk to each other.”
“Okay, yeah, sure.”
“What’s wrong?” Dig stopped strapping his helmet on.
“This is really nice, Dig . . .”
“Man, Nanda. I’ve had all this. It’s been in the garage because I haven’t had anyone on the back of my bike in years.”
She gave him a skeptical look, and he grinned at her again, but not his usual cocky, smart-ass grin. This grin was sweeter, more innocent, and maybe a little bit nervous.
Nanda sighed. “Okay. Okay, okay. Let’s go.” Nanda pulled on her helmet, fumbling with the chin strap. Dig’s voice came over the intercom.
“Let me.” Nanda tipped her chin up, and Dig adjusted the strap, making sure that the helmet was secure. “Does that feel good?”
Nanda nodded, speechless at the little zing that she felt when Dig’s strong fingers fluttered over her skin.
“Okay, then, let’s ride.”
Dig got on the bike, and then Nanda climbed on behind him. She sat as far away from him as she could, and because of the backrest and the seat, she was able to sit back a bit.
She gazed at his broad back, the tight Henley rippling over the muscles of his traps as he started up the bike and revved the engine. Nanda tightened her thighs around Dig’s hips and put her hands on his waist, and then they were off.
Chapter Seven
“What the hell are you looking at?” Nanda’s pretty face wore the most adorable frown he’d ever seen. Dig wanted to kiss the wrinkle in between those perfect eyebrows and then nibble on that perfectly arched neck while he plunged his hands into those tight jeans to feel the soft skin of that firm ass of hers.
Wow, that escalated quickly.
Nanda reached over and thumped him on the side of the head.
“Ow! Dammit, Nanda. What’d you have to go and do that for?” Dig rubbed the spot she thumped. “Junior just drained that ear. Damn.”
“Sorry. I didn’t realize that.” She looked sheepish for about ten seconds and then the adorable scowl returned. “What the hell is that expression?”
Dig blinked. “What expression?”
“That expression you have on your face. You’re all . . . dreamy and shit.”
Dig chuckled. “This is just nice, you know? Riding in the nice weather, enjoying some nature. It’s nice.”
“No, this is nice.” Nanda gestured at the view from inside of the lodge where they had stopped for lunch. “Being inside and looking at the nature while being protected from all the . . . outdoors.”
“You’re not the nature girl, are you?” he snickered.
“Uh, no. Me and nature? We have a long, antagonistic history.”
“Oh, come on. It couldn’t be that bad.”
Nanda glared at him and proceeded to regale him with story after story of “meaningful” outdoor experiences gone bad, starting with trying to pet what she thought was a Chihuahua and it actually being a rat, resulting in rabies shots, and ending with a “romantic” swim that got busted by the cops, and after donning her clothes, realizing that said clothes had been resting on a pile of poison ivy.
Dig laughed harder and harder the more stories she told, finally holding up his hands to get her to stop. “You’re killing me, babe. Oh my God,” he wheezed.
Nanda scoffed at him. “You don’t seem to be all ‘Outdoor Otis,’ buddy, with your perfectly coiffed hair and manscaping. I bet you spend longer in the bathroom, primping, than I do.”
“I’m a lot hairier than you are. I’ve got more to prep.”
“Dios.” But she was laughing even as she rolled her eyes.
“And what the hell is an ‘Outdoor Otis’? Is that a Jersey thing?”
“Nah, I just couldn’t think of another ‘O’ name.”
Dig cleared his throat. “I was an Eagle Scout.”
“You are a liar. There’s got to be some rule about lying about being an Eagle Scout.” When Dig kept looking at her, she frowned again. “You’re not lying, are you?”
“Nope. Scout’s honor.” He held up three fingers in salute.
She shook her head. “Wow. I knew you were all-American, but damn.”
“Yeah, I’m all-American all right, with a name like Dominic Donato DiGiacomo.”
Nanda shrugged. “I like the name ‘Dominic.’ Why don’t you go by Dom?”
Dig cleared his throat. “There were a few Dominics when I was in school. ‘Dig’ set me apart.”
“Catholic school, huh?”
“You know it. I was the pride of Saint Pius.” He grinned remembering his mother sobbing when he got award after award at the senior dinner. “Don’t know what happened.”
Nanda scoffed again. “Please. You’re successful, handsome, well spoken. Anybody would be proud of you.” Dig heard her inhale as she turned her attention to the view outside the window.
“Hey, Nanda, what’s wrong, babe?” Dig unconsciously reached out to her, stroked the back of her head, surprised that her short hair was so soft.
“Nothing. This is just nice, like you said.”
“So, you want to go see another waterfall?”
“Do I have to climb another hundred and thirty-five stairs? Because fuck that.”
Dig threw his head back and laughed. The look on her face when she discovered they could have driven up to the lookout point had been priceless.
“No, only about seventy-five steps this time.”
“Oh, okay. Only seventy-five.” She shook her head, a small smile playing on her lips. “I swear, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, DiGiacomo. I really don’t.”
I don’t know what I’m going to do with you either, Fernanda Maldonado.
Dig dropped Nanda off at her apartment after they finished their leisurely ride back to Atlanta from the North Georgia mountains. She had hugged him before she opened the door, a huge grin on her beautiful face. He automatically bent
to kiss her but remembered at the last moment where he was and who he was with, and he stopped himself. But he thought that he might have seen a glimmer of disappointment in her eyes before she turned and opened the apartment door.
He got back to his own apartment, hung his keys on the key holder, and set his helmet down on the built-in desk. Dig looked around his apartment, suddenly incredibly lonely, and contemplated going right back to Junior’s and asking Nanda out to dinner.
But he didn’t.
Then he considered calling Tig, but when he remembered that the little cowboy fighter’s parents were in town, he sighed, resigned to spending the evening alone.
He was sprawled out in his underwear, eating a steak and baked sweet potato fries and watching a rerun of an episode of a police periodical that he had seen at least ten times when his phone rang. He dove toward the phone and didn’t even check the caller ID before he answered.
“Hello?”
“Well, hello, Dom. You actually sound excited to hear from us.”
“Oh, hey, Ma. Is Dad on the line, too?”
“Yep.” Dig snickered. Donato DiGiacomo, in general, a man of few words, hated the telephone.
Francesca DiGiacomo sniffed a laugh. “How are you, sweetheart? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
Dig and his mother chatted for the next half hour, with Dig’s father interjecting one-syllable utterances to let Dig’s mother know that he hadn’t wandered off. The conversation was pleasant, but Dig sensed his mother had something else to say, especially when he mentioned going on the bike ride with Nanda, something he had absolutely no idea why he mentioned in the first place.
“Something on your mind, Ma?”
“She ran into Jessica the other day,” Dig’s father blurted.
“Don!”
“Well, you weren’t going to spit it out, Fran, and the Vikings kick off in half an hour,” he groused.
“Uh, okay . . . ? Um.” Dig pinched the bridge of his nose. Why his mother would think he cared about her seeing his ex-fiancée, he didn’t know. “How’s she doing?” Dig asked, at a loss for what else to say.
“She’s doing well, it seems.”
“Okay. I guess that’s good.”
“I just thought you might want to know, honey. Just because . . .”
Dig scratched the back of his head. He cleared his throat.
“Yeah, thanks for telling me.”
The conversation continued for a few more awkward minutes before Dig lied and said that he had to go because he was meeting Tig for dinner. After saying his goodbyes to his parents and hanging up the phone, he shook his head. He literally had not thought about Jessica Winters in years.
Of course, now he was, which irritated him because remembering his relationship with her revived all sorts of feelings that he would rather not relive again. His parents had seemingly loved Jessica, but even when they were first dating in high school, Dig wasn’t sure if his parents had liked Jessica for Jessica, or if they looked to her as a substitute for Dig’s estranged older sister. He was definitely convinced that that desire fueled their insistence that Dig and Jessica could work things out. In the death throes of their relationship, they had both behaved badly, and when their six-year relationship finally ended, “relieved” was the only word that could be used to describe how Dig felt. And he was pretty sure that Jessica felt the exact same way.
Jessica was just like his sister before she went off the rails, and before things in the DiGiacomo family fell apart. Jessica and Natalie, his sister, and Fran would sit in the kitchen and talk about teaching school and babies, and Dig and Natalie’s then husband, Nick, and Dig’s father, Donato, would sit in the living room and watch the football game. It had been routine and comfortable.
But then Natalie’s marriage had fallen apart, in no small part because of her behavior. As Dig’s parents scrambled to help Nick care for two infants, Dig tried to maintain some semblance of stability in his relationship with Jessica, but the reality was that the two of them had been having problems for a while.
Then Jessica had gotten pregnant. The baby wasn’t Dig’s.
The father didn’t want anything to do with her or the baby, and Jessica hadn’t wanted anything to do with Dig even though he didn’t hesitate about raising a child who wasn’t his. So he and Jessica went their separate ways. She showed up at his doorstep a few months later, and that’s when he found out that she lost the baby. They tried to rekindle their relationship, but it never caught on again. They didn’t even sleep together during Round Two.
Dig blew out a breath and then chuckled, thinking about his mother and Nanda. Boy, that would definitely produce fireworks. Francesca DiGiacomo had a big personality, but so did Nanda.
Yeah, that would be scary.
Dig’s mind wandered to Nanda as his hand drifted toward his cock.
Damn, Nanda was hot. And sassy. And smart.
And damn if he didn’t like that.
He blamed Tig for his change in attitude. He’d never really considered anything but horizontal compatibility before, but seeing his best friend so completely happy with one woman and realizing that he was more than a tiny bit jealous of that happiness? Dig began to suspect he was ready for more. Actually, he had begun to suspect that a few months before when he found himself becoming bored while in bed with beautiful, adventurous women that were game for just about anything and then some.
He’d actually gone out on a few real dates with some of them. Real dates with dinner in quiet restaurants where they had to talk to each other, not scream over music. Those dates had been unmitigated disasters of awkward conversation, or even silence, until he paid the bill and they went back to her apartment—never his room, ever—and they disrobed. Or not. Dig wasn’t really all that picky.
Fernanda Maldonado was a different sort of woman. First of all, she was a bit older than the girls that Dig normally tangled with. And he finally admitted that they were really girls, college coeds in their early twenties, perhaps one that had reached a quarter of a century, compared to Dig’s thirty-three. He wasn’t sure exactly how old Nanda was, but he knew that although she was quite a bit younger than her older brother, most likely she was older than him, and Dig was surprised at how appealing that was.
And then there was the older brother complication. Junior knew Dig’s taste and habits and had been nagging him almost since he’d arrived at DS Fight Club to not be a quote, unquote manwhore, to have some respect for the women he slept with, and more importantly, himself.
But Nanda, man. She was exquisite. She was on the tall side, five foot eight or nine, and slender, with pert breasts that Dig just knew would be a perfect handful. But most striking was her beautiful face. Huge blue eyes, a blue so dark that he thought they were black until she got nose to nose with him and told him off. Red lips that needed no paint, and beautiful olive skin.
Oh, and her neck, sweet Jesus. Long and graceful, and her short pixie haircut just accentuated it.
Good grief.
Yes, Dig suspected that he wanted to actually date Nanda, but she was having absolutely none of it. Every day he flirted with her, and every day she leaned over the desk and put her finger in his chest and thumped it in rhythm of her mantra.
I. Do. Not. Date. Fighters.
But then she’d gone on a bike ride with him. So, maybe?
Dig gave up and began to jerk his cock, pressing his other hand against the sensitive area behind his balls as he imagined Nanda’s sassy look, arms crossed over those perfect breasts and hip cocked, and that no-nonsense look in her eye that drove him wild.
Damn.
What the fuck was happening to him? How had he been reduced to a thirty-three-year-old man who jacked off to thoughts of a girl that he wasn’t even dating, whom he hadn’t even seen naked, after talking to his mom?
Fucking pathetic.
Chapter Eight
Nanda whistled a tune as she pushed the trolley of to
wels down to the hydrotherapy room. She skidded to a halt when she realized that she was whistling Lynyrd Skynyrd.
“What the actual fuck? Now they’ve got me singing this shit. Ugh.”
She knocked loudly on the therapy room door before pulling it slightly open and announcing that she was coming in. When she didn’t get a response, she pushed the door completely open and began moving the folded towels from the cart to the bathroom shelves. She turned around to grab the cart and leave.
And came face-to-face with a naked Dig, standing slack-mouthed and soaking wet, having apparently just gotten out of the shower. Nanda stood, stunned and staring at the gorgeousness of him. Big arms covered in ink, chest just dusted with dark hair, the stubble not thick enough to cover the large tattoo directly over his heart nor the star on the left side of his abdomen. Her eyes drifted down along the heavy V below.
Nanda gawked and leaned against the door, her mouth hanging open. All that beautiful olive skin, almost bare of hair all over. All over. Talk about manscaped. Holy shit.
She dragged her eyes away from the towel that he held in front of his thighs, back up his rippling abs and to his thick chest, to rest on his handsome face. Water droplets hung from the curls on his head and in his beard. All she wanted to do was catch a droplet of water on her tongue.
Nanda licked her lips.
“See something you like?”
His voice snapped her out of her stupor.
“Oh my God, Dig! Jesus fucking Christ, I am so sorry.” Nanda squeezed her eyes shut and fumbled for the door knob. “I didn’t know you were out of sessions. Oh my God, I am so sorry.”
“Hey, it’s okay. We’re all adults. No worries, Nanda.”
She could hear the rustling of material. She let out a deep breath and then opened her eyes.
To find him still standing naked in the middle of the room, but even more exposed because he was drying hair with the towel that covered him earlier, a towel that hid the most perfect cock that she had ever seen. Thick and long, Dig was cut, the thick shaft and head a few shades darker than his olive skin. A dark vein ran the length of the underside, which she could see because he was sporting a massive hard-on, enough that his cock actually stood above a ninety-degree angle.