Yeah. Definitely pissed.
But he stood rooted to the spot, not giving in to how badly he wanted to go after her. To find her, and . . . what, exactly? His dick twitched against his jock.
At least one part of his body knew exactly what he’d do if he got Jules alone. A series of images seared through his brain, hot enough to burn. Jules, naked and riding him with abandon. Her lips stretched around his cock, his hands tangled in her hair. The creamy skin of her inner thighs, soft against his cheeks as he tasted and tormented her until she begged him to make her come. Fucking her against a wall in a nightclub bathroom. Fingering her in the back of a cab, not enough to get her off, just enough to drive her wild. Smacking her sweet little ass as he slammed into her from behind, his name falling from her lips. He’d almost come at the sight of his handprint marking her soft skin. Marking her as his. Watching the sun rise over Chicago with Jules in his arms, her bare skin warm against his. Feeling as though he’d found a piece of himself in her that he hadn’t even realized he’d been missing. The way she’d seen him, not through him, but into him. They’d become completely addicted to each other. At least, he’d become addicted to her. To the way she felt, the way she made him feel. Big, and good, and happy. He’d thought what they had was real. But it hadn’t gone both ways.
He’d given her everything, laid himself out like a goddamn feast for her, and she hadn’t even told him that she was Craig Darcy’s daughter. Fuck.
Silence hung in the room, and he belatedly realized that while he’d been staring at the empty space Jules had left behind, Craig had asked him a question, or said something that needed a response.
He adjusted the towel around his shoulders and tipped his chin up, hoisting his smile back into place. “Just here to work, boss.”
Craig arched an eyebrow and half smiled before continuing. “As many of you have heard, we’re stepping things up here at the WFC. We’re growing the organization, bringing on some big fighters, and taking our marketing in a new direction.” He glanced at where Jules had stood and gave a small shrug when he saw she’d gone. Something about the gesture bothered Nick, that tiny shrug hitting him low in the gut. “We’ve got a big fight night coming up this weekend, and this card is fucking great. I want all of you there for the fights, doing press, and at the after party. For the first time it’ll be on a major sports network, so I want all of our fighters to show up. Be visible. I’m so proud of the talent on this card—Gabe Maddox.” He smiled and pointed to the man standing next to Nick. “You finally get your shot at the belt. You’ve earned it.” The room exploded in shouts and applause, but Gabe wasn’t affected, just tipped his head in a nod and crossed his arms over his chest. “By the end of this year, every MMA fan out there will forget all about Imperial. We will be the league to watch, with the best fighters, and the best fights. We want everyone talking about the WFC, about our fighters, about our events. So you do your part, and go out there and fight like your lives and careers depend on it. Put on a show for the fans, and I’ll do my part to make this the best fucking MMA league in the world. We’re going big, guys, and you’re all part of it. Good luck, everybody.”
The fighters all applauded as Craig turned to go, murmurs of “thanks, Darcy” and “you got it, man” echoing through the room. All Nick could do was stare at the door, pressing his weight into his feet to keep himself rooted against the stupid need to chase after Jules.
“Hey.” Gabe elbowed him. “You good?”
Nick nodded, still staring at the door.
Gabe flipped his hand in a dismissive wave. “These guys, they’ll get used to you. Let them get their ribbing in and they’ll forget about it in a few weeks. Don’t let them get to you.”
“They’re not.”
No, the guys weren’t getting under his skin. But Jules? Fuck, she’d gotten under his skin like a tattoo, and seeing her again only made everything sharp and raw.
A vibration sizzled through him, and before he could talk himself out of it, his feet were moving across the gym floor and he’d yanked open the door. But of course there was no sign of her. He stood in the deserted hallway, his hands on his hips, sucking down air as though he’d just gone three rounds. An ache flared up in his chest, a longing sensation twisting around his heart, around his lungs like knotted rope.
It fucking hurt to see her again, after what she’d done to him. After what she’d given him, and then taken away.
He turned and stalked back into the gym, needing to hit something.
2
Jules rushed past Deb’s desk on her way to her dad’s office, sure she was late because it had taken her so long to get over seeing— Nope. She wasn’t even going to go there, he didn’t matter. Deb was on the phone, but covered the mouthpiece to whisper, “You can go on in, dear.”
Her dad looked up when she walked in and waved her over before transferring his cell phone to his other hand and running his hand over his head, slightly mussing his short hair, the same dark blond as hers. Standing, he walked to the wall of windows in his corner office to stare out at the parking lot below as he talked. “Relax, Bill. He’ll show up at the meeting next week. We have an excellent card this weekend. He’ll watch on TV just like everybody else and be begging us to give him a chance on Monday.” Apparently that didn’t satisfy Bill, because her dad sighed as he propped an arm against the window to listen. Bill’s tinny voice echoed through the silence of her father’s office, and Jules drummed her fingers against the back of the tablet clutched in her hands.
Left with nothing to do but wait, Jules set her tablet on a pile of papers on his messy desk and sat down in one of the chairs facing it. The spacious room was devoid of anything personal. Despite the fact that he’d been in the building for over six months now, a pile of boxes were stashed in a corner. He didn’t look settled in at all, as if he’d hung the pictures showing him posing with various sports figures on the wall behind his desk and work had taken over.
She recognized a few of them from his boxing days—him with Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Mike Tyson—because they’d hung in the den of her childhood home. As a kid, she’d stared at them for hours when he was gone training or traveling for a fight. There were others too, from when he’d moved into mixed martial arts. She didn’t recognize those, because by then her mother had stopped allowing her to go to the fights and he hadn’t been home much. By the time she was a teenager and had been sent off to boarding school in upstate New York, they’d barely been speaking.
She almost smiled when she stopped on the final picture, a poster of him with his welterweight belt from when he’d won his first championship in the 170-pound weight class. He’d given her that poster on one of his last visits home before the divorce, but she’d been an angry twelve-year-old and had stuffed it into her closet. He looked good in it, though, happy, even, as his ocean blue gaze stared out fiercely. As far as she knew, fighting was the only thing that made him happy. She and her mother hadn’t been enough, and even now, with an entire league to run, she knew he missed the thrill of it.
It had taken her a long time to understand his drive. She still didn’t completely, but she was proud of what he’d accomplished, and that’s not something she could have said even five years ago. He’d come from nothing in South Boston and worked his way up as a boxer. Then he’d moved into MMA when the sport was still young and had become the welterweight champ of the WFC’s predecessor, the Ultimate Cage Championship. He’d retired as champ with an impressive 33–4 record, and she was proud of him for that.
Prouder still that when the UCC had filed for bankruptcy, he’d stepped in and bought the organization, becoming president and owner. Now the WFC was a force to be reckoned with, giving bigger organizations like Imperial something to be worried about.
He’d sacrificed his family in the process, but he was trying to make amends. Besides, Megan was right—she might never get this chance to know her dad
again, so she’d try not to dwell on the past anymore. And maybe working with him was a way for both of them to move forward.
“Christ!” He startled her as he ended the phone call and moved back to his chair. “Save me from investors.”
She knew that he’d originally sought out investors to pay off the UCC’s debts, but that had been years ago. “I thought you bought them all out.”
“All but one. Bill Davis—he’s the biggest leech of them all. He’ll be out as soon as the endorsements I’ve been working on come through.”
“What endorsements?” she asked, picking up her tablet. Was this how it was going to be? Her having to chase him for scraps of information?
He shrugged. “I’ll fill you in, along with—” He broke off and waved his hand toward the empty chair next to her as if he couldn’t be bothered to say the person’s name. “The UCC didn’t have a middleweight division. Well, they did, briefly, but there was that whole doping scandal. Every damn one of them was handed a lifetime suspension to satisfy the commissioner, but we’re adding a new middleweight division to the WFC. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now. We’ve had four come over from other leagues and three more moved up from welterweight. And you met Giannakis today. He was Imperial’s reigning middleweight champ.” He rolled his eyes. “Among other things.”
She froze at his name. An image of him smiling as he pulled her into his arms, his mouth hot and gentle against her— No, she wasn’t going to remember. It was over. Anything between them was in the past, and had to stay there. Swallowing hard, she managed to nod and maintain eye contact as she focused on her father. This was good. She could totally do this. After a few days, it probably wouldn’t even bother her that Nick was here. There was no point in telling her dad about their history. It wouldn’t matter, and there was a chance it could make things tougher for Nick. Not to mention the absolute horror of having to discuss her sex life with her father, whom she barely knew. Yeah, no thank you.
“Since I’m already spending a metric fuckton getting this new weight class up and running, I figured it’d make sense to have our new promotional campaign focus on it. The fighters, the new additions to the league, all of that.” He frowned slightly before continuing. “This new middleweight class needs a champion. We’ll have a tournament over the July Fourth weekend, something we’ve never done before. The tournament will decide the inaugural WFC middleweight championship.”
She frowned. “July Fourth? That’s less than three months away.”
“Yeah.”
“And you want this new campaign—the one your former marketing guy never even started—to focus on that?”
“Right.”
She sighed heavily. “Do you have anything started on it? Anything at all?”
“I’ve already bought TV slots, so I’ll need you to work on a couple of commercials. The first day of the tournament will be on cable, but the final day, the fights that determine our champ, is pay-per-view. We need commercials promoting both.”
She nodded and made notes on her tablet. “We’re really behind. Shit.”
“That’s why I called you. You’re the expert, right? If we can pull this off, if we can get the viewers, we’ll be primed for more airtime, and more advertisers later in the year. It’s an important fucking fight.” He paused and sat back in his chair, tenting his fingers. “There’s more.” His voice had lost its excitement.
“Of course there is.” She met his gaze, fingers poised over the tablet.
“Giannakis.” He grimaced a bit, his brow furrowing as he rubbed his temple.
Her breath caught. He didn’t know, did he? For a brief second, her heart began to gallop out of control, and she took a breath. She was being ridiculous. Of course he didn’t know about those weeks in Chicago. He couldn’t. She forced herself to not react, but she knew she wasn’t going to like whatever he was about to say.
A knock on the door made her shoulders stiffen, and a knowing sensation prickled down her spine. “Come in,” her dad called, forcing his grimace into something only slightly more neutral.
“I didn’t realize I was late.” Her stomach dipped and swirled at the sound of Nick’s voice.
“You’re just in time.” Her dad waved him in. “I was getting Julian up to speed on the tournament.”
She didn’t turn to acknowledge him, but she could feel his eyes on her as he walked over to the vacant chair. He paused right beside her, and for a split second, he was all there was for her, the weight of his presence filling up her consciousness. The words on her tablet went blurry and she closed her eyes to breathe in his scent. He’d showered since his workout. She could smell his soap, but underneath that was all him. That scent she knew so well, because when he hadn’t been inside her, she’d slept pressed against him every night. His scent had been on her skin constantly, making her crave more of him. Even now, her body was awakening, recognizing him after such a long absence and begging for his touch, his voice, anything he’d give her.
Shifting in her seat, she forced herself to open her eyes and focus on her dad. He was talking and it took all she had to make sense of his words.
“—she’ll be in charge of that campaign.”
Her dad raised a brow as if he expected her to jump in, and she knew she should. This was her job, she was supposed to be brimming with ideas. And usually she was. It was how she’d quickly become one of the most sought-after consultants at her old marketing firm. Even before she’d finished grad school, she’d made small startups great because she had so many ideas. But one day with Nick and she was flailing.
He’d already taken his seat and, as the silence stretched out, she knew it was weird that she hadn’t actually looked at him yet or acknowledged him in any way. The last thing she needed was for her dad to get suspicious, so she clenched her hands in her lap and forced herself to look over. He’d changed into a black ribbed T-shirt that hugged his chest, and jeans. His hair was loose now, hanging in damp waves just to his shoulders, longer than it had been in Chicago. He’d worn it longish then, but still too short to pull back. She wasn’t sure she liked it this way. It made him . . . different. Less hers. Though she had no right to claim him. Not after the way she’d left.
Before she could stop it from happening, Nick’s gaze caught hers, hungry and fierce, and desire clenched tight in her belly, settling low in her core. Sucking in a breath, she glanced at the few notes on her tablet. “If the slots are the standard thirty seconds, we’ll have to be creative. We don’t have time for anything elaborate, but we can still put together something that hits all the right notes. Off the top of my head, we could do some quick shots with the guys. I’m thinking a dark background, maybe some artistic, slow-motion shots of them hitting a punching bag, kicking, wrestling, maybe even something subtler, like putting on hand wraps, sweat dripping off of faces, off of arms. A voice-over to hype up the whole ‘clash of titans, there can be only one, this is gonna be crazy, this is the event MMA fans have been waiting for’ angle, and as the commercial progresses, the speed of the action progresses too, driving the message forward. We want people feeling amped up after seeing the commercial. We’ll need to pick official music that will play in the background. I’m thinking something along the lines of ‘How You Like Me Now?’ by The Heavy, or maybe something more classic, like ‘25 Miles,’ by Edwin Starr. Maybe have each of the guys saying the same catchphrase, and we can overlap them all saying, ‘It’s my time,’ or something. Again, I’m just spitballing here, since this is new information to me.”
She glanced up and saw her father was nodding his approval, a small smile curving his lips. Finally drawing in a deep breath, she chanced another look over at Nick. He was still watching her, an elbow resting on the arm of the chair, fingers tracing his chin. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and he wasn’t giving anything away. She looked back at her dad, safer territory.
“Sound
s great, Julian. Work on that and we’ll meet again early next week with the production company. Right now, I need to talk to you both about another campaign. With the fights this weekend and the upcoming tournament—which by the way is the biggest MMA event ever televised—we’ve got a real chance here to gain momentum. I want us to finish out the year with an even stronger television presence and dedicated spots going into next year. We have to have solid, consistent advertising to keep us moving.
“That’s where you come in, Giannakis. I know we talked about this a bit, but I want you to be the face of WFC, for now.”
“The face of WFC?” The words were out before Jules even realized she’d said them. If he was the face, they’d be spending a lot of time working together. There’d be no avoiding him, no pretending he wasn’t here. Not with the marketing campaign and promotional events and everything that would go along with Nick’s role. How was she supposed to function working with him when she couldn’t even be in the same room with him without her body going into hypersensitivity overdrive?
Her dad gave her an odd glance before giving a short nod and continuing as if she hadn’t spoken. “You have fans from Imperial that’ll follow you over, and you have the personality to draw in new ones for us.” Her dad’s nostrils flared slightly, as though the last few words tasted bad in his mouth.
“I’m happy to help.” Nick sat up straighter as his attention shifted to her dad. Without even meaning to, her gaze dropped to his left hand, his long, graceful fingers clenched tight around the padded arm of the chair. Before she could stop herself, she remembered how that large, strong hand felt on her body, easing its way between her thighs that time in the cab. When they’d arrived at his apartment, she’d barely been able to walk upright thanks to the almost painful throb between her legs. She’d never done that in a cab before, but with Nick all of her boundaries had disappeared.
Dirty Boxing Page 2