by Scott, Ada
Submission Specialist: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy #2)
Ada Scott
Published by BadBoyRomance.com
Copyright 2015 Ada Scott
Cover Design: Kevin McGrath
http://www.kevindoesart.com/
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Disclaimer
All characters and events are entirely fictional and any resemblances to persons living or dead and circumstances are purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Still a Bad Boy (Still a Bad Boy #1)
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
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Bonus Story (Still a Bad Boy #1.5)
Submission Specialist (Still a Bad Boy #2)
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
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
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Please note: This ebook is a special limited edition of ‘Submission Specialist’ that includes both the first in the series ‘Still a Bad Boy’ as well as a bonus short story previously exclusively available to Ada Scott newsletter subscribers. If you haven’t read ‘Still a Bad Boy’ or the bonus story yet, then be sure to start here so you get the full bad boy experience!
Submission Specialist
Still a Bad Boy #2
Chapter 1
Skylar
The roar of the crowd in the arena above rose and fell with action I only caught in brief glimpses as I ducked into each of the dressing rooms. Every time a door opened, the air was hot and thick with linseed and testosterone as people buzzed around either preparing or treating fighters.
I was walking a fine line, trying to be the best employee that No Holds Barred Fighting Championship had, and trying to be invisible all at the same time. At any given moment I expected to get a tap on the shoulder and be told that, with “great” regret, they had to let me go.
Everything I did, I did it fast. Hopefully, if people saw me rushing around and keeping busy, they wouldn’t stop to think that an unqualified nineteen year old girl didn’t really have any business being anywhere near the elite athletes of the most prestigious mixed martial arts organization in the world. They wouldn’t stop to think that they could get somebody more qualified to work for less, or even nothing at all.
If Uncle Malcolm were still around, I wouldn’t have to be so scared. A lump came to my throat at the thought of him as I dodged around all the people scurrying around on their own missions down here.
He was my foot in the door with NHBFC, and I used to just follow him around and do what he said. After he disappeared, I think everybody was surprised that I turned up for work by myself, and too polite to tell me to leave.
That awkward politeness was probably wearing thin by now as the months rolled by. It was anybody’s guess as to whether it would run out before everybody just settled into the status quo, and I could breathe a little easier.
It wasn’t that I didn’t miss him, because I did. I remembered that first day, it felt like I was tearing my soul apart just getting out of bed so I could come in and do all these low-level tasks.
Uncle Malcolm was the only one who knew exactly what he had done for me, what this job meant to me. It was so much more than a paycheck. It was part of my ticket out of my own little hell. It was my one chance to be a part of the only world that had ever given me some small measure of happiness.
He knew that living under my father’s roof was breaking me, especially after Mom died. Dad had always brought the fire and brimstone to the dinner table, but it was worse after she wasn’t around.
Now this job was the only thing paying the rent at Uncle Malcolm’s apartment, and funding my studies to become a sports therapist, and I was barely getting by. If I put a single foot wrong, then the golden opportunity he gave me, the brief candle of hope that had appeared in my life, would be snuffed out.
That’s why I worked through my time of grieving, why I still worked. The police didn’t ever find a single thing. There was no closure for me, or anybody that knew him.
The crowd screamed and the entire building rumbled like an earthquake as forty thousand people jumped to their feet. Something big must have been happening in the cage, the ten-sided ring the fighters competed in.
On a night like tonight, the fans were getting their money’s worth. The support staff down here had been stretched to their limits, treating all manner of injuries and exhaustion. That was fine by me, the less energy people had to spare to think about me the better.
It was easy to lose track of time, but I guessed that the fight card must have been into the main events by now, the big names. Even when Uncle Malcolm was here, we never worked with the fighters who were so good they were basically celebrities.
NHBFC held them up on the pedestal they earned by bringing in the most paying customers, and the Tier-1 fighters were assigned their own separate dressing room areas, and tended by a different team altogether. I knocked on another door and somebody opened it from the inside.
“Here’s the extra towels,” I said to Gordon.
My team leader looked at me with frustration. Thankfully it was clearly directed at the middleweight fighter who was bouncing around, every bit as excited as the crowd on the other side of the thick concrete above us, as he watched the replay on the screen instead of staying still to get the stitches put into his head.
“Oooooohhhhh!” he yelled. “Anaconda choke! Sick! Grady didn’t see that coming, day-um!”
“Stop moving around so much!”
“Sorry, man, did you see that, though?” asked the young fighte
r.
“Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Skylar.”
I gave a weak smile and looked at the screen, where Austin “The Killer” Aquila was getting to his feet in the middle of the cage. There wasn’t a mark on him, but his opponent was still on the ground.
Aquila was a crowd favorite, who had made some truly talented fighters look like circus clowns over the past couple of years. He would have had a title shot by now, if not for those few surprise losses along the way.
With those looks, he’s my favorite too. He could-
I cut off my own thought before I could let myself go down that path, fighting off a blush. As much as I tried to tell myself that the way my dad used to terrorize me about boys and dating as I was growing up was wrong, I couldn’t shake my past. No matter how good I tried to be, nothing was ever good enough for him.
If he was to be believed, I was going to bring about the apocalypse with my whorish ways, even though I’d been too scared to even let a boy kiss me. I wore a purity ring in an effort to appease him. I even meant it when I promised to abstain until marriage, but the second I wore a skirt shorter than halfway down my calves or went outside without a sweater in the middle of summer, well, the whiskey came out, and sooner or later so did the belt. And the maniacal screaming.
One time a boy had practically signed my death warrant by coming to our door and having the gall to ask for permission to take me out on a date. Even now, miles away, I still felt that self-loathing that had been beaten into me every time somebody showed an interest in me, or every time I even fleetingly entertained the thought of any kind of intimacy.
“You look whacked. Go ahead and take fifteen,” said Gordon, nodding at the door.
I blinked and shook my head, tearing my eyes away from Austin and bringing myself back to reality. This wasn’t something I wanted Gordon to notice.
“No! I’m fine, there’s so much to do, I…”
Gordon pulled the needle through the fighter’s scalp, then held up his hand and shook his head to cut me off. “Go ahead, there’ll still be plenty to do in fifteen minutes, you’ve been great tonight.”
I could almost taste the ice-cold water from the watercooler and the fruit I’d packed for myself.
“Well…”
“Go.”
“OK, I guess. I’ll be back to help soon, though.”
Chapter 2
Skylar
Crunch!
I was about ten minutes into my break, and the apple was going down good, when Gordon’s head popped in the door. He looked desperate.
“Hey, sorry about this, but can you take care of something for me?”
I swallowed the mouthful of apple and bolted to my feet. “Yes! What can I do?”
“Team one is down a lot of people with the flu that’s going around, they need somebody to help out. Henry said Aquila needs a massage.”
When the name came out of his mouth, it was like somebody with a tiny defibrillator zapped me on my spine, and I startled before my heart started thundering in response.
“A… a mas… me?”
“Yeah, sorry about this, there’s just nobody else I can spare. He’s not injured or anything, just needs to work out some kinks before the post-event press conference. Can you head over now? Tell them I sent you.”
“I… well… of c-course, I’ll do my best,” I said.
“Thanks for that.” Gordon was gone before he had even finished the sentence.
I felt like I was sitting inside my own head watching a movie play out as I dropped the remains of my apple in the trash and headed towards the Tier-1 fighters’ area. Uncle Malcolm wasn’t here to show me what to do. All I had was less than a year of study and a general appreciation of massages to rely on. It would have to do.
The Tier-1 wing had a guard at the door who looked mean enough to actually fight for NHBFC, but he let me through when he saw my uniform and heard that Gordon had sent me at Henry’s request. The hallway behind said door was just as chaotic as the ones I’d just left, but for a completely different reason.
With a smaller group of fighters to look after, and an already smaller staff diminished by illness, it was the MMA groupies making the most noise over here. Clusters of some of the most stunning girls currently in the city hovered around their favorite fighters’ doors, giggling and talking loudly. It wasn’t official of course, but the guard knew only to let in the best of the best.
The intensity of their beauty only served to make me feel self-conscious, as I awkwardly nudged my way through them to Austin’s door. Most of them were taller than me and the tops they wore made absolutely sure to show off their breasts, at my eye-level, to maximum effect.
They made me feel like a potato in a diamond display case as I sheepishly knocked on the door. A few moments later an older guy, Austin’s coach, snatched the door open.
“I told you bitches he isn’t ready yet!”
“Uh, Gordon sent me? Henry said you-”
“Oh, right, yeah. He’s just in the shower-”
The groupies in earshot all squealed and started talking at once.
“You come in, he’ll be ready in a second, I’m stepping out. Lock it behind you. Which of you girls wants to do me a special favor so I put a good word in for you with The Killer?”
I squeezed past him as a chorus of “I do!” “I will” rang out behind me. One of them said “How come the cleaning lady gets to go in?” Another said, “I’ll deepthroat your-” just as the door clicked shut.
Stepping into a Tier-1 dressing room after working on the other side for so long was like stepping into first-class on an airplane after only ever flying coach. They had all the same stuff that we had, but instead of bare concrete, there was actual paint on the walls, a permanent massage table, a brand new heavy punching bag hung from the ceiling on a chain. Plenty of bells and whistles.
Steam poured out of a cracked-open door and I could hear a shower running. I walked over and paused by the door, before knocking even more tentatively than I had on the other one.
“Austin? I’m here for the-”
“I told Ross to tell you I wasn’t ready!” he yelled out.
“Uh… no I’m not… uh… I work here? Henry said you needed a massage?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll be right out.”
The sound of running water stopped and I caught a flash of movement in the steamed-up mirror through the opening. Quickly, I turned and faced the other way, ashamed at the flush of excitement that came unbidden and made me bite my bottom lip without thinking about it.
After a couple minutes I felt the waft of air as the door was pulled open behind me, and turned to face him. Standing there, wearing only a towel, with beads of water dripping down his neck and torso from his hair, was fan (and my) favorite, Austin “The Killer” Aquila.
That perfectly sculpted body looked like it was made from granite by an artist with an eye for sin, then decorated with ink in designs that curled all over. His thick arms had contours that drew my eyes up to his broad shoulders, and then sent them down across his pecs and over each and every bump of his abs.
His lower abdominals formed lines that narrowed as my eyes roamed lower… lower… lower until the visual ride was abruptly cut off by the towel, which he held up by one hand.
I looked up and heard my jaw click shut when our eyes met. I only hoped I’d closed my mouth before I drooled. If I was looking at him like a piece of art, he was looking at me like a piece of food, and it took all my willpower not to find a plate to climb on to.
All heavyweights have a certain presence. It would be hard not to when you’re a tank that has briefly assumed human form, but Austin had presence that almost seemed to make the air crackle between us and around him. His eyes, they were looking at me in a way that would give my dad a stroke. That brought me partway back to reality.
“Um… over there?” I pointed at the massage table.
“You sure you work here?” he asked.
“Yeah, I… I normally work in Ti
er-2…”
Austin closed the distance between us and leaned down towards me. My heart tried to jump up my throat to get a better view out my mouth at all that solid muscle so close to me, and my ability to breathe be damned.
“Because, if you’re another girl that stole a uniform just to get in here… well, I’ll have to do to you what I did to her.”
A drop of water fell from his head and landed on my ear, making me flinch. The scent of soap and the faint musk of him filled my lungs as I took a deep breath to offer whatever reassurance I could.
“I promise I work here,” I squeaked.
I’d been around men before, I’d seen Austin on TV before, but I’d never felt anything like this. I’d always been able to keep what my father called my evil nature shut up in a box, but something about this was different.
Maybe it was the way he carried himself, that presence I felt. Maybe it was the fact that he was the hottest man I’d ever laid eyes on and he was only wearing a towel.
Whatever it was, that part of me had kicked a hole in the side of its box and was yelling at me to reach out and run my hands all over that perfection. I gulped, because that’s exactly what I was supposed to do, in my professional capacity.
“Hmmm. Too bad. All those rules, huh?” he said.
No doubt he was talking about the rules concerning no sleeping with the fighters. I got that talk during my induction right after the fire safety lecture. Despite that, if rumors were true, then Austin had taken liberties with more than one ring girl in his time with the NHBFC.
The tattooed fighter walked over to the massage table and climbed on, leaving me in a daze for a few seconds before I followed. There was a fully-stocked basket of massage oils on a shelf underneath, and I pulled one out at random while he settled himself in.
I poured a little on to one palm and rubbed my hands together to warm everything up. That was lesson one in the massage course I took earlier in the year, and although there hadn’t been anything in that lesson about chanting “professional, professional, professional” in your mind, I did that for a moment too, before I touched him.
Even his back was roped with well-defined muscles and tattoos, enough to make a girl blush. In my course, we’d always had same-sex massage partners. Michelle, the girl in my class, felt nothing like this.