Sleeping With the Opposition (Bad Boy Bosses)

by J. K. Coi

  When he touched his lips to hers, she didn’t pull away. Her pulse pounded, and she inched even closer and kissed him back. She went on tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  With his hands spanning her waist, he lifted her the few inches off the ground and sat her down right on the flat surface of her desk.

  She automatically stiffened, but Leo wasn’t letting up. Bold and brash as always, he buried his hands in her hair and pushed himself between her legs, trapping her between him and the furniture. She wasn’t even sure which one to call the rock and which one to call the hard place.

  But his lips were soft, scorching her with epic, unrelenting tenderness, and his hands shook with restraint, betraying the force of his need as they lightly smoothed down her back.

  Then his arms curled around her waist. She tipped her head back, and his kiss followed the length of her neck, pushing her off-balance until her elbow hit the desk and Leo bent over her.

  “Too long since I’ve touched you like this,” he groaned, sliding his open palm down her cheek and curling around her neck possessively. His hips pressed into the cradle of her pelvis. “It’s been way too long, Bria. I can’t stand it anymore.”

  She gasped and turned her cheek. “Leo,” she murmured, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “Leo, I can’t—”

  “Don’t,” he bit out harshly. “Don’t keep doing this to us. You love me.”

  “Just because I love you doesn’t mean I can be with you.”

  His jaw clenched. “Why the hell not?”

  She pulled back. His gaze was shuttered, but she sensed the turmoil in him. He’d been so calm and controlled, but there was a fountain of frustration and disappointment bleeding from him now. She was pushing him to the breaking point, to the point where he would either finally share his feelings with her…or give up completely and walk away from it all.

  “This isn’t about what I’m doing to us,” she whispered, her voice failing her. She squirmed off the desk and ducked around him, crossing her arms protectively over her chest.

  “Really? Because it sure feels that way from where I’m standing.” The bite in his voice threatened to draw blood. It was full of pain, sadness, anger. All things he had every right to feel. All things she’d needed him to feel a long time ago.

  “I wish we could do this so neither of us would be hurt,” she whispered. “So that we could still be friends. But if you’re not going to—”

  “Fuck, Bria. Before all this, there was more good than bad to what we had, don’t you agree? Instead of rehashing the bad, shouldn’t we be finding a way to bring back the good and make the most of it?”

  He waited for her response with his arm outstretched toward her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He didn’t understand. This was more than just “a bad patch,” and she couldn’t go back.

  He dropped his hand and squared his wide shoulders. Her chest ached with defeat and disappointment. He was never going to let her in.

  “I guess I’m going,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be home tonight. I trust you can make it back to the house on your own when you’re done here?”

  She bit her lip. It was late. He’d already been to the gym. Was he going to his boxing club? Or to…someone?

  You have to stop caring. Whether it was now or after he agreed to give her the divorce, Leo was bound to find someone else…someone who wouldn’t ask for more than he was willing to give.

  Her chest constricted, but she quickly tamped it down and hurried to clarify, “Don’t think you can demand more time some other night in lieu of this evening just because it didn’t go the way you wanted it to.”

  Was that a wince? He sighed, and his mouth turned up in a brittle smile that had absolutely no humor in it. “Don’t worry.” He sneered. “I’ve had about as much of our agreement as I think I can handle for one day.”

  He was pissed. Here was the anger she’d been waiting on for weeks, but…it didn’t give her the satisfaction she thought it would to see him finally give in to it.

  She crossed her arms. Her stomach flip-flopped, and it was hard to breathe, but she forced a nod. “Fine. Good. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

  His jaw tightened as he turned from her without another word. She watched him walk down the hall alone but didn’t follow. He got farther and farther away, and she had to press her hand tightly over her mouth to keep from calling him back.

  Only when the darkness beyond the reception area had swallowed him up did she stumble back to the window and bang her head against the cool glass. She raised her hand to trace the outline made by the distant red and green blinking lights of the Fresh Mart, but her fingers shook so badly she clenched them into a fist. What if he doesn’t come back this time?

  Despite all the violence Leo Markham welcomed into his life—whether in the form of hateful spouses on opposite sides of the boardroom table or actual fists coming at his face in the boxing ring—Bria had never, not once, been physically afraid of her husband. And she wasn’t afraid now…but she was afraid of herself. Because the flash of pain crossing his face when she’d jerked away from his touch had shredded her. He’d finally given her a sliver of the emotional response she’d been asking for, and seeing it had made her want to jump into his arms and beg to take it all back.

  Why don’t you? Her focus shifted and instead of looking out the window, she stared at her reflection. “Because it’s not enough,” she whispered to the night. She closed her eyes rather than look at the devastation in her own face reflected back at her. She could still go after him. It would be so easy. She could tell him she was sorry for making demands. She could beg him to forget all the harsh words she’d uttered in the last few weeks and welcome him back into their bedroom. He would forgive and forget, and there would be no hard feelings because he loved her. She knew he did.

  But then what? He loved her now, but how long would it be before she got pregnant again? What if she ended up in the hospital again? She wouldn’t survive it if Leo shut down a second time. She couldn’t handle losing her husband and another baby, that horrible feeling of failure and isolation.

  …

  Leo took deep breaths and swore up at the glittering stars. You fucked that up royally.

  His eyes burned, but he wouldn’t cry. He never cried. His chest ached with the pain he refused to show. He’d been trying so hard to be strong and steady so that Bria could hold on to him and find her way back to a happy place…but it was all spiraling out of control no matter what he did.

  He’d been certain that getting her to spend time with him would prove that he was in this with her, that it would help remind her how good they were together. But so far it had only proved to him that this disconnect between them had gotten worse.

  He walked to the curb and flagged down a taxi. “Park Place, between Church and Broadway,” he said to the driver, intending to go to Big Joey’s Boxing Club. “Wait, scratch that.” The smart thing to do would be to go to the gym and release his frustrations on a punching bag—it was open twenty-four hours a day for moments just like this—but he was in the mood for something with a little more edge. He gave the driver an address down by the docks.

  The guy nodded and pulled away from the curb. Leo sat in the shadows of the backseat with his roiling frustration. When the car stopped in front of a darkened warehouse a while later, he was surprised. He’d been so caught up in thoughts of Bria, he hadn’t been paying attention to anything else. They’d left the skyscrapers and condos behind a while ago. This was a much older part of town that still harkened back to the days of dirty industrialism. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you wanted to look at it—the city hadn’t gotten around to developing and urbanizing it yet. Most of the big buildings were empty, run-down, and forgotten, waiting for someone to buy them all up and make condos or something out of them.

  “You sure whatever it is you’re looking for is here?” the taxi driver asked with a frown as he peered out the
window.

  Now that’s the question, isn’t it? “Yeah, this is good, thanks.” He handed the guy enough to pay the fare and cover a decent tip. “Keep the change.”

  The driver reached over the backseat and handed him a business card. “You call me if you want a ride back to the city later, and I’ll come back for you.”

  Leo nodded. “Thanks.” He tucked the card in his jacket pocket and got out of the car.

  He avoided the main door in the front facing the street and walked around the side of the building to a brown steel door that blended into the old red brick. No lights anywhere, but although the building looked deserted from every angle, he could already hear the noise from inside. It came through the doors and windows like a rumbling storm looking for a way out.

  As he reached out to knock on the door, the thunderous music transferred into his arm and traveled to his chest.

  He waited a second, then knocked again. The door opened to reveal a monster-sized dude wearing a white T-shirt. “Leo, man. What are you doing here?” Aiden asked with a grin. He held out his hand. Leo smiled back and shook it.

  He shrugged. “I guess I just needed a change of scenery.” Aiden and his brother Mac and sister Julie ran a bar that also hosted semipro boxing matches, which existed on the very fringe of legal. The only reason they hadn’t yet been shut down was because the siblings were super rigid about adhering to every regulation and had never had a violation.

  “You lookin’ to get in the ring tonight, bro?” The diamond stud in Aiden’s ear flashed as he took in Leo’s gym clothes. At the boxing club, he was always teasing Leo about getting back in the ring for real one of these days.

  “I’m not here to get dirty.” He chuckled. “Have you guys gotten that desperate for fighters?”

  He laughed. “Naw, but with your pretty-boy looks, you’d be a big draw, my friend. Very popular with the crowd.”

  Leo ignored that. He liked to box, but his days of fighting for money were over. It was a form of exercise and a much-needed release, that’s all. Turning it into a lifestyle wasn’t part of the Plan.

  The Plan. He’d come up with the Plan while working for Mr. Russo at the restaurant and learning to box with Jason.

  At first, the Plan had just been to keep his mother from crying and finish high school—which had seemed a challenging enough prospect at the time. But once he’d decided to turn things around, he’d really turned them around. All or nothing, that’s how he’d operated, even then.

  He’d brought his grades up to the point where college had become a real possibility, and even managed to get a scholarship to cover half of his first year.

  So the Plan had evolved to include getting his law degree, and once that had been accomplished, he’d looked for the next challenge: wealth. He’d used all his boxing money to learn everything he could about the world of investment banking, and by the time he was out of college he was debt-free and on his way to a serious nest egg, so he’d focused on the next part of the Plan: running his own firm. He’d met Bria, and he’d immediately made room in the Plan for marriage and kids. Lots of kids. After his dad died, there’d been Mr. Russo. Then Aiden, Mac, and Julie had welcomed him into their family, and he’d known he wanted a big family of his own for real one day.

  Everything had been on track…until it became horribly, painfully derailed.

  For a moment, he stopped and actually considered getting into the ring tonight, but not seriously. Like the courtroom, he never went into anything unprepared. Doing it just for a chance to pound on someone would end up backfiring on him.

  “All right, come on in.” Aiden stepped out of the way and held the door. The noise tripled, hitting Leo like a heat wave. So did the smell. Ripe bodies, spilled beer…spilled blood.

  It was a hundred bucks just to get through the door. He handed over a small stack of twenties, but Aiden shook his head and shoved it back at him. “Naw, man. Keep it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll have Mac bring you a beer,” he said, clapping his friend on the shoulder as he stepped across the threshold.

  Although it had been dark outside, his eyes still needed to adjust. The lighting was dim and inconsistent. The large bar on one side of the big room and the boxing ring on the other side were well lit, but with all the people crowded around both, it was far from enough. Then again, nobody came here to take in the decor.

  Aiden at the door and Mac at the bar were the owners of the building, along with their sister, Julie. The three of them were a tight-knit Irish family, and he’d known them almost as long as he’d known Mr. Russo, because first Mac, and then Aiden and Leo, had all joined the same after-school boxing program run by Mr. Russo’s son, Jason, when they were kids. The brothers now ran the day-to-day stuff here and kept order when the place was open for business, but Julie was the one who actually organized the fight schedule and handled all the finances.

  Leo looked up to the second story where the office was, behind a big viewing window. Sure enough, a tiny figure stood up there all by herself, looking down on the floor.

  Someone stopped by his side and followed his gaze. “She’s been up there every night,” Mac said. He was leaner than Aiden, but they shared practically identical features. Leo could barely hear him over the clamor of the screaming crowd and the thumping music. “I’ve tried ordering her to go home and get some sleep, but—”

  Leo laughed. “Your sister has never been the type to let anyone tell her what to do…especially her brothers,” he said.

  Mac laughed with him. “No, you’re right about that.” He sighed. “But I wish she would let us help, you know?” Julie’s fiancé had been in an accident just two months ago and was still laid up in a coma. When she wasn’t here at the club, she was at the hospital sitting with him.

  Leo understood perfectly. As much as Julie loved her family and friends, there were some things a person went through alone, no matter how many people were around.

  “Maybe she’ll listen to you. Go on up. She’d probably appreciate the company, if nothing else.” Mac’s expression tightened with worry as he looked up again.

  Leo glanced up again, too, and nodded, but before he left, he said, “Send Aiden at the door something to drink, would you? He’s looking parched.”

  Mac grimaced. “My brother sure knows how to sucker the customers.”

  Leo grinned. “I didn’t say I was paying for it.”

  Mac chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder before leaving him.

  Leo made his way through the crowd and ducked beneath the rope blocking off the steel-framed staircase going to the second floor. The door at the top opened before he could knock, and Julie stood there with a hand on her hip, smiling. Dark brown hair cascaded over her slim shoulders, and her long legs were encased in skinny jeans and tall boots. “Leo! What brings you here tonight?” she asked with a wide smile of welcome.

  He smiled back. “I needed to get out of the house for a while.”

  Her expression turned to one of sympathy, exactly what he didn’t want right now. He brushed past her into the dark office. “Where’s the whiskey?”

  She shut the door and went to the big desk against the back wall, pulling out a drawer and holding up a bottle. “You mean this whiskey?”

  He grinned. “Bust it out.”

  As she retrieved two shot glasses from the same drawer and poured, he walked over and looked out the big window to the fight below. He could already tell which of the competitors was going to win. The younger guy was playing up the crowd a bit, but he was also strong and keen, with a tendency toward MMA-style moves—which he managed to get away with here because the rules were a little less stringent. The other guy seemed to be more experienced and methodical, but in this case, Leo decided he just wasn’t going to be fast enough.

  “Brianna still isn’t talking to you?” Julie asked in a soft voice filled with concern. Although their lives had gone in different directions since high school, they’d been friends a long time. He hadn’t talked to her�
�or anyone—about what he and Bria had been going through, but Julie was intuitive, and she’d picked up on it when she’d come to check up on them in the hospital.

  He didn’t turn around. “She’s talking. She just has nothing positive to say…at least to me.”

  “She’s hurting, but it’ll get better. You just have to give it some more time.” She handed him a glass over his shoulder. He took it with a nod of thanks and sucked it back with a gulp.

  He twirled the empty glass. The fear and despair dug in a little deeper.

  Julie moved to stand beside him. Her reflection in the window was one of quiet strength and unflinching support. “You can’t give up on her.”

  He swore and squeezed his eyes shut to keep from looking at his own reflection.

  Julie, always too perceptive by half, touched his arm. “You love each other, and you need each other.” Her voice was thick with emotion, and he immediately felt guilty for dumping his shit on her when she had enough of her own to deal with. “And if you give up, you’ll hate yourself in the dark years to come.”

  He wasn’t a quitter, and he’d refused to believe that his love wasn’t enough for Bria anymore. There’d been a glimmer of hesitation in her insistence that they were over, and that had kept him going. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been wrong.

  “Have you tried talking to her about it? I’ve known you for a long time, Leo, and while you’re great to have around when the going is good, you bottle those emotions of yours up tighter than a clam at high tide,” she said, a maddeningly knowing look on her face. “Bria miscarried a baby. Your baby. Maybe she needs to know that you didn’t just shrug it off and move on, that you’re hurting as much as she is.”

  He scrubbed a hand across his face. Maybe he hadn’t said it in so many words, but she had to know that. And the words were just words. They wouldn’t help anyone. Falling apart like a giant baby would only prove that she couldn’t rely on him, prolonging the agony for both of them. He’d done everything he was supposed to, he’d been the rock by Bria’s side and shown her that he wasn’t going anywhere, no matter what. He’d tried to help her see that they still had a whole life in front of them. He’d promised there would be other children. That’s what mattered. Strength. Security. Hope for the future. Fighting back against the pain.