Sweet Insanity (Sweet Series Book 1)

by Desiree Adele

  “Excellent idea, Dahlia,” Christos says. “You will act as his sparring partner, paidí mou.”

  Me? I assumed he’d call up a student of similar build to Zack, like Javier or Roland.

  I open my mouth to protest, but Zack cuts in, his face twisted with confusion. “No offense, sir, but I must be double her weight. Doesn’t that tip the scale in my favor?”

  Christos flashes him a knowing smile that lets me know he’s as much in on this as I am. He’s well aware Zack and his friends are screwing around, but Christos isn’t a man who lashes out when he’s angry. Considering his expertise with various forms of martial artistry, he’s spent years carefully honing his ability to turn someone against themselves, whether physically or mentally. I still have a ways to go before reaching his level.

  “If Dahlia wasn’t a capable fighter, she wouldn’t be my apprentice.” Christos’s voice is deceptively calm. Before walking away, he calls for someone to grab Zack protective gear. Just Zack. Not me.

  I may not be smiling on the outside, but inwardly, a nefarious grin stretches wide and bright.

  I may no longer need to plot out my own revenge. Christos took care of that in a way I couldn’t have chosen better. I’m ready to play. Zack is the puck and I’m the stick, about to sink him into the net. Game on, Puck Boy, game on.

  EACH OF MY SO-CALLED FRIENDS takes a step back to single me out.

  Fuckers.

  As I step onto the mats, a man with dark skin and a shaved head walks over with chest and head padding and a mouth guard. I’m instructed to remove my shoes.

  Keith walks up to me, showing not even an ounce of remorse. “Not exactly the quiet weekend you’d originally intended, eh?” He claps a hand on my shoulder while I throw one of my Nikes onto the floor.

  I brush him off and snarl, hopping on one foot to get my other shoe off. “Is this some kind of sick payback for all those times you kicked kids’ asses for me in elementary school?”

  Giving a non-committal shrug, he looks at where Dahlia stands, pulling on a pair of protective gloves. “I sort of wanted to see if you were cocky enough to go along with it or if you’d be running scared out the door. Would have made for one hell of a class Monday morning either way.”

  Using my shoulder to shove him aside, I pull on the gear, spitting out, “Fuck you,” before biting down on the mouth guard. Since it’s a standard guard, not one specifically fitted for my teeth, it’s uncomfortable as fuck and digs into my gums, filling my mouth with a metallic taste.

  I haven’t even stepped into the spar and I’m already fucking bleeding. A gnawing feeling in my stomach tells me I’ll be lucky to walk out of here with all of my teeth intact, even with a mouth guard. I’ve already pissed this girl off once, and if the flaring of her eyes when she spotted me tells me anything, her impression of me hasn’t improved much.

  Keith steps back to where Aaron stands jaw-slacked and gawking while Dave holds out his cell phone. Making a mental note to threaten him later if he doesn’t delete the video I know for a fact he’s recording, I turn toward the center of the mat. Dahlia already stands there, no protective gear besides the gloves.

  Rather than the fierce scowl she had the last time we stood face to face, she stands in front of me with a look of placidity. Her icy blue gaze is alert but not glaring. That’s when I notice that she’s not looking me in the eye but staring directly at the center of my chest.

  She doesn’t seem even the slightest bit intimidated when she raises her fists to nose level, stepping a foot back to widen her stance.

  That’s the moment it hits me that she probably lives and breathes her sport just as I do mine. I know for a damn certainty that standing in front of her in this place is like a rookie trying to beat me in a one-on-one on the ice. It would only end in a screaming victory for me and a humiliating loss for my competitor. This is her zone, her art, and it shimmers in her eyes and her silent confidence.

  Mimicking her stance and putting up my guard, my head spins as I attempt to conjure up any memories of watching UFC with the guys or my father and brother. Just one fucking move.

  With images flashing through my mind like a movie on rewind, I come up empty. The older man who greeted us—or more specifically, pitted me against the likely real world equivalent of Wonder Woman—stands on our right, one hand rising above his head.

  Game time.

  In a booming voice, he says something in a different language and slashes his hand through the air between Dahlia and me.

  Acting on adrenaline, my blood pumping rapidly, my arm pulls back to land a right hook. Instant mistake.

  Like catching a phantom, my eyes struggle to follow as Dahlia pushes against my shoulder with one hand, using the other to drive a swift punch directly into my gut. The force of her fist nearly knocks the wind out of me despite the protection of the padding. But she isn’t done yet.

  Sweeping my legs from under me with the back of her leg, she uses my arm as a lever to send me crashing to the mat. The impact is so powerful, small specks of light swarm through my vision. Without a second breath, she delivers a swift kick to my ribs, followed by the sight of her above me with her elbow pulled back as a second punch plunges into the center of my chest.

  I. Can’t. Fucking. Breathe.

  “Again!” a heavily accented voice shouts, and Dahlia clasps my hand to help me pull myself to my feet.

  The entire room falls into complete silence when we resume our stances, with me stumbling to find my footing while my head swims.

  This time when the starting signal is given, Dahlia moves in for the first strike before I can think. With a crushing kick to my stomach, she jumps high and delivers a switch kick straight under my chin and takes me down for a second time in under two minutes.

  Everyone watching erupts in a painful “Oh!” and audible winces. Meanwhile, I remain plastered to the floor after having gotten my ass decimated by a woman who doesn’t look as though she weighs more than a buck twenty.

  Fucking hell, I can only imagine what kind of shape I’d been in without the gear safety. Pulling myself up into a sitting position and ignoring the smarting pain in my lower abdomen, I look at the source of my beatdown.

  A passing flash of a smile graces her full lips, revealing a small dimple in her cheek, and she crouches beside me. “Junior classes meet on Wednesdays at six p.m.”

  She rises to stand above me and regard me one final time before she turns and disappears into the back room. I’m left baffled as my jackass friends come up to huddle over me.

  Whatever it is they’re hollering, I don’t hear any of it. My eyes are glued to the short hall she’d walked into. Sure, I may have just received the most grueling beatdown I’ve ever experienced, but even more surprising is that I’ve never been more fucking turned on in my life.

  THE FIRST THING I DO when I get home that evening is call Lexi.

  She answers the phone with, “What’s the word, hummingbird?” Her voice is muffled, and I hear crunches in between her words.

  The girl is always eating something. Doesn’t matter where we are or what we’re doing, she’s either brought food or she buys something. We could be stranded in the middle of nowhere and somehow Lexi would sniff out the closest restaurant like a pig hunting for truffles. The ten minutes it takes me to explain the events of today from start to finish leaves me winded and the other end of the line silent. Lexi is never silent.

  “Hey, Dahly?” she says after a solid thirty seconds. “I’m going to pose a theory, and you might not like it.”

  My brows knit together as I pick at a loose thread in my bedding, almost certain I would not like her theory. “Okay . . .”

  “I think he’s into you.”

  Yep. That theory is trash. I hate it.

  My brain is still trying to process her words that feel like bile caught in my throat, as my heart leaps in my chest like it’s trying to escape the absurd thought. She must be delusional.

  “Hear me out for a sec . . .”
The end of her statement trails off as rustling is heard in the background.

  Hear her out? The notion that Zack Graves is into me is ludicrous. The only two times we’ve ever exchanged words were when I was scolding him or kicking the shit out of him. How the hell she managed to translate that into “he’s into you” is a logic only Lexi could wield. Not to mention he tried to hijack my school work.

  The rustling stops, and her voice comes loud and clear through my phone speaker. “If we consider all of these riveting new events, I think we may have misinterpreted the homework issue.”

  Great, the psychology major emerges. “How do you explain it then?”

  She huffs out a sigh. “From what I can gather, I think you may have sparked a little something with the phone rant a couple of weeks ago.”

  I yelled at him, he got pissed off, went for payback and failed, then he tried to confront me on my first day of instructing, where he also failed. Simple equation. What else is there to factor in?

  “Sparked what exactly?” I challenge.

  “As we’ve previously established, Zack Graves is a popular guy. You seem to be one of the only people on campus unaware and unaffected by that popularity.”

  “So what, I bruised his ego or something?”

  With a frustrated growl, she says, “No, you dingbat. Listen carefully.” She clears her throat. “Girls flock around him like the salmon of Capistrono.”

  I can’t contain a laugh at the Dumb and Dumber quote. Back when we were roommates, our love of the movie and all things Jim Carrey was what initiated our bond.

  “You’re a girl who is not only clueless about who he is, and therefore doesn’t get blinded by his hockey fame, but you flipped your lid and threatened his phone without the notion of trying to get in the sack with him. You are a challenge for this game player, Dahlia.”

  I think I’m starting to catch on. “So because my intentions had nothing to do with sleeping with him, he walked into Christos’s studio and willingly got his ass kicked?”

  This still seems ridiculous. I’ve been with guys before—it may have been a while, but I’m not so out of practice that I can’t recognize when a guy is trying to hit on me—and not one of them came within a foot of me if I was angry. Either Zack is craftier than most or he has some masochist fetish.

  Tittering, she responds with, “I still can’t believe that actually happened.”

  Neither can I. By the time I walked back into the main room, I felt bad for the guy. Funnily enough, I left the studio with some respect for him. His friends were egging him on about something and Zack was clearly hesitant, but still, he walked up in front of an entire group of people—some of which happen to be students at our school—and his friends and put his ass on the line. Both figuratively and literally.

  I’m not sure how many grown men would risk having a reputation of getting beaten up by a girl. Sure, I’m a girl with eleven years of MMA training under her belt, but I’m still a girl. And because sexism sadly exists in our culture, the entire thing makes him a prime subject for ridicule.

  As if reading my thoughts, Lexi says, “Trust me, no guy, especially one with a reputation like Zack’s, walks into an MMA joint and has a girl beat the living daylights out of him without a pressing reason.”

  She may be on to something, but I’m still skeptical. “Who knows what his true motives were, but if you’re right and he is into me, then he’s clearly masochistic.”

  “Oooh, now that’s an interesting thought. Zack tied up to the bedpost, those abs of steel splayed out before you while you whip—”

  “Lexi!” I squeal.

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “Even you have to admit that man is one fine male specimen.”

  Glimpses of his features emerge in my mind. Coffee-brown hair, cut short and haphazardly styled as if he doesn’t give a damn. Bold brows shaped perfectly straight over deep-set denim-blue eyes. He wasn’t clean-shaven, and as I recall from the times I’ve seen him in class, he prefers to keep a little scruff. And from what I’ve seen of his body, he’s chiseled. Not bulky or lean, but somewhere in the middle, where you know he’s an athlete with countless hours of gym time and practice under his belt.

  All right, I admit it. Zack Graves is hot. Not that I would ever voice that aloud to Lexi. She’d never let me hear the end of it and would gloat about how right she was for a week.

  “He is all right,” I finally respond. And that’s as close to an admission as she’s going to get.

  AS I SWIPE MY HAND over the condensation-covered mirror, my gaze drifts to the two bruises marring my stomach, as well as the one on my ribcage. Blackish-purple and tender to the touch. Initially I’d thought all the safety gear was a joke, but fuck me, some of the hits Dahlia dealt me made getting barreled into by a two-hundred-pound hockey player feel like a tropical breeze.

  The walk home with the guys yesterday was blissfully silent. I managed to keep my composure, even though I swear I was seeing double for a little while.

  When we made it back to the apartment Keith and I share, Dave whipped out his cell the second his ass hit the couch and loaded the video he’d taken. Even I sat down to watch. I couldn’t resist the urge. Not to watch me get my ass beat—no, the bruises were enough of a reminder that my stupidity knows no bounds. I watched to see Dahlia. To see if she was as graceful from an outsider’s perspective as I’d imagined she was. And I was right.

  She was fucking magnificent. Power radiated from the top of her head all the way down to her dainty toes coated in ruby-red nail polish. Lithe and self-assured, Dahlia was clearly a woman who owned who she was.

  All of the girls I know are as malleable as fucking Play-Doh. I say, “Jump,” they say, “How far?” and I fucking hate that. They cheapen themselves. As though they’re nothing more than sand beneath my shoes. Makes me feel like a fucking jackass.

  They don’t want me. They want Zack fucking Graves, center for one of the best college hockey teams in the country. All so they could walk back to their dorms with smeared mascara and a missing pair of panties and brag to their insipid fucking friends about their time with me. They use me as much as I use them.

  “Don’t invest in someone who isn’t invested in you.”

  That’s what my mom said to me after I brought home my first girlfriend, Mindy. The first time she came over for dinner with my family, she sat there smacking her gum and yapping on about how some other girl in our class had dared to buy the same designer jeans as her. After seeing the disapproving look in my mother’s eyes, I broke up with Mindy the next day. If my mom could’ve seen me in my freshman year of college, she’d have dragged my ass home by my earlobe and given me the cuss-out of a lifetime.

  What would my mom say about Dahlia?

  It’s stupid to even pose the thought. Dahlia has made it more than clear that she hates my fucking guts. I have to assume it’s more than just the phone issue. She’s likely heard the rumors about me. Probably from her bubblegum-haired hippie friend.

  Some of those rumors are either exaggerated or entirely made up by girls who want to prove that it was somehow different with them. Some have even claimed I told them I loved them. Bull fucking shit. No amount of alcohol could cloud my brain enough to say those words. As if I need to say them to get a girl underneath me.

  Even at my wildest, I’ve never lured a girl into my bed under false pretense. I’m not that low. They all knew the score when my bedroom door shut, and anything to the contrary was entirely manifested in their own minds. Which is why I have girls like Christie to text when jacking off won’t cut it. Girls who enjoy using and being used.

  Which makes my fascination with Dahlia all the more confusing. Can’t say I’ve ever had a girl loathe me enough to kick the ever-loving shit outta me, but I’ve seen plenty of girls pass me in the hall with a sneer. Made no difference to me then. So why does it now?

  Whatever the case may be, if Dahlia thinks I’m going to run with my tail tucked between my legs, she’s in for one hell of a
blindside.

  MONDAYS. MOST PEOPLE CURSE THE word every Sunday night, dreading the sound of their alarm the next morning. Personally, I like Mondays. Brand new week, brand new start. A chance to leave the prior week in the past, no matter how bad it was. If people treated the beginning of the week the same way they treat January 1st, I fully believe they would have a more positive outlook on life. Then again, my general outlook on life can certainly be considered questionable at times. Sometimes even when you want to let go of the past, the past refuses to let go of you.

  After missing two weeks of class, I’m relieved to make my way toward criminal psychology. Thrilled to be anywhere except in bed, watching trash TV or the inside of a trash bucket.

  I’m terrible at sitting and doing nothing. I much prefer keeping busy, whether with school work or training. Christos always tells me that’s a result of my chaotic childhood. Whether it was scrounging for food or avoiding my mother and the numerous dirtbags she brought home, I was always doing something.

  I freeze when I step inside the doorway. Zack peers up at me with those deep, ocean-blue eyes from where he sits at his desk behind mine. It’s in that moment I realize that my memories of his features don’t hold a candle next the real thing. He is undoubtedly gorgeous. His posture exudes confidence, shoulders square and down, hands resting casually on his desk, but his eyes say something entirely different. Not of embarrassment or irritation, but … something else. Something I can’t quite pinpoint and I have a strong feeling it’s better if I don’t.

  Tearing my gaze from his, I move toward my desk and sit, continuing with my usual routine of setting down my textbook and opening my laptop. My skin prickles with awareness of him an arm’s length from me, and when goose bumps trickle down my arms and the back of my neck, I know he’s staring at my back. I feel him.

  Damn, I sorely underestimated his potency. For the first time, I only pay partial attention to Cormac’s lecture. My breathing is uneven, moving in short, forcibly controlled puffs of air. The heat filling my cheeks makes me burn. I feel . . . restless. What the hell is happening?