Against the Ropes (6 page)

“The reason I went to prison.”

She stayed silent.

“I was drunk.”

“And that gives you an excuse to beat someone half to death?”

He shook his head and looked out over the small yard. The grass was a thick, green rug and the large orange trees against the back brick wall provided some shade, but more importantly, privacy from the neighbors, not to mention fresh fruit.

“No, not at all.”

“So?”

Dylan shrugged, his shoulder numb from the frozen peas. “So, my buddy and I were on our way home for the night. There were these two guys in the parking lot of the bar hassling this blonde woman that looked a lot like you from the back,” he said, not meeting her intense gaze. “Somewhere in my mind I knew it wasn’t you, but in my drunken haze, I thought it was.”

He looked over to the orange tree and noted that the fruit would be ripe soon, which meant fresh-squeezed orange juice. “They had her bent over the hood of a car and were pretending to screw her, but they weren’t. She was crying, they were sure laughing, and it pissed me off thinking about someone doing that to you, or to anyone for that matter. So I went over there, pulled them off her and beat the shit out of them.”

Dylan turned to look at Regan. She stared at him intently, but said nothing.

“The cops came, I fought them off, and they finally wrestled me into the car. The rest is history.”

“How long were you in prison?”

“Just shy of two years. With me fighting off the cops, they got me for aggravated assault. I would probably have gotten longer except the woman testified in my defense and said that she had been afraid they were going to rape her, and she didn’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t shown up.”

She studied his face for a moment and then asked, “Was it horrible?”

Dylan couldn’t help but smile. He’d gotten respect in prison, simply because of whom he was. His reputation meant that he hadn’t been targeted for anything, but that didn’t mean that it was a walk in the park, either. The days seemed to stretch on forever, and the nights were never quiet. He kept to himself, did what he was told, and looked forward to his time in the sunshine every day. “It was worse than I would have imagined. Remember that show where they took stupid kids into prisons, pretended to lock them up and had the inmates yell at them and tell them how miserable their lives were? I think it was called
Scared Straight
?”

She nodded.

“That’s me.”

“When did you get out?”

“Almost a year ago.”

Regan looked him over a beat longer and then looked around the yard as if she were surprised by where she was. She gathered up her notebook and stood. “Thanks for telling me, Dylan. I hope you do get your life back together and you can have the future you want.”

With that, she went into the house.

The one thing prison had taught him was that he needed to get his shit together. If partying and wallowing in self-pity were it, then he was in for a world of hurt. Or, he could get up from the mats, dust himself off, and get back on a stable path.

He had chosen to move on, and the fight the other night was the first step down the right path.

However, a new component of his plan had taken root, and was growing at a fast pace. He wanted Regan in his future and he had thirty days to convince her that he had changed. Long gone was the young, cocky jerk who had the world at his feet. Dylan was now a man with purpose, honor, and integrity.

He just needed to prove that to Regan.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As Regan ran down the tree-lined streets past the middle-class cookie-cutter houses, the pounding of her running shoes against the pavement was keeping time with the beat of music blasting in her ears.

It was white noise—it was there but in the background to her thoughts.

What Dylan had told her about going to prison played over and over. Regan was happy that he had helped that woman, but what bothered her was that he said that the woman reminded him of her.

It would have been about two years after she left that he went to prison, and it sounded like she was still forefront in his mind back then. How could that be when he’d broken her heart not once, but twice beforehand? She would have thought he had moved on because it certainly seemed like it that day she had gone to the gym.

She’d walked through the door hoping that things could possibly be worked out between them, but Lila’s presence and possessiveness had put an end to that. The girl had practically peed on Dylan to mark him as hers. And her little quip about being his girlfriend the night before had sealed the coffin on their relationship. At that point, she was certain that Dylan had moved on and she was but a distant memory.

Perhaps she was wrong.

But if that were the case, why had he cheated to begin with?

She’d tossed this question around for hours, if not days upon days in the past five years. Why had Dylan cheated on her to begin with? What was she lacking that he needed? And were there others? Was it something he did on a frequent basis, and he had just gotten caught that one night?

Regan couldn’t see how it could have been a regular thing for him because they spent so much time together, unless he was doing it in the middle of the afternoon while she was at work. But even that didn’t really make sense since his days were generally spent training with Max.

Or so she had been told.

Spending time with Dylan these past couple of days had brought back the same old feelings. Her body warmed as she worked on his shoulder, and her heart melted when he smiled at her. Talking between them had been stilted, but it was getting easier.

Nothing could happen, she decided as she picked up the pace. It couldn’t. She needed to protect herself from Dylan, and she didn’t need to know the why’s of what happened in the past.  She just needed to focus on getting his shoulder in the best shape possible, and then move on with her own plans for the future.

With that resolved, she turned around and headed back to the house.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Left, right, left,” Max said, holding up the mitts, and Dylan did what he was told.

“Jab, hook, duck, uppercut.”

Dylan got through the jab and hook just fine, it was the duck that didn’t compute and Max landed the mitt on Dylan’s cheek.

Thankfully, he hadn’t put much strength behind it.

They were out in the backyard, the spring sun warm against Dylan’s bare back. They’d been doing mitt work for an hour, and Dylan knew he still needed to complete his ab workout and then meet with Regan. No rest for the guy trying to make it to the pros.

It had been a week since Dylan told Regan about his prison time, and things had thawed a little bit each day between them, which only made him hotter. He was stroking himself off nightly now as he thought of her on the other side of the wall, curled up in bed. Perhaps it had been his imagination, but he thought he had caught her staring at him a time or two with that look in her eye that she used to get when she wanted him in the sack.

It was probably wishful thinking.

His shoulder actually felt a little better, which was surprising considering how long he’d been living with the pain. At the same time, it was expected as Regan had a magic about the way she manipulated the joint that seemed to bring out the best in it.

“You need to focus, boy,” Max said, hitting him upside the head with the mitt. “C’mon. You got ten minutes left of this, and then you move onto the abs.”

Bringing his attention back to Max and away from Regan, they completed the ten minutes without incident.

“Damn,” Max said, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “Get the ab workout done. I’m going to go to the store and then lay down for a while.”

Dylan wiped the sweat from his head with a towel. “You sure you’re okay, Max? You seem to be resting a lot lately. Maybe you need to see a doctor.”

At the sliding glass door, Max looked over his shoulder. “I’m old, Dylan. I don’t need no doctor to tell me that. Now get to those abs. I want to be able to bounce a quarter off them, you hear me?”

Dylan nodded, sat down at the picnic table and put his head in the towel. He just needed to rest for a few minutes, and then he could finish his workout. Even at twenty-seven, he could feel the difference in his body and stamina from when he was twenty-two. He couldn’t imagine what Max felt like at sixty-five.

He heard the door slide open and turned. Regan stood there in a pair of black leggings that hugged her slim, toned thighs and a black tank top. The blood in his body made a mad dash for his groin.

She came and sat down next to him and smiled. “So, I was just talking to Max before he left,” she said. There was a glint in her eye, and he knew from experience that usually meant she was going to say something he wasn’t going to like.

“And?”

“I asked him what he thought about you doing some yoga.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding me? Yoga? I’m a boxer, Regan, not some tree-hugging ballet dancer or cheerleader or some shit.”

Now, it was apparently Regan’s turn to roll her eyes. “There are a lot of athletes that participate in yoga, Dylan. They find it helps with their flexibility, which, by the way, you are sorely lacking.”

“It’s stretching, Regan.”

“It’s more than that.”

He had better things to do than yoga, for God’s sake. “No.”

“C’mon, Dylan. Give it a try for a couple of days. It’s going to help your shoulder.”

“No.”

She sighed. “Fine. Max said you have to do this.”

“He did not.”

“Yes, he did. I told you, I just talked to him about it and he thinks it’s a great idea.”

Fuck. He didn’t want to do it and was ready to fight it, but then he had an idea that bordered on brilliance. “You do it with me.”

She stared at him a moment, obviously surprise.

“You do it with me, or I’m not doing it.”

“Dylan—”

“That’s the deal, Regan. Take it or leave it.”

Regan’s eyes narrowed and she looked as though she were going to give him an earful.

Instead, she smiled. “Fine, Dylan. If that’s the way you want to play it, game on.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Regan bent back into Cobra position, feeling the wonderful curve in her spine and looked out the corner of her eye at Dylan.

They had moved the living room furniture around to make room for them both to fit in front of the television. Dylan was sweating profusely, breathing hard, and cursing under his breath.

“The spine is not meant to bend like this,” he muttered.

Regan said nothing, but inhaled deeply and moved into Cat-Cow as the woman on the TV told her to.

She had been wracking her brain the past couple of days on how to get Dylan to stretch more. As she suspected, his brawn was as flexible as stone, and as far as he was concerned, serious stretching was for “cheerleaders and ballet dancers,” as he so eloquently put it.

Exhaling, she rounded her spine and glanced over at Dylan again. He was going to be sore tomorrow.

The woman on the TV told them to move into Downward Dog, and Regan closed her eyes and pushed her butt up in the air feeling the stretch in her extended arms and down the back of her legs. It felt great. She thought this one may be tough on Dylan’s shoulder, and she looked over at him to see how he was doing. His arms and legs looked like bent sticks, and the sweat trickled off the tip of his nose. He cursed silently, and she burst out laughing and crumpled to the floor on her stomach.

“What’s so funny?” Dylan asked, coming down to his knees.

She rolled over to her back, still laughing. Regan knew she shouldn’t find Dylan’s attempt at yoga so funny, but she couldn’t help it. He looked ridiculous in his inflexibility.

“Nothing,” she said, trying to stop the giggles.

“Yes, there is.  What’s so funny, Regan?”

At that point, she had tears rolling down her face, and she realized how stressed she’d been. The laughter and tears were about so much more than Dylan looking silly trying to get into Downward Dog—it was a release of pent-up emotions. She wiped her eyes, and Dylan appeared above her, smiling. “Are you laughing at me?”

She shook her head, and the laughter started all over again.

“You
are
laughing at me!”

Dylan then tickled her ribs, which he knew from the past would send her into more fits of giggles. Despite being weak from laughter, she struggled against him, and he put his weight on her to keep her in place.

“Stop!” she yelled between gasps. “Please! Stop!”

After a moment, Dylan quit, and she finally got a hold of herself.

Their eyes locked, and her breath caught. It was then that she realized the intimacy of the situation. She was flat on her back and Dylan hovered above her. All he needed to do was lower his body to hers, and he would cover her like a blanket. Her body screamed yes, her head yelled no.

Something in her face must have said yes, because the next thing she knew, Dylan was on top of her, his mouth covering hers. It was as if her body had a mind of its own because it wasn’t listening to her head.

Her arms wrapped around his neck, pulling him closer. Her core became molten within seconds and her legs seemed to spread on their own accord.

Dylan gently stroked her neck, her shoulder, the side of her breast, and down her hip. He bent her leg up so that he could bury his arousal deeper between her legs, and she cursed the clothing that separated them. She felt as though she would weep with the desire that rolled through her.

His tongue founds hers, and he nipped her bottom lip. He kissed the side of her face, and down the column of her neck. Finding the hem of her tank top, he slowly lifted it, revealing that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Letting out a groan, his mouth quickly found her right nipple and shockwaves jolted through her body at the contact.

Good God. After everything this man had put her through, he still made her feel as though she would explode with his touch.