Entice (The Fighter Romance Series - Book #2) (5 page)

The anxiety returned all at once and I froze. I
wondered if I should just pretend that I wasn’t there. I wasn’t expecting
anyone…what if it was Mitch again? Could I even call the police? Would they
even help me? The intruder knocked again and I tried to walk quietly over to
the door to look out the peephole. Before I got there I heard, “Jessie! It’s
Paul.” I jumped at the sound of his voice before I processed that it was him.
This was getting a little bit ridiculous. I wasn’t even this paranoid when I
dated a drug dealer.

I went over and just to be sure, looked out the
peephole. It was definitely Paul. I pulled open the door. “Hey,” I said. He was
dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt that hugged his tatted
biceps nicely. I wondered if there was anything that he didn’t look good in. If
I recalled correctly, he also looked good in nothing. He was holding a bag in
one hand from a hardware store and a hammer and drill in the other. “What’s
up?”

He held up the bag and said, “I brought a chain lock
for your door. Is it okay if I put it on? I’ll feel a lot better. I don’t want
that asshole trying to muscle his way back in.”

I smiled and stepped back to let him in. It was nice
of him to worry about me. “Sure, thank you.”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Don’t thank me. None
of this is your fault. Thank you. I’m just so sorry about all of this.”

“It’s really fine. You can stop apologizing. I was
just going to fix myself some dinner. Are you hungry?”

“Always,” he said with a grin.

“Okay, I’m not sure what I have but I’ll find
something.”

I went out to the kitchen, stopping to look once
over my shoulder at him as he got ready to drill holes in the door for the
chain. God, he was hot, and now he had power tools as well. I forced myself to
tear my eyes away and go start on dinner.

I had some boneless chicken in the refrigerator. I
took it out and cut it into cubes. I was thinking about making it with rice and
vegetables, but then I thought about Paul’s upcoming fight and I was sure that
he needed his protein. I pulled out the peanut butter and made a spicy peanut
sauce that a friend of mine in college had showed me how to make. It was easy
and quick and packed with protein. I put the cubes of chicken on metal skewers
and put them in the oven while I made the sauce. I made the brown rice while
the chicken cooked, poured on the sauce and it was done. I fixed out plates and
carried them out to the dining room table. Paul was cleaning his mess up by the
front door and the shiny gold chain lock was in place.

“Good job!”

“Thanks,” he said. “That smells good.”

“It’s ready.” He went in the bathroom to wash up and
met me back at the table. Sitting down with him for dinner was a little weird
and uncomfortable at first, but eventually I asked him about fighting and the
conversation grew from there.

“So your match that I went to last week was the
first one I ever watched live. You’re good.”

He grinned. “Yes, I am.”

“Oh, and you’re modest too,” I said.

“There’s no room for modesty in fighting. When it
means the difference between getting your ass kicked or not, you have to know
that you’re good.”

“True story,” I said.

“So why have you never been to a match? Don’t you
train fighters all the time?”

“I train with some. I haven’t really been out of
school that long, so I can’t say all the time. But, it’s just the idea of
watching someone get beat up that bothers me.”

“Well, at least you’ll never see me get beat up,” he
said with another grin.

“It never happens?”

“Never…not anymore anyways.
I might not be able to take them down, but I do know how to protect myself.”

“That’s always a good thing,” I said. I was thinking
about Mitch now and hoping he could protect himself against an angry cop and
apparently jilted boyfriend.

“This is amazing by the way,” he said of the food.

“Thanks. I like to cook. It’s hard just cooking for
me. I haven’t had this peanut sauce in a while. I like it.”

“Me too,” he said, cleaning his plate.

“So this fight at the end of the week, this is a
pretty important one for you?”

“Yeah, really important.”
He didn’t even really have to speak; I could see it in his eyes. He genuinely
loved what he did, that was good…I guessed. It was strange to me to think about
being in love with fighting. “If I win this one I go up against the champion
next. Winning the championship gets me professional status…endorsements and the
whole bit. It’s what I’ve been working for all these years.”

“Then I’m glad I made you protein and not carbs,” I
said with a grin. I was also glad to hear he had goals and ambition. It was one
thing my ex was seriously lacking.

“So you just got out of college this last semester?”

“Yeah.
I graduated in June.”

“Good deal. I wish I
would have
gone sometimes. With fighting and Marie and Victor…things just got too out of
focus for a while. When I began really focusing again, I put all my energy into
winning this title. How was it, going to college? Did you live in the dorms or
a Sorority house or something?”

“No, I lived with my mom. I had to subsist mostly on
grants and loans so I couldn’t really afford school and room and board.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

I laughed. “You probably wouldn’t say that if you
knew my mom.”

He put his fork down and looked at me seriously.
“Relationships with parents can get really screwed up sometimes.”

“Yeah, tell me,” I said. “I’m not the best at
relationships in general. I studied really hard in college…I got straight A’s,
I worked out hard, I ate right. I was healthier physically than I’ve ever been
and I loved it. It was good for me.”

“But…?”

I laughed. “You heard that, huh?
Nothing
really.
It’s just that while I was pursuing my goals, I got a little off
track with trying to help others pursue theirs. The ‘but’ was a guy I met
during that time.”

“Uh oh,” he said with a smile.

“Uh oh is right. He was a mess and I thought that I
could ‘fix’ him.”

“He was unfixable?”

I laughed again, nervously. I didn’t usually talk
about Justin. It was one of those really low points in my life that I’d love to
forget. “Yeah, he was. It took me way too long to figure that out and when I
did, he didn’t want to go away easily. It’s true that you can’t change a
person. They have to be determined to do that for themselves.”

He was quiet for a few seconds and then he said,
“Can I ask what was wrong with him that you wanted to fix?”

This was the part that I hated telling him. What did
it say about me that I dated a drug dealer, and how did I tell someone I barely
knew that I’d met him through my mom? “Don’t judge me?”

“The day I am in a position to judge anyone,” he
said with another grin. “I won’t judge, I promise.”

“He was a drug dealer,” I said.

“Oh, yeah…definitely he had issues.”

Laughing, I said, “That sums it up, pretty much. The
lifestyle was unbelievable…Constantly partying and constantly paranoid and
worried about getting caught, running from the law. Me putting up with it for
two years even more unbelievable I guess. He was addicted to it. Not the drugs,
but the money, the power it gave him, the partying and having people calling
him at all hours of the day and night…even the adrenaline that came from worrying
about getting caught…all of it. I thought he loved me and me him. I finally had
to accept that he was a creep and I was a codependent, but I was too naïve to
realize it for a long time.”

“What did your mom think of him?” He of course would
think that my mother would have objected. Most mothers would have, but mine was
definitely not the norm.

“Oh God…I think that’s a story for another dinner,”
I told him. That would just be way too much disclosure. Telling a guy I was
just getting to know that my mother was an addict who encouraged me to date a
dealer…way too much information. Too much self-disclosure was not a good thing
sometimes.

“Okay,” he said. He stood up and picked up our
plates. “I’ll tell you a sad story while we clean up. It’s only fair.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“Tell the story?”

“Oh no, you owe me that,” I said with a laugh. “You
don’t have to clean up.”

He ignored me and took the plates to the kitchen. I
followed him and opened the dishwasher. While he rinsed, I loaded and he
talked.

“When I was sixteen I got into working out. I was
always looking for something…anything that made me feel…alive, I guess. My
sister was gone off with Mitch at that time and I was stuck at home. Our home
life left a lot to be desired. My father didn’t win any awards for his
parenting skills. He was a gambler first, before everything else. He gambled
everything he could get his hands on…even if he had to borrow it from dangerous
people to do it. I was going to the gym every day and running every evening. I
had a job after school and I used every penny I made to buy healthy food and
pay for work-outs and
jiu
jitsu
classes. Then one day right before my seventeenth birthday I came home to find
the old man beat to a bloody pulp on the doorstep.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yeah.
He borrowed money and he lost and lost and lost. He didn’t pay them back and by
then the interest was astronomical. He was crying…I’d never seen him cry. He
said they were going to kill him. I spent a lot of my life angry with him but I
didn’t want him killed, you know?”

“I do. More than you know,” I said with my mother in
mind.

“Anyways, I heard about this underground cage fight.
The first prize was fifteen grand but you had to be eighteen. I told the old
man about it and a light-bulb went on in his head. He somehow got me an ID that
said I was eighteen and entered me. I won and he took all the money.”

“Oh wow. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I didn’t care about the money. I’d
finally found something I was good at. It was something I knew I could get better
at. More than anything it gave me a purpose, something to look forward to.
That’s when I started fighting all the time. It gets in your blood.”

He stopped talking and all of a sudden, the room was
completely silent. He turned toward me and I knew he was going to kiss me and I
knew we would have sex. It was one of those moments…if I leaned in for the
kiss,
the wheels would be in motion. My body completely
overrode my brain and I just went with it.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Kissing him felt like…I didn’t even know what to
compare it to. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced. It was just so
good. I had to wonder how someone got so good at kissing. Was it experience?
Natural talent?
Did it really matter?

He put his hand on the side of my face and brushed
my hair back with his fingers. It tickled and I shuddered. Then he guided my
head and my lips where he wanted them. Once we were aligned, he attacked my
lips with his. A full-on assault with not just his lips but with his tongue
taking long, slow strokes into my mouth and his teeth nibbling on my lips…it
was so erotic that for a few seconds my mouth was the only part of my body that
mattered. But then I felt him pushing on my tank top and I remembered how badly
I wanted him to touch the rest of me too. We broke the kiss long enough for him
to push it off over my head and he resumed the kiss while his hands found my
breasts, cupping them tenderly at first and sending goose bumps racing down
both my arms. I was so into it that I barely registered when my bra was unhooked
and slipped off…until I felt the cool air on my hard nipples and he broke the
kiss again to lean down and take one into his mouth. Then the fireworks started
going off in my head.

He had the hard nipple of my right breast between
his lips and
he was flicking back and forth and up and down
with his sweet, wet tongue
. I threw my head back and he reached a hand
up while he sucked on the other nipple and pulled the elastic band off my
braid. He deftly unbraided my hair and sucked my nipples at the same time. He
definitely got points for coordination.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that
I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to get involved with this man…it was
a bad idea…right? I moaned as he sucked my right breast into his mouth. He kept
the suction going while his tongue continued to work the nipple…There was
nothing at all bad about what we were doing. It was all good. It was sex
between two consenting adults. Who the fuck cared about a relationship? I
could’ve lived on this alone. I felt him pushing down on my shorts, then, and I
helped him, wriggling free of the elastic band and then stepping out of them
when they hit the floor. I was still in my pink lacy thong, but that was it,
right there in the kitchen. He had pulled his mouth up off my nipple and was
looking at me like I was a steak and he was a lion. I was ready to be devoured.