Hawke: A Bad Boy Fighter Romance (With bonus book Sons of Flame MC) (6 page)

“But a rush? Danger? Excitement?” She dropped her eyes, pained. She looked back at me, waved her hand at my injuries. “This isn’t the only way, Jack.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “It’s just the only way I know.”

“What would be the harm in finding another way, then?”

“Why do you care?” I asked. I really wanted to know. Sure, she cared about everyone, that was who she was, it was written in her DNA probably. “I mean why do you care what I do? What’s it to you if I go back to the cage, or throw myself off this building? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“You told me,” she said. “I know who you are, Jack.”

Yeah, they always thought they did. “No,” I told her. “You don’t. You know about the fighting, you know I like it, but you don’t know everything. You don’t know what I’ve done, how I got to where I am now. You don’t know how many people I’ve sent here, to this place, and not just from the ring, lady. What do you think a cage fight is? It’s an interview. With people like Valentino, and worse. People who want things done to other people but don’t have the guts or the muscle or the know-how to do it themselves.

“Just stop, Naomi. Stop giving a shit about me. Get your rush somewhere else. I’m an animal. And I got an expiration date, get me?”

It all just came out at once. I wanted to fuck her—anyone would, unless he was blind—but I realized that a girl like her doesn’t settle for that. They got attached. She’d get attached, and she might as well get attached to a burning building, or a fuckin’ rabid bear. It’d end the same.

She just watched me. I wanted her to say something. Get angry, like she had before. I wanted her to spit in my face, tell me I was trash, and walk out; sign me over to somebody else. Go, good girl, before you get burned.

She didn’t go, though. She stood up, and put her hand on my shoulder. Different than before. Softer. It was warm, and made all the skin around it hot. “I care,” she said, “because no one who was a complete monster would say something like that.”

She took her hand away, and gathered her clip board to leave. It was that time. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Jack. Think about it, okay?”

After she was gone, I tried to put it all out of my mind. Go back to the cage, in my mind, and imagine my next fight; the unofficial kind, once I’d dragged Valentino’s ass in there with me, to show him how it’s really done.

But I couldn’t. The scene kept changing, and I kept imagining, just for a few seconds at a time, a different life.

Chapter 7

Jack

Naomi came back to me the next day, like clockwork as usual. In the hour leading up to it, I realized I was looking forward to seeing her again. Which is why I kept a straight face when she came in.

It had started to occur to me after she left the day before that I might have not read her quite right. Now, my battin’ average for reading women is pretty damn near perfect, and I thought I had at least one part of her down right—Naomi wanted me. That part was normal, almost a given, though. I mean, look at me.

But there was something else. She’d gotten softer with me, and at first I’d thought it was just her gettin’ used to my shit. That’s just Jack; he’s a sexy asshole, har har. But no. I’d seen her that first day, and read her right—she hated this job. She was tired of it, tired of life.

I don’t know shit about stuff like love and touchy-feely bullshit like that but I know enough about people to know that there are a few things in life that make the parts that are tiring feel not-so-bad. One of them is gettin’ the wrong idea about someone. Or the right idea, I guess; but it was never the right idea in my case.

So when she came in again, I’d made my decision. Hands off. Don’t give the poor girl the wrong idea. She was already invested, and it would just make things worse when I went back to my world and left her here in this one, where she could survive.

Don’t look at me like that. I’m an asshole, not a monster. Not really.

She noticed right away. “Two days in a row, and you’re quieter than before,” she said as she worked my shoulders. “Don’t tell me this is going to be a pattern. You’ll restore my faith in humanity.”

“Well, I’d hate to do that,” I said. “How about I screw it out of you after we’re done here?”

She choked, and I glanced up at her to see her eyes wide, her mouth open. She sighed, rolled her eyes at me. But… she was trying not to smile, again.

“You’re not gonna read me the riot act?” I asked.

“Would it do any good?”

I grunted, and held my breath for just the second it took me to remember I wasn’t supposed to as she dug her fingers into the muscles between my ribs and stretched my arm up. “Probably not. I’m an irredeemable manslut, after all.”

Naomi lowered my arm. And shook her head while she made notes on her chart.

“So,” I asked her, “am I fixed yet?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not really my job to fix you; more like, it’s my job to make sure you don’t break down right away when you walk out the door. Your range of motion has improved, though. You’re healing up, at least.”

“Cause for celebration,” I muttered. “You gonna get me a cake or somethin’?”

“No, Jack,” Naomi chuckled. “You don’t get a cake for getting better, you get quality of life. It’s priceless. Alright, we’re done with all that.”

It had gone quicker than before. I glanced at the clock. Still half an hour left. “Cuttin’ me short? What am I payin’ for in this joint?”

“No, no,” she said, “I mean we’re doing something new today. You’ve been in that bed too long, we need to start making sure you stay limber all around. Leg works from here on out, in addition to the other stuff, and I’m going to leave you with a few exercises to do on your own. It’s third phase stuff; you’re on your way out soon enough.”

“And out of your hair?” I asked.

She set her jaw, and swept that lock of hair behind her ear. “Well, that depends on whether you’ve given my suggestion from before any serious thought.”

“What suggestion was that?” I asked. The woman just didn’t stop, did she?

She didn’t believe I’d forgotten. Smart. “About rehousing to somewhere safe, Jack.” She sighed again, looked like she might say something else, but must’ve shelved it because she waved at the blanket and sheet over my legs and hips. “First part’s on the bed. You’ve got something on under there, I hope?”

“Do you?” I asked. I grinned, and slowly drew the coverings down.

Naomi watched my face, defiant and challenging for a good ten seconds, until at the last her eyes flickered down. I got a little triumphant tickle and chuckled at her.

I was in my boxers, of course. I had to walk back and forth to the bathroom and wasn’t about to do it bare-ass naked with a cougar like that Yvonne woman stalkin’ the hospital rooms lookin’ for a meal.

“God, you’re the worst,” Naomi groaned. “Kick them off, all the way down.”

I tucked my thumb under the band of my boxers.

“No, Jack,” Naomi said. She giggled. “The blankets, Romeo.”

I had to reorient myself. The plan was to discourage her, not make it worse, fuck-face. Come on, get your head in the game. Wait, no; out of the game.

Once my legs were out in the open, Naomi came to the bedside and dropped the rail on the side that was conveniently there to keep me from rolling out of it or something. She put her hands on my shin bone, and rolled my leg a little, looking for something; too tight, too loose, falling off. Some secret PT bullshit, she didn’t tell me.

She rolled my ankles, tugged on my leg, had me push against her hand with the ball of my foot, bend my knee, and then lift the whole leg and hold it there for several seconds. A lot like what I did with my arms when she worked those.

Each time she did, though, she touched me somewhere. Differently than before. First, when I’d seen her right after I came in, she’d been clinical, methodical, even rough. Not gonna lie, it hurt; but it was kinda hot, too.

She’d changed, though. A bit at a time, and now her fingers didn’t just rest lightly here or there; when they moved from one place to another her fingers trailed half the time and left tingling traces behind that snuck up the skin of my leg and made other things tingle. I kept up a mask of plain, stone-dead expressionless nothing on my face because every time she did it I wanted to grab her hand and put it somewhere else; somewhere I’d appreciate that touch a lot more.

Not that I had any doubts, but when she asked me to pull against her hands with my thigh, like I was closin’ my legs—which I thought was ironic—her lower hand was on my knee but the other was higher up, almost at the lower hem of my boxers.

I watched her hand. Maybe, I thought, she had just decided she wanted a bang. Free and clear, no strings. Maybe she was trying to tease me, turn the tables after I gave her a hard time early on. Maybe I was reading into all of it and way off base. I didn’t think so, though. Signals were signals; you didn’t see ‘em, you felt ‘em.

The way I saw it, there were two ways this went and they were both fine with me. Either I gave her what I was pretty sure she wanted, had a good time, and then that was the end of it; or I gave it a shot, she slapped me, I survived, and that was the end of it. Either way, nothing really changed, right?

I reached down and put my hand over hers, the one closest to where I was already starting to swell up, half-stocked just from having her hand so close.

Naomi froze just where she was, deer in the headlights still.

Naomi

“My legs’ll be fine,” Jack said. His hand was rough on mine, but hot. It was heavy, like it weighed as much as a brick, and though I’d touched his hands a dozen times now they felt suddenly different. Full of force, just barely contained.

My heart pounded behind my breasts and I couldn’t get enough air. I don’t know what I’d actually expected. I wasn’t trying to do anything, exactly, but… I’d let my hands do what they wanted, and I knew they wanted something.

“It’s my job,” I said. It came out a whisper.

Jack chuckled, a low, rumbling sound that was different than before. It was full of promises, and demands. “I been laid up longer than this. I know about atrophy, Naomi. Not worried.” He pulled my hand, and I was almost shocked that I let him. My fingers were under the edge of his boxers now, and close to something fiery and hot, maybe inches away.

Whatever he had hidden away under that thin cotton was waking up, getting bigger.

“Jack… I shouldn’t…”

“Shouldn’t isn’t ‘can’t’,” Jack said. “It isn’t ‘no’ either.”

I couldn’t quite speak. I looked up at him.

He was watching me, the hunger in his eyes plain, his lust unmasked. It made my stomach go into a free fall. I shouldn’t do this, some part of me said. I should stop it now. If someone walked in, if someone needed me, if, if, if… There were too many reason not to than I could have counted, not the least of which was that it might cost my job.

The list of reasons to let him keep going, to let him push me, to let him take what he’d been hinting at—no, not hinting; outright saying he wanted—was short but in blindingly large print.

My regular day? My every single day? Was soul sucking. Nothing happened. I hadn’t been on a date in six months, and before that it was one date with a guy Nic had set me up with who turned out to be another clean-cut douche bag with nothing interesting to say. Before that? Mike and his clockwork sex.

Maybe, if I just broke the rules once…

Jack could have been reading my mind. Somehow, I couldn’t quite convince myself he hadn’t because on every other count he’d seen into me, picked up on things I usually hid so well. Whether he did or not, he grunted as he sat up, slipped his free hand around the back of my neck, and slowly pulled us together.

My chest was heaving. Just that feeling of his hand there broke down some other layer of the wall inside me. I can give you excitement, it said. I can give you what you’re missing. Heady promises that made some long sleeping part of my nervous system wake up and take notice, and start working overtime to light up neglected parts of me that were suddenly hyper-aware of what was happening. I felt my nipples tighten against the inside of my bra as Jack’s lips hovered an inch from mine.

One more chance. I put whatever was left of my will power into it, tried to resuscitate the Me that I knew I was supposed to be. “This is a bad idea, Jack,” I said. Damnit, that’s not what I’d meant to say.

“You want me to stop, say so,” Jack growled; not angry. But predatory. A lion with a gazelle in its jaws already, offering it a way out.

If I said I wanted him, that I wanted to feel that coiled aggression inside him to come out, to loose itself into me, then I was something I couldn’t be; wasn’t allowed to be. If I said nothing, though…

Jack pulled me closer. I didn’t stop him; I didn’t let him. I just rode along, watching it from the backseat and wondering what would happen next.

His kiss pulled me front and center, back into myself. His lips were still swollen, a little, and rough from where the two or three splits he’d had were healing up. But they were a soft spot in the middle of his rough stubble that scratched my lips and made it all feel suddenly dangerous and forbidden. His tongue pressed through my closed lips, and the lightning it sparked in my mouth shot down through my body, burned me from the inside and brought a quiet moan from the depths of my throat.

I sucked his tongue, and bit his lower lip gently when he took it back, careful not to reopen the cuts but suddenly growing bolder, wondering what would happen if I did.

I didn’t find out. My hand moved under Jack’s as he guided it to his cock. He was hard, and it throbbed quietly with his heartbeat that seemed like it was beating as fast as mine. “You taste sweet,” he murmured in my mouth. “Soft hands. You like what I got there?”

Answering was out of the question. “Don’t talk,” I whispered instead. If anyone heard us…

Up until then, I hadn’t realized I’d made the decision.

My fingers curled around Jack’s rigid tool, filling my hand. God, it was big; bigger than Lance had been. How long since I’d had something like that inside me? What kind of life was I living that I couldn’t remember? I tugged at it, drawing the surprisingly smooth skin up around the head and twisting. He grunted in pleasure and surprise, and pulled back a bit to look at me.

“Get up here,” he said.

I did, drawn by some magnetic force that compelled my limbs. I glanced at the closed door to the room. No one had interrupted us before. What were the chances…?

Before I could properly weigh the risks, or convince myself to stop, I was straddling Jack’s hips. He slipped his hand down the front of my scrub pants at the same time he pulled me into another kiss, and at the moment he pressed his tongue between my lips again his fingers found my clit and did something, pinching and swirling, and I quaked inside, my thighs tensing against him. I gasped into his mouth and then cried out quietly.

“Keep quiet,” he said, his voice gruff, his breath hot on my mouth. “You’ll get us caught.”

“Jack,” I whispered, but couldn’t finish and forgot what I was going to say, fingers slipped inside me as his thumb started working the wet nub of me, and he silenced me with his mouth, pulling my head tight against his.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t stop. God, he knew his way around a clit. All I could do was pant against him, grinding my hips to drive his fingers deeper, and try to excite the rod under his boxers. He laughed at me, face to face, while he drove me wild, amused by the loss of control, or at winning. He’d told me before, hadn’t he? He always won.