On The Ropes (8 page)

Once the hateful, embarrassing words were out, I pushed past him and fumbled with the doorknob. But the bandage made me clumsy, and I didn’t get it open fast enough.

His hand came down above my head, holding the door closed. For a moment, he didn’t speak, and I stared at the peeling cream paint on the wood, trying not to react to his heavy, hard body pressing against my ass.

“Need me for what,
tesoro
?” he said against my hair, and goddamn him, I trembled. Like a fucking ring card girl who’d been granted a smile from her favorite fighter.

Like a foolish chick who was cruising for a bruising.

Or maybe a…pounding.

“I don’t know. Maybe a conversation? Would that be too much to ask for?”

“No, it wouldn’t be, if you didn’t fuck me with your eyes every time we spoke.” He trailed a finger along my curls. “Now that I’ve been inside you, that’s not fair.”

I nearly trembled again at inside you before I got a hold of myself. “You want to know what’s not fair? Having the kind of sex we did then walking away. That’s not fair.”

“So you want more.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t want more.”

I definitely didn’t say that
. I turned to face him in the small space he’d allotted for me between him and the door and slapped a hand on his chest. Luckily I picked the one without the Daffy Duck bandage on the pinkie.

I frowned at it. He’d picked out Daffy Duck?

“I can see how you’d be confused, with that other clean-cut young man in your life. I bet he doesn’t have any tattoos or a prison record. I bet he doesn’t fuck you so hard you need help getting into the shower either.” His mouth skimmed my hair, so quickly I didn’t register the gesture until his mouth again hovered near my ear. “Must be a real hard choice.”

He didn’t rock his hard dick into my pelvis when he said the words
hard choice
. Nah, not smooth enough for him. Instead he pulled his hips away, so that I throbbed to have that heat and pressure right back where I needed it.

The bastard.

“A prison record?” I bit my lip as I stared up at him. “For what?”

His mouth curved grimly. “Attempted murder.”

I gasped—I couldn’t help it. He simply reached up, closed my lips with his fingers and spoke against my ear.

“I bet that tight pussy got even hotter and wetter hearing that, didn’t it? You like danger. That’s why you like hanging around the club.”

It was an effort to find my voice, and once found, not to let it wobble. “I don’t hang around there. I have a job. I earn a living.”

“I told you I’d take care of that.”

“Yeah, why? So I can pay you back in a way you decree? Hell no. I won’t be beholden to anyone.”

That included my sister, and the money she wanted to use for my education. The dynamics were much different there of course, but I wanted to pave my own trail. I didn’t want to owe anyone anything.

“You’d rather tempt that danger, even when it hurt you the other night?”

“I’m fine.” I shoved at his shoulders, but he didn’t budge.

He had a prison record for attempted murder, and he was chastising me for courting danger? He hung around with men like Marco and the others, pretending he liked them when hatred gleamed in his eyes as it had the other night in the back room, and I was the foolish one?

Maybe so, but I wasn’t alone.

“You won’t be beholden to me. I’ll give you the check, and it’ll be yours to do with as you wish.”

“How can you have that much money to throw around? You don’t even have a real job. Unless being a thug counts as one.”

His eyes glinted in the near darkness. “You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t even believe you went to prison,” I continued, trying to brazen my way through. Maybe I’d find out something real. Maybe even something I could use to begin to put together the puzzle of Giovanni Costas. “I bet that’s a lie.”

“Oh, it’s no lie. I was booked on attempted murder in Las Vegas, June twenty-ninth, 2012. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Giovanni Vincente Costas. Age 19 at the time.” He stroked my cheek with the side of his thumb, another of those fleeting touches that made me yearn for so much more. “Scarcely older than you are now.”

“Did you do it?” I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

He didn’t answer for so long that my head started to pound with my trapped heartbeats. This close to him, there simply wasn’t enough air.

I’m sure he knew that. Exploited it like he’d exploited so much else.

The corner of his mouth curved. “Of course.”

A knock sounded on the door behind me and I jumped, colliding with his impossibly hard chest. He caught me and turned me toward the door, opening it without missing a beat.

My sister waited on the other side, her mouth set in its typical sour lemon lines. “You need help getting that bandage on, Costas?”

“Nope, Daffy’s all set.” I held up my hand as proof, amazed it didn’t shake.

I’d only just found out the guy I’d slept with three—
four
—times was a murderer.

D
inner was hell
.

With the way the evening had started, it wasn’t like I’d expected much. I’d walked in to blood, then Carly had fainted, and had awakened pissed and shaky. I never did well with shaky women. They made me react in one of two ways. Either I hovered too much, or I goaded them into being so annoyed at me that they forgot to be unsteady.

Carly usually seemed to bring out the second reaction.

I had no right to talk to her the way I had. Her boyfriend—or whatever he was—wasn’t my business. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and after what she’d been through the other night, I never should’ve stooped so low as to taunt her about being aroused by me. So what if she was? I didn’t want that. The timing was horrible, and I wanted her safe. Even if I was jealous as hell about that other fucker, and even if I couldn’t stop thinking about being inside her, her well-being had to be my first priority. No matter what.

Instead of ensuring she was doing okay after the trauma she’d suffered, I’d only ended up inflicting more by throwing out that attempted murder bullshit. It was all true, but context was important, and I’d deliberately left that part out. I’d hoped she would think the worst so she would steer clear of me…not look at me with that challenge in her eyes like she was even more intrigued.

Damn inexplicable woman.

Then we’d sat down to her delicious casserole and the salad Mia had massacred—Carly had been right to worry about her tomatoes, because Mia had just halved a bunch and thrown them in the bowl—and Carly had spent the entire meal whispering and giggling with Jenna, who was supposedly slightly older but seemed ridiculously young. Even worse than Carly.

I almost felt like I was tainting them by sitting at the same table. Carly, I wanted to taint, in spite of how hard I fought against my urges in that direction. Jenna, I wanted to lock up in a convent before some dickhead came along and killed that youthful joy in her big green eyes.

It was hard to focus on the rest of the dinner conversation when I was so busy trying to overhear what they were up to. They were plotting something, I just knew it. Girls that age were nothing but trouble.

Girls all ages, but that one especially.

“So, I guess now’s as good a time as any to spill the beans.” Fox shot me a glance. “I’m going to fight again. One night only. Against that fuckwit at the other end of the table.”

Silence reigned.

Predictably, Mia broke it first. “Say the fuck what?”

I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “It’s no big deal. Just like Fox said, one night rematch for our fight in January. Then he’ll go back into retirement with his pockets a little fuller and his chest a little more pumped up…if he kicks my ass as he claims he can.” Out of the side of my mouth, I added, “Doubtful.”

Mia glanced at Fox. “Since when do you want to fight again?”

He leaned back in his chair and hooked an arm around the back of it. We were all crowded around their small kitchen table, though luckily Mrs. Knox had been busy so there was one less person there than usual lately. But Jenna had taken up that room, and how with her incessant laughter with Carly.

Times like this I realized how very young she was. Not just chronologically, but in other ways too. I didn’t doubt she’d seen difficult things, some more difficult than even I could guess, but she was still a young girl in so many ways. And I wanted her to stay that way, not become a hardened shell of a person like me.

“I didn’t want to fight again,” Fox said finally, catching my eye. “You could say I was persuaded by very effective means.”

“What means?” Mia narrowed her eyes in my direction. “I knew you were up to something the last few months. Trying to make us think we were all buddies now, ingratiating yourself, dragging Tray into dangerous situations.”

She forgot to add getting her sister in trouble then fucking her senseless, but she didn’t know that part.

“Hold it there, fighter girl.” Fox no longer looked amused. “I’m not twelve, and he didn’t
drag
me into anything. And trust me when I say the terms he offered will benefit you too.” He gave her a thin smile. “Assuming you don’t nag me to death and make me not want to have sex with you again for the foreseeable future.”

“Ha. Like that’d happen.”

Coughing into my napkin, I glanced at Carly. And found she was staring at me openly, speculation written in every line of her beautiful face.

“There is no trick,” I said quietly, to her as much as Mia and Fox. More so, probably. “I have my reasons for wanting to have a rematch with Fox, but they aren’t sinister so much as self-serving. He stands to make a good amount from the bout, and the attention will—”

“Son, I told you once. I don’t give two fucks about attention. I’m happy slinging drinks, teaching people to fight and taking sports medicine classes. My glory days, such as they were, are over. And I’m glad.”

Mia speared a tomato chunk. “One night only.”

“One.” Fox leaned forward and grabbed her wrist across the table, halting her tomato’s progress on its way to her mouth. “I’m not asking permission. I’m happy to talk it out, but I’d assume you’d give me the same courtesy I gave you when you started fighting again.”

She inclined her chin at her bandaged arm. She’d broken it in her first fight back out of retirement while fighting Evie Pierce, a former hot shot from Europe who’d been sidelined after an injury herself. “Still not fighting yet.”

“Yeah, but that cast is coming off this week, and we both know then you’ll be back training full speed ahead. Hell, you’ve been doing leg work straight through.”

“Nothing is wrong with my legs.”

“No, and soon your arm will be back to full strength. And I’ll be outside the ring watching you fight, week after week. Because it’s what you want to do, and I support you. I may not always love the idea of it, but I’ll always love the idea of you doing what you need to do for yourself.”

S
he sighed
. “The fact that you’re such a good person is a constant trial to me, Trayherne.”

His only response was a grin.

“Guess the sex is back on again?” I forked up some of Carly’s casserole and caught her eye again, sharing a smile with her before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to. Being friendly with her was absolutely not part of the plan.

She needed to hate me, even if I kept finding ways to sabotage that at every turn.

“I still have questions, Costas. Like your self-serving reasons for staging a rematch with Tray, and if they have anything to do with your unsavory associates.”

“More soda, anyone?” Carly asked, jerking to her feet so fast that she nearly upended the white lace tablecloth she’d thrown on the table at the last minute before serving the meal.

“Your glass is almost full,” Mia pointed out.

“Yeah, but Jenna’s isn’t.” She grabbed Jenna’s half-full glass before Jenna could respond. “Anyone else need a refill?”

“I’m actually go—”

“Okay, everyone’s set then,” Carly said, speaking over Jenna and carrying her friend’s glass into the kitchen to “refill” it.

Guess she didn’t want to be around while I discussed my associates, unsavory or otherwise.

“If I fight Fox, I make money.” I relaxed in my chair and placed my fingers over the top of my own half-empty glass, in case Carly decided to offer me more refreshments as well. “Simple as that.”

I’d also get Marco and his band of merry men betting in huge amounts, and betting in huge amounts would be more likely to lure Roberto Andretti out of his hidey-hole. As would the supposed loyalty I’d proven the other night by being with Carly.

They figured she wouldn’t cry rape because of her stripping job—patently unfair or not, her character would be brought into question in court—and I wouldn’t, because I was over the rack if I wanted to be a man of honor in their organization. I was already bucking every established protocol that one family’s men didn’t cross into another, but I’d been very convincing when I’d told them I couldn’t stand my father. Because it wasn’t a lie.

He’d run my mother into the ground with that lifestyle and his loyalties, ones he’d claimed paled in comparison to his love for his wife. Bullshit. She’d hated every minute of worrying and knowing she might not see her friends again if they crossed some invisible line within the organization. And then she’d gotten sick, and I’d had to watch her shrivel away into a fragment of the warm, wonderful person she’d once been. And I put all of that at Vincente Costas’s doorstep.

Some days it was a toss-up which of the two men I hated more—Emilia’s father, or my own.

“It’s never simple with you.” Mia reached for the bread basket with warm Italian bread inside. Carly went all out for a meal, no doubt about it. My mother would’ve adored her. “And if you’re spending time with those men, either you’re lying to all of us about your intentions or you’re lying to them. There’s no way you can stand on both sides of that particular fence.”

“Mia,” Fox began.

“You damn well know I’m right. After what they wanted me to do—” She broke off, shook her head. Then she bit into her bread.

I leaned forward. “What did they want you to do?”

“Nothing.” She took a quick glance over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. “Just forget it.”

“One has nothing to do with the other,” Fox said.

“You don’t know that,” she said, and he quieted, because I suppose he didn’t.

Even though I had no idea what additional weight Marco and his men had put on Mia, she was right to assume the worst of me. I
was
the worst. I was doing the damnedest to become enmeshed with my enemy so I could end him.

Maybe that would mean ending myself. If so, it would all be worth it.

“You have no reason to trust me.”

“No, she doesn’t.” Carly returned to the table and set Jenna’s glass in front of her. “None of us do. Yet you keep sniffing around.”

“I wonder why that is,” Jenna muttered, stuffing a piece of bread in her mouth when Carly aimed a dark look her way.

“Fox is my friend. I take friendship very seriously.” The words were out before I had time to realize how fucking stupid I was being by wanting to convince them I wasn’t dangerous. Coming to dinner in the first place was the king of idiotic decisions. Why? Just so I could watch Carly?

Then she turned and sashayed out of the room with some excuse about “having homework” and I realized, that no, my most idiotic decision wasn’t coming to dinner to keep an eye on her. Nothing Carly did could be predicted from one moment to the next, and someone had to have her back. Since no one else at this table knew what she’d gotten herself into at the club—with the exception of maybe Jenna, who hadn’t given me one dirty look tonight, which made that possibility more unlikely—I had to be that person.

I had to be the one who simultaneously pushed her away, and pulled her back in by confusing her with my attention. All because I wanted to keep her alive.

My most idiotic decision was ever allowing her to follow me to the club last spring in the first place.