Wreck (Bareknuckle Boxing Brotherhood Book 2) (7 page)

“Did you actually hit her? Did you go to her house and beat her up?”

“No!”

“Then it doesn’t count.”

“That’s not true. If you sin in your thoughts, it’s the same as sinning with your body.”

“Wanting to hit someone and restraining yourself is not the same as punching their face in, no matter how religious you are. That’s like saying because I liked that Lexus in the mall parking lot and wanted to take it for a spin that I’m a thief. There’s a fundamental difference between thoughts and actions. Just like good intentions won’t save you, bad thoughts won’t send you straight to hell, Danny Boy,” Shea said, leaning forward with her hand on his knee for emphasis.

“Are you Catholic?”

“I’m not anything, really. I don’t know what I believe. But I believe in you.” Shea faltered, then threw her arms around his neck and held him close.

Kyle crushed her in his arms and squeezed his eyes tight shut, holding on to her like she was the only thing keeping him on his feet. “I think I should go,” Kyle said suddenly, pulling back from her.

He had been ten seconds away from peeling her clothes off and knocking over that stack of catalogs in a good cause. He stopped himself.
I don’t want to use her
, he thought.
I don’t want to be the guy who’s only out for a good time.
He stood up, trying to look at her shoulder, out the window behind her, or anywhere but at the crestfallen expression on her face.

“I can’t,” he said. “I mean, I
can
. But I don’t want to. Not like this,”

“You don’t want to? Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Maybe I think you deserve better. Maybe you’ll be better off.”

“What if I don’t
want
better? What if I want you?” Shea challenged.

“I’ll call you later, if you want,” he said, suddenly desperate to get out of her apartment and that laser-focused stare that was pinning him down. “I’m trying to be the kind of guy who doesn’t take advantage of nice girls, who doesn’t punch people all the time and get drunk in the middle of the day.”

“I’m not asking you to reform, Danny Boy. I was hoping for—” She finally stopped. He almost heard the click as she turned off, gave up, shook her head, and wrote him off.

“Bye,” he said with a halfhearted wave.

He went down to the fight school and worked out until his mind finally blanked and he could relax. It took a lot of hits to the heavy bag, a lot of pullups, and hours on the used treadmill they’d bought. He went upstairs, dead tired and numb, and went to sleep without even a shower. In his dreams, all he heard was
dangerous
with every footfall, as he ran down endless white hallways that looped in on themselves with no escape.

Shea was too miserable even to call Zoe and complain that Kyle had rejected her. The story was too mixed up in the fact that he had a secret daughter and still fought on the sly. It made her feel unspeakably tired just to think of having to tell the story and omit just the right parts to protect his privacy. So she settled for a box of caramel popcorn and a couple of hours of bad reality TV. She fell asleep, sad and sticky, on her couch and woke up when her phone beeped around two in the morning.

I hate how we left things. RU busy?

Yeah, SLEEPING. It’s two,
she replied.

Can I buy u a drink?

Maybe in 18 hr or so. Good nite.

She dropped the phone back on the table, stretched, and got up to take a shower. She was clean and keyed up, and annoyed that he was out drinking and probably being mobbed by hot blondes who partied at night, instead of gorging on caramel corn and
the Real Housewives of Idaho
, or whatever she’d been watching. After the way he’d acted that afternoon, he had no right to text her, much less suggest a drink and a booty call, when he’d blown her off just hours ago. Her stomach twisted at the thought of him drunk and alone, falling prey to other, more persistent women.

This was way too complicated and frustrating to be the fling she’d hoped for when she went to that first class. She’d wanted to lick his tattoo, straddle him, and ride to oblivion, then part as friends and go on with her life, fully satisfied and completely free. She never wanted to know his secrets or help him navigate the troubles of new fatherhood and a vengeful ex. It was too real to be fun. If she could just get in his pants and get him out of her system, she could disentangle herself from this messy involvement and move on. She knew she should forget him, that he was more trouble than she needed, and he’d made his lack of interest clear when he was sober. She couldn’t let him go. It was as ugly and simple as that—she wanted him, and she couldn’t stop until she had him.

The fact that she was very inconveniently in love with him would just have to go on the backburner for now. She’d deal with the broken heart after she’d shagged him and said goodbye.
Closure!
she thought triumphantly.
Screwing Kyle will give me closure, and then I can get over him!
With that strange rationalization, she went happily back to sleep.

After slogging through a twelve-hour shift with back to back appendectomies and an emergency ruptured spleen, she took two showers before getting dressed and dragging home. It had been one of those days that left her feeling lifeless and sad. The last patient had died on the table. It didn’t happen very often at all, but this one was a young man, younger than her, and she had gone out into the waiting room with the surgeon to tell his wife what happened. Shea was usually pretty stoic, the sensible one, but she had sat beside that woman and cried with her until she was completely spent.

At her apartment, it had taken her trembling hands three tries to get the key in the lock. She sank onto the couch and shut her eyes, trying not to think of the man who’d died, of his wife going home alone, of Kyle. She had been hit so hard with the idea—what if it had been Kyle’s spleen? What if she herself had sat in the waiting area with an old Us Weekly waiting to hear he was out of surgery, only to be told he was gone? The unwelcome surge of empathy had left her sad and grouchy.

Her phone rang, and she saw his number, partly with relief because he was okay and partly with annoyance because he wasn’t hers, and she was in no mood for a booty call.

“Hi,” she said flatly.

“I remembered you were getting off work at seven, and I still want to buy you a drink.”

“How about you buy me a sandwich?”

“Hungry? I can fix that,” he said.

I bet you could, but you rejected me!
she thought.

“Okay. Pick me up in ten?”

“Fifteen,” he said, and hung up.

Shea bolted into the bathroom and layered on more eye makeup than she’d worn since the last time she was a bridesmaid. She found her push-up bra and wrestled into it, risking death by underwire puncture in the process. She pulled Zoe’s hot-girl boots out of her closet, offering up a silent prayer that Zoe would forget she had them, and pulled them on with what her friend had called the Easy Dress. It was electric blue and shorter than short, with loose cold-shoulder sleeves that made it seem slightly less revealing than it was, with its deep v-neck and high thigh hem. It was probably designed to be a shirt, she thought with a laugh as she tugged the snug fabric down over her hips. She slipped on long silver earrings and waited.

He showed up late. It was only a couple of minutes, but long enough to make her panic that he wasn’t coming at all. When he knocked, she let out a whoosh of breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in and opened the door.

“You’re a knockout, lass,” he said appreciatively, sweeping her with his eyes.

“Thanks,” she said, snagging her keys and following him out.

“Nice boots.”

“Thanks, they’re stolen.”

“Shoplifter?”

“Nah, they’re Zoe’s. So where are we going?”

“This bar I know with really good burgers.”

“You really know how to spoil a girl,” Shea said, exasperated.

“Too good to share a burger with me?”

“I want my own burger. I like to eat.”

“Then I think you’ll like this place,” he said.

In the car, he told her about getting a text from his daughter, about messaging with her online and finding out that she liked ‘old’ bands like the Backstreet Boys.

“Have you told Aaron yet?”

“No.”

“When are you going to?”

“I don’t know. I kind of thought I’d have a burger, Shea,” he said, trying to joke with her.

After that they were quiet until they reached the bar. She had overdressed for the venue, but she decided to go with the flow. Shea ordered a bacon burger with onion rings.

“An excellent choice,” he said. “I’ll have the same,”

“They have good club soda,” she remarked. “I have an early shift, so I can’t get wasted. But feel free to go ahead without me.”

“Nah, I’m fine with this.” He indicated his beer. “I just look around this place, and I mean, I love this place, but it’s a dive. I could never take Olive here. I can’t take her anyplace I go except the defense school. My life isn’t fit for a kid. It’s like none of the things I do are good enough.”

“The things you do are fine. They’re just not child-friendly,” she said.

“Yeah, but do you see me going to some water park or cheering at a soccer game? Is that who I’m going to become?”

“There’s nothing wrong with going to the kid’s soccer games, and there’s nothing wrong with skipping them. It’s up to you.”

“There’s just been so much change in my life. First I gave up fighting—”
“Eeeeh!” She made a siren noise. “Judge’s ruling is, NO you did not give up fighting!”

“Okay, I pretended to give up fighting and started the school with Aaron. I live with him and his girlfriend. My mom’s health is so much better. I mean, she was on the road to ruin, and now she’s got the new kidney and we’re aces. And then this kid and dealing with Ashley. I don’t know how to make it all work.”

“I think you have to make it up as you go along. That’s what most people do,”

“Yeah, but how?” He placed his hands palms up on the table, as if waiting for an answer to fall into them.

“I don’t know, Kyle. Do you, like, have a priest or anything you could talk to? I know this is confusing and hard for you, but I’m not your confessor or your therapist. I don’t know what I am, but I’d like to see your A-game.”

“My what?”

“Your A-game. The way you’d treat a girl who wasn’t the repository for all your worldly secrets? I’ve seen the defeated boxer and the insecure dad. I wouldn’t mind meeting the fun hot guy.”

“How am I not the fun hot guy? You think talking about my mom’s kidney disease and my ex-girlfriend isn’t fun?” he challenged. “You don’t know how to have a good time.”

When she rested her elbow on the table, it came back sticky, so she kept her arms off the surface. She twisted the paper wrapper from her straw and flicked it at Kyle. “Entertain me,” she said cheekily.

“Well, I thought the bit about the Backstreet Boys was pretty entertaining.”

“It was, but it’s about your kid. I like your kid, and I’m weirdly honored to be the first one you told about her—”

“I’m making you uncomfortable.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s that I had a shit day, and this guy died on the operating table, and I was hoping that going out with you might cheer me up.”

“Oh, shit, lass, I didn’t know. Let’s see if I can muster some charm.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

“I may need a bit of my meal to build my strength up for the project,” he teased.

“Ah, you’re so fragile and starved?” She surveyed his beefy, muscled form ironically.

“Let’s see…charming, fun…I know! I can tell you about the glory days. I came back from a run in with some illegal brass knuckles in the ring, fought in Vegas, and made the final round. My name trended in the top ten on Yahoo—for an hour and a half, I was ahead of Jennifer Lawrence in searches. Millions of people watched my fight on pay-per-view.”

“Including me.”

“You watched that?”

“Zoe told me to. I was checking out her boyfriend. Your fight was on first.”

“Couldn’t you have spared my pride and said you tuned in to watch me because I’m a legend?”

“She told me to watch, and I could see your brother’s cross tattoo. I had it on mute. I was shopping online and glancing up to see if the tattoo was on.”

“You’re terrible. It’s impossible to charm you if tales of athletic glory don’t move you.”

“You lost. It’s not glory if you lose. Unless you’re Stallone in that movie you hate, that I’m not supposed to mention.”

“Ugh.” He took a drink of beer, as if to wash away the mere thought.

“It isn’t my fault I’ve only seen you lose,” she shrugged.

“Goddamn, Shea,” he said, setting down his beer hard enough that it sloshed, “give me a fucking break.”

She narrowed her eyes and studied him closely. There were lines around his mouth she hadn’t seen a week ago, a frown almost of disbelief, when he had seemed such a typically sunny guy.

“Was that harsh?”

“Most of what you come out with is harsh. That was worse. I mean, when Ashley called me a loser, it gutted me because she has my kid and that’s what she believes. But you…I guess I thought you liked me a little.” Kyle looked almost impossibly boyish, disappointed when he raised those blue eyes to meet hers.

“I’m sorry, Kyle. You’re right. That was a nasty thing to say, and I do like you. I guess, I don’t know, I’m a smartass. It’s not an excuse. It’s just a habit. I’ll try to be—more careful with you,” she said, looking down at her burger, abashed.

“I was thinking you might try to flatter me a bit. Say something about my deltoids, or how my class inspired you to kick the crap out of some jerk in the parking lot.”

“I thought since I compared you to barbecue chips that time that we were all stocked up on compliments,” she said. “But I’ll give you this—you know where to find good onion rings,”

“Thanks,” he said.

“So, I’m still waiting to be entertained.”

“I had a student the other day who asked me to tie her up. She said it was so I could teach the class how to escape from ropes and zip ties and stuff, but she pulled out a scarf for me to tie her up with, and I’m thinking she just wanted me to tie her up and—”

“Dismiss the rest of the class?” Shea suggested.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Do the women in your classes often sexually harass you?”

“Yeah. And don’t slut shame me, either. I’m not asking for it.”

“I’m not about to, Danny Boy. I’m just saying that the next time some girl tries to hit on you in class, maybe use her to demonstrate some painful self-defense move. Like kick her in the stomach.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Hurting the students is bad for business.”

“Okay, fine. Be a boy scout, but it’s not funny that they treat you like that.”

“I thought the thing where she wanted me to tie her up was pretty funny myself, but what’s really not funny is that we have to have a school to teach women how to fight off men. But that isn’t a
charming
topic. So maybe I should bring up bitch mittens again; you seemed to like that.”

Shea snorted her club soda, laughing, and had to wipe her face with a napkin. “Well timed, Dolan,” she conceded.

“Thanks.”

“Do you want that ranch dressing?”

“No, I’m a ketchup man.”

“Pass it over. I like ranch,” she said, displaying her empty condiment cup.

He handed over the dip, and she dunked an onion ring appreciatively, licking off a drip of dressing happily. He was eyeing her in a way that sent jolts of excitement through her. She dropped her onion ring.