Fighting Hard (5 page)

“Jesus Christ. OK, I think we’re done anyway, right? You got enough?”

“I do.” Katie tossed her head. “
More
than enough from you, thanks.”

“Fine. It was very nice to meet you, Mia.” He turned to Katie. “You, not so much.”

“Ditto,” Katie said. “Thank you, Nick. It was a real pleasure to work with
you
.”

“You too.”

Adam glared and went back to the boxing ring. Katie stalked towards the gym entrance and Nick was surprised that she looked about two seconds away from tears.

“Um,” Mia said to Nick. “I guess we’ll have to finish the rest of your interview some other time…”

“I guess so.”

Their eyes met and they both started to laugh.

“Wow,” Nick said. “I’m assuming those two won’t be best friends, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Do you think Katie’s OK?” Nick asked. “She looked pretty shaken up.”

“Katie is – well, she needs to be in control. It’s important to her.”

“Yeah. And I guess Adam is a bit of an Alpha male, you know… he likes to be the one calling the shots.”

She glanced around at all the men hitting things. “I imagine this place is full of Alpha males, huh?”

“Sometimes.”

Their smiled at each other and Nick cleared his throat.

“OK, so. Do you want to come back here tomorrow for the interview? Or… maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe you want to come to my place tomorrow morning? For coffee?”

Mia looked up at him.
Is he asking me on kind of a date? Nah. I doubt it.

“Actually, Nick. I was thinking: maybe you could come to my place tomorrow night, for dinner. I’d like to thank you properly for what you did for me.”

“Mia. You don’t have to…”

“I know I don’t. I
want
to.” She smiled. “You like Thai food?”

“I do.”

“Well, I make a mean Pad Thai, if you’re not allergic to shrimp.”

“I’m not.” He swallowed. “That sounds good, Mia.”

“OK, so… dinner at my place? Seven-thirty or so?”

“Yeah. OK.”

She scribbled her address on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “So. Tomorrow.”

“Perfect. I’ll be there.”

Nick walked her to the door and she turned to him. “Bye, Nick.”

“Bye.”

She gave him a kiss on his cheek and it took everything he had not to turn his face to hers. He wanted nothing more than to kiss her and lick those gorgeous lips with his tongue. His skin tingled where her lips touched him, and his hands tingled where he touched her.

He watched her go to the car and he waved at Katie. He went back to the gym and went over to Adam.

“What the hell, man?”

“No kidding.” Adam shook his head. “Look, Mia is fantastic, one hundred percent. But that friend of hers? A bitch on wheels.”

“I wonder what she thinks about you.”

Adam glared. “I don’t give a good goddamn, Nick. I hope I never have to lay eyes on her ever again.”

Chapter Five

“So, wait. Nick is coming here tonight? For dinner?”

“Yeah.”

Maggie Branson turned to Katie, her green eyes sparkling. “Tell us the truth now:
exactly
how hot is this guy?”

Katie grinned. “Smoking. Like, crazy, insane hot. I have photographic evidence.”

“Show! Show!” Reena Mackay clamored from Mia’s kitchen. She added milk to her coffee and came back in to Mia’s bright living room.

Katie attached her camera to Mia’s laptop and the women gathered around to look at the photos. When Nick appeared on the screen, Mia felt lust and longing curling in her stomach.

“Wow,” Reena breathed. “He is amazing.”

“Ummm-hmmm.” Maggie blinked. “And you say that he took care of you?”

“Yeah,” Mia said. “He was a perfect gentleman.”

Three pairs of eyes stared at her.

“What?”

“Well, that’s a damn shame,” Maggie said. “I can tell you – the last thing I’d want
that
guy to be in bed is a gentleman.”

“Mia was hurt,” Reena objected. “If he’d taken advantage of her, we’d all be screaming for his blood right now.”

“That’s true,” Katie said. “But she’s not hurt now and he’ll be here tonight. I hope that he sees no need to be a gentleman anymore. Unless you
want
him to be?”

Mia was silent.

“Mia?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Maggie said.

“What’s that?”

She shrugged. “See him again with your head on straight. You’ll know what you want then. And if what you want is
him?
Honey, I say enjoy him.”

“Whoa, wait.” Reena was scrolling through the rest of the pictures. “Who is
this?
”

“Urgh,” Katie said rolling her eyes.

“‘Urgh'?" Maggie repeated.

“Yeah. That’s Adam.”

“Why ‘urgh’?” Reena said brushing her strawberry blonde hair out of her eyes. “The man is devastating. Look at that muscle! And that ferocious glare! He makes me all shivery.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“He is
not
,” Mia said. “He's very nice, actually. Smart and funny and ambitious, too. But he and Katie had some… ummm… creative differences.”

Maggie and Reena looked at Katie.

“Ah,” Reena said.

“Yeah. He’s an asshole.” Katie looked at the photos. “But the pictures turned out great. His body is a dream to photograph – look at those muscles and angles and tattoos. Amazing.”

She saw that they were looking at her with knowing smiles on their faces.

“Shut up,” Katie said to them.

“We didn’t say a word,” Maggie protested.

“You did too. I can
hear
you.”

She glared at them and they kept smirking. After a few seconds, all four of them burst in to laughter.

**

Nick knocked on Mia’s door. He felt incredibly nervous.

When was the last time that I actually went to a woman’s place when I hadn’t picked her up at The Cave? And when she was sober?

She opened the door and a delicious smell rushed out to greet him.

“Hi.” Mia reminded herself again to stay cool but that tight white t-shirt and casual jean jacket he had on were not helping matters. “Come on in.”

“Thanks.”

He stepped in to her place and felt like he was surrounded by warmth and calm. Her apartment was bigger than his and was bursting with life and color. He looked around and immediately felt like he knew her; it felt like her arms were just wide open, welcoming him to her space.

Nick handed her a bottle of wine. “I know you don’t drink much, but I thought maybe you’d have one glass with dinner. I hope white is OK?”

“Thank you. It’s perfect with noodles and shrimp,” she said. “Put your jacket on the chair and sit down and I’ll be right with you. I just need to do one thing in the kitchen.”

“OK.”

He wandered in to the open-plan living room but he didn’t sit. He gazed around the room, taking in everything he could. Photos of Mia in what looked like India and Thailand and China. Mia with her parents, he guessed. Hand-painted boxes and lots of paintings, brightly-colored throw cushions and shelf after shelf of books. He spotted her name on some of the spines and he pulled one out.

Mia came in to the room now with two glasses of wine. “It’ll be about three more minutes.”

“You wrote this book?” he said.

“Yeah. That’s one of mine.” She handed him his wine.

“Thanks.” He glanced down at the title. “It’s about arranged marriage in India.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the others. “This one’s about – what? Acid throwing? Burned women in Cambodia?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And this last one?”

“Sex trafficking in Thailand.”

“So when you said that you travelled to Asia and wrote about sociological studies…”

“I meant that I do on-the-ground research and write about the exploitation of women.”

“But isn’t that incredibly dangerous? I mean, these people in the sex trade especially wouldn’t appreciate having somebody poking around and asking questions.”

“Well, I never go alone… I always work with local organizations who are looking to bust up sex rings and save abused women.”

Nick stared at Mia as she stood there in a simple, pretty dress and bare feet, her hair shining. He was astounded at this side of her; her sweetness had an edge, it seemed, and he saw a toughness in her that surprised and impressed him.

“Besides,” Mia continued. “What
you
do is dangerous too, you know.”

He blinked. “Me?”

“Sure. You go in to situations where you just
know
that somebody is trying to beat the life out of you… Adam does, too. I mean, in your job and when you compete, people are trying to hurt you – that’s the whole point, isn’t it? That’s how you win? By beating someone else, quite literally?”

“Well, yeah.” He grinned. “I guess you can see karate and boxing that way. But they’re also disciplines. They’re about training and pushing yourself and getting stronger, faster, better. And ultimately, they’re about learning to control the power you have – having the strength of mind to
not
do others harm, even if you can.”

“So, you’d say that the benefits are worth all the risks of being hurt?”

“Absolutely.”

Mia smiled up at him, her eyes golden and bright. “I’d say the same thing about my work. It’s worth every one of the risks.”

Nick wanted very much to kiss her right then but a beeper went off in the kitchen. He paused, cursing bad timing.

Mia gestured at the table. “Sit down, OK? Let’s eat.”

**

“OK, so.” Mia was trying very hard to focus on the last part of the interview, but it was a struggle. She looked over at Nick.

He was sitting there across from her, all sexy and gorgeous in the candlelight, his body strong and huge and so close to hers. He had charmed her within an inch of her life over dinner and she was seriously contemplating just throwing herself at him. Pride be damned.

“So.” Nick smiled, thinking that she looked like dessert to him. He had loved every second of the meal and that shocked him: he liked being with Mia, he liked talking to her and making her laugh. She was beautiful and smart and funny and sexy and he wanted her so badly.

“Right. Ummm.” Mia looked down at her notes. “The one thing we never talked about at the gym was how you got in to karate in the first place.”

He leaned back. “Yeah. That’s a bit of a story.”

“OK. I’m listening.”

Nick was quiet.

“Nick? Is something wrong?”

“It’s just – Adam is the only person who knows the real reason that I got in to karate. When anyone asks, I always say that I was drawn to the discipline, and that it’s an ancient art worthy of respect and reverence, and that it makes me strong physically and mentally. But none of that is true.”

Mia waited.

“The truth is… I got in to it for less-than-honorable reasons, at first. I got in to it for revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“Yeah. I was going to hurt some people very badly, and I wanted the satisfaction of doing it with my bare hands.”

The look on his face made Mia shiver.

“About twelve years ago, I had a girlfriend. Shelley. My high-school sweetheart, you know, and we had plans to leave our little hometown and start a new life together in a big city. We saved up some money and went to Dallas for a holiday, to check out the city and to see if we’d maybe want to move there. I was almost twenty-one years old and just dying to start my life, you know?”

She nodded.

“Anyway, we were walking down this one side-street in Dallas. Bad neighborhood, but we didn’t know. We were jumped and robbed. I got the crap beaten out of me and Shelley was pushed in to the street. A car ran her over.” He stopped as his throat closed up. “Shelley died.”

“Nick. Oh, my God.”

“I started to think: what if I’d been able to fight back? I mean, I was big and tough – I had played football all through high school and I was in great shape. But I had no idea how to fight… I had never even really punched anybody in my life. If I had learned, would Shelley still be alive? I was sure she would be.”

“Nick.” Mia was horrified. “Nick, you have no way of knowing that.”

“Maybe not. But I went back home determined to learn to fight. Karate felt right to me – the idea of being able to kill a man with a single blow to the throat appealed. So I started training and it turned out, I was good at it. I was also pretty driven. The guys who had killed Shelley would be out of jail in about six years, and I was going to be ready for them.”

“What were you going to do?”

Nick’s gray eyes were hard. “Beat them almost to death. Maybe even
to
death, if that felt right at the moment.”

Mia felt tears in her eyes. “Oh, Nick…”

“But the strangest thing happened as I advanced in karate: I started to learn about the awesome responsibility that comes with the power to hurt – even kill – someone else. I started to really think about how the strong have a duty to use their strength to protect the weak, not to hurt them. And after more than five years of intensive training from a very good teacher – a teacher who didn’t neglect the self-control part of karate – it turned out, I was almost always the strongest and deadliest person in the room. That made me responsible for others. That meant I had to take care of people who couldn’t do what I could.”

She nodded.

“So, I let it go, Mia… all that anger at those guys and myself. But I didn’t let any other woman in. I haven’t, not since Shelley.” He flushed. “I’ve been – I’ve been a real asshole about women. Twelve years of one-night-stands and meaningless fucks and nameless sex.”

She was silent.

He met her eyes. “Does that disgust you, Mia?”

“No. No, I understand.”

“You do?”

“Yes. You were in pain, and people in pain do lots of things that aren’t really healthy or good for them… they really do their best to keep other people away.”

“But I want to change that now. With you.”

Mia’s heart started to pound so hard she was sure he could hear it.

“I had to be absolutely sure, you see.” Nick stared at his hands. “I had to be sure that if a woman I cared about were in danger, I’d be able to protect her without hurting anyone else unnecessarily. And I know now that I can. You showed me that.”

“Me?”

“You’ve – I don’t know… you’ve slipped under my skin somehow, Mia, and I liked taking care of you the other night. You have this light that just shines and I want to keep that light safe. I want that more than anything.”

“You do?”

“Well, almost anything.” He stood up and walked towards her slowly, watching her. “What I want more than anything is this.”

He kneeled down in front of her, inserted himself between her legs, and gently took her face in his hands, avoiding the bruise on her cheek. Mia gasped, her whole body responding to his touch.

Nick leaned forward and kissed her. Mia closed her eyes as his tongue ran over her lips and then slipped inside her mouth. She moaned and opened her mouth to his, her hands clutching his t-shirt.

Her touch was like fire and Nick felt it even through his clothing. He wanted to be naked with her, right now. He wanted to be inside of her, those eyes gazing up at him as he nudged them both towards climax. He wanted everything.

OK, slow down. This isn’t a quick drunken fuck. No rush here, Spencer.

Nick pulled back for a second. “Is this OK, Mia?”

“Yes.” Her lips were soft and perfect and he wanted to taste them again. “It’s definitely OK.”

He ran his fingertip over her face, down her throat, stopped at the top of her dress. She shuddered as his fingers brushed her collarbone and he smiled. Her breath was coming faster now, and her breasts were rising and falling, just inches away from his hands. He moved his fingers lower, lower. Gently, he traced the outline of her nipple and she sucked in her breath.

He leaned in and kissed her again, his mouth hungrier and hotter. She responded fully, her body pressing forward, looking for his. When his hands covered her breasts and lifted their weight, when he massaged them and tweaked their peaks with his thumbs, she groaned. Every part of her felt loose and airy; she was floating and light and all she wanted was for him to keep touching her.

Mia’s hands started to run over his body now: they went to the bottom of his shirt and she lifted it up and over his head. When she saw that amazing chest again – broad and strong and muscular – her mouth went dry. She ran her fingers over it, felt his heartbeat. He closed his eyes, fighting to stay in control. Her touch was soft and sweet and shy, and he stayed still, letting her explore him.

He moved closer now and Mia’s legs tightened around him, her thighs pressing in to his hips. This kiss was wild and unabandoned and was all about sex. This kiss was the one that announced all of their intentions and desires and they broke apart, panting, knowing that this was what they both wanted.

Nick stood up and extended his hand. “Come on, babe. I want to take you to the bedroom.”