Shadowboxer (25 page)

His eyebrow arched. “Am I supposed to be frightened?” He gave a mock shudder. “Honey, your boyfriend is the one who calculated and lost. I can’t be bought.”

Before I could dredge up a coherent response—what the hell was he talking about?—he started walking away.

“Wait
,” Carly called out.

He stilled, but he didn’t turn back. “What,
tesoro
?”

Tesoro
? I didn’t know what that meant, but it was probably an insult.

From Carly’s smile, he might as well have presented her with a bouquet of roses. “A real man doesn’t walk away from a lady until she’s done speaking.”

I rolled my eyes. Yeah, that would have a lot of effect with Mr. Machismo. I kept right on rolling them until he returned to us.

To Carly, I should say. He came to a halt in front of her and spoke quietly, without any of the conceit he’d employed with me. “What would you like to say?”

She blinked so fast I feared a seizure was imminent. Then she gestured to me. “Not me, my sister. She needs to talk to you.”

“Your sister.” He reached up to touch her hair and thought better of it when I cleared my throat. He let his hand drop. “How can this be?”

“She’s the sweet. I’m the spice,” I said. “Now quit trying to score and focus, loverboy.”

Giovanni didn’t shift his attention from my equally eye-smitten sister. “Why should I? What’s in it for me if I fight you?”

“A date with me,” Carly blurted.

“Sold.”

He didn’t even hesitate. The bastard.

For a second, no one spoke. I didn’t even breathe. Then I snatched Carly’s arm and dragged her against my side. “No way. She’s a minor.”

She shook me off. “For two more weeks. Jesus. Loosen the apron strings.”

“Two and a half weeks.”

“So we will have our date after the fight.” He gave me an innocent look that fooled no one—except maybe my gullible baby sister. “I will be a perfect gentleman.” Then he sneered for my benefit. “Outside of the ring, that is. Inside? You want a fight? I’ll give you one.”

“I’m truly honored.”
Asshole
.

“A fight like that should attract plenty of attention
,” he mused.

“Duh. Why do you think I’m doing it?”

“No damn clue.” He cracked his knuckles, still eyeing me up and down. “But if you choose to pretend you are a man, then I’m happy to oblige you.”

“Oh, you’ll oblige me, will you? I’ll be sure to—”

I broke off when Carly stepped forward and poked a finger in his chest. She was about a foot shorter than he was, but she didn’t shy away from his warning look.

“You, too,
tesoro
?” he asked, sounding tired.

“Don’t talk to my sister that way. She’s not pretending to be a man. Women fight. Is a man pretending to be a woman if he designs or cooks or creates?”

A hint of his cocky smile reappeared. “Well…”

“She could kick your ass.
I hope she does.”

“You haven’t seen me in the ring.” He flicked his finger down her bare arm. “Or elsewhere. As I have not yet seen you.”

Another sound rumbled from my chest, and this one bordered on a growl. “Enough. You’re fighting me, not fucking her, so cool it. I’ll buy you an extra bottle of lotion for your consolation prize after you lose.” I hit him hard in the stomach as I passed, grabbing my sister’s hand as I went. His surprised “oof” made me shoot my sister a triumphant grin. Pretending to be a man, my ass. “Let’s go, Carly. We’re done with him.”

“We made a deal,” he reminded me, idly rubbing his stomach.

The damn thing had felt like a brick. My knuckles already hurt.

“And I intend to collect on that date no matter w
hat, Anderson,” he called.

We walked out, Carly swaying her hips so hard I swore I heard her pelvis pop out of joint. She practically vibrated with excitement. Or lust.

Yeah, lust seemed to be the most likely contender.

“Are you cold? Do you need a sweater?” I whispered furiously, tugging her down the hall toward the locker room. “If you shake any more, I’m putting you in a strait jacket.”

“You got what you want,” she whispered back, her eyes aglow.

I hadn’t had much experience with the emotion I glimpsed in her eyes until two weeks ago, and I so didn’t like seeing it reflected back at me. Especially not due to Overcocked Costas.

“So, what? Now I’m supposed to let you get what you want?” I asked, hoping she would toss back a reassurance.

“Yeah, Ame, maybe you should. You don’t want to have a sex life? Good for you. But I do. And you’re not going to make me ashamed of it.” She slammed the locker room door shut in my face.

I leaned against the wall. Great. I was supposed to be basking in the thrill of my accomplishment in getting Costas to fight me. Instead I’d have to borrow Carly’s laptop so I could do a search for chastity belts.

The idea of her having sex didn’t bother
me. Much. We’d already covered that topic. I wanted her to have fun and enjoy her youth. But did she really have to go after a fighter? One that had busted Fox’s eye socket no less? That number on Giovanni’s stomach probably had to do with his number of sex partners or something. And he was older than she was. Not by much, but a few years was a lot with guys like Giovanni.

Plus, he spoke Italian and probably thought a date consisted of eating tiramisu off a woman’s thighs.

I didn’t know how I would renege on the agreement, but I would. I hadn’t made it anyway. It wasn’t binding, and besides, he hadn’t even named it as a condition of winning. He just had to show up for the fight and he got to take a big juicy bite out of my sister.

Why had I gotten myself into this mess again?

Tray’s smile flashed through my mind, and I rubbed my bleary eyes. Yeah. That was why.

I’d spent the last three days pacing and fretting every moment I wasn’t at work or at the gym. Last night I’d deliberately watched
Pretty Woman
so I had an excuse to bawl like a baby. Then I’d researched eye socket fractures and looked at videos until I wanted to cry for a different reason. He had surgery to look forward to, all because of me.

Sleep had been impossible. I missed him, and worse than that, I was still so fucking worried. Everything I’d read online had only increased my fears. What if he ended up blind from his injury or something equally awful? His beautiful eyes…God.

That wasn’t a likely consequence from the kind of damage he’d sustained. It still didn’t stop the crazy scenarios from spinning through my head at three a.m.

Fighting the guy who’d put him in that hospital bed was a crappy sort of penance, but it was all I had. I’d worry about the money I needed after that. And I wouldn’t think about the fact
that I was having trouble remembering that money had been my reason for setting up that fight with Fox in the first place.

Two weeks had changed so much.
I
had changed. That scared me most of all.

Aggravated and completely out of sorts—and not at all eager to talk to my sister—I typed a quick text to Kizzy.

You took Italian. What the f does tesoro mean?

A moment later, her answer appeared.

Treasure. Y?

Inside the locker room, I could hear Carly banging around like a crazy person. A crazy
pissed
person. I sighed and dropped my head against the wall as I formulated my response.

B/c I think my life just got a lot more complicated.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tray

I got sprung from the hospital on Monday. Halle-freaking-lujah. From there, I picked up my hefty prescription of anti-inflammatories and antibiotics and went home to Long Island with my parents and my dog. That lasted until approximately seven-eighteen a.m. on Friday, when my mother asked me for the fourth time when I would be contacting the admissions counselor at Yale. Then she proceeded to cut the crusts off my wheat toast.

One of those two things was the final straw.

By mid-morning, Vey and I were back home.
Home
home, in Brooklyn. I might’ve kissed the floor in my joy at being back in my own place if the dust wasn’t a concern. Sneezing with eye socket fractures—not so good, I’d discovered. Blowing my nose? Even worse. The pocket beneath my right eye tended to swell up like a balloon. And it hurt, a fucking lot.

So I sniffed pretty much constantly and spent plenty of time with my head back. I’d also taken to popping cold medicine about every eleven minutes.

Good times.

I lay
down on my couch with my dog at my feet and relished the faint smells of home through my plugged up nose. The dirty socks under the coffee table. The scent of dog. The lemon furniture polish.

Huh?

Propping myself on one elbow, I dragged a fingertip over the top of the coffee table. No dust. And my socks were gone.

What the fuck? Had my mom come here and cleaned when I’d been laid up? That didn’t seem like her. She had an army of maids, butlers
, and assorted house staff for a reason.

Ten reasons actually, and they were the claws she lovingly called fingernails. She wouldn’t risk them for such a menial task as polishing a table.

I dug my phone out of my jeans and called Slater.

He answered right away. “Yo. You home already?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Just called the Domicile of Doom and they said you were no longer ‘bedding’ there. I’m assuming you’re
bedding
at your place again? Or did you find somewhere else to go?”

I didn’t miss his implication. Nor did I respond to it. “I’m at my place in Brooklyn. Hey, did you clean my apartment?”

His guffaw answered my question. “Hell no. I barely clean mine, dude, and that’s only because clean sheets get me laid.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. You have live-in pussy now. Rub it in.” The hard-on I’d woken up with every morning in the hospital hadn’t helped my bitterness issues. Somehow it didn’t seem fair that even when I could barely string words together, my dick remembered Mia and everything we hadn’t finished in this very l
iving room a week ago.

Weeks had become lifetimes in my world.

Slater didn’t say anything for a minute or two. “Yep. All roses and rainbows up in here.” Before I could ask what was going on, he continued. “So, ah, I have news about your girl. You’re not going to like it.”

With just those few words, my eye started pounding. Stress wasn’t good for my injury, and I had to wait two more weeks to have my surge
ry. Supposedly I’d benefit from waiting for my cold to get better and for the eye swelling to subside as completely as possible, but I had my doubts.

“She set up
the fight with Costas.” I didn’t phrase it as a question because I already knew the answer.

“Yeah. She swapped it out with your fight and booked him instead.”

“Why did he agree? What the hell kind of man is he?” One that didn’t give a shit about gentlemanly ethics, that was for sure. Costas had built his reputation on getting down and dirty with anyone who asked. He was a talented fighter, I’d give him that. Mia ranked as a strong competitor against anyone, male or female, but I didn’t like how easily she had convinced him.

Maybe she’d used other ways to persuade him
…

As quickly as the sneaky thought arose, I shut it down. Nope, no way. This wasn’t about that. Whatever her reasons for wanting to fight Giovanni in my place, I didn’t believe she’d resort to anything shady to get him to agree to a bout. Didn’t want to believe it.

“I don’t know why he agreed, but he did. I was stuck pulling doubles for the last few nights. If I’d known she’d go right down there and corner him—”

“It’s not your fault. She’s a grown woman. She makes her own decisions.”

“Looks like the time you spent bare-assed helped you get your Zen back. I thought it was gone forever.”

“Yeah, well, dealing with my parents for the last week tested it, that’s for sure. But I’m trying to find some new perspective.” I
was
trying. Slater didn’t need to know I hadn’t succeeded yet. “I appreciate you calling them when I got hurt, man. Even if they drove me crazy.”

“I didn’t call them. Mia did. I told you when you first woke up, but you were still pretty out of it.”

I pushed a hand through my hair, grasping for the memory. “Yeah, that’s right. Sorry. Between the concussion, the eye thing, being dehydrated, and all the other crap they said I had wrong with me, they pumped me full of so many drugs and electrolytes it’s amazing I don’t glow in the dark. I still feel like ass.”

“An
d aww, you have a stuffy dose.”

I had to laugh at
his imitation of how I sounded. “She really called them?” Mia hid her uncertainty and anxiety behind bravado most of the time, but calling my folks out of the blue had to have been hard.

“She did. And she freaked out about getting to you after you were hurt. She held your head in the ring, man. Got your blood all over her and she wouldn’t wash it off.”

I nudged Vey from his sleeping position draped over my feet and swung my legs down so I could brace my elbows on my knees. I’d known I would have to see her soon, no matter how I tried to resist. Part of me had been relieved she hadn’t returned to the hospital, because that justified my desire to stay away. I didn’t mean to her what she’d come to mean to me in such a short amount of time. That was reality.

But
what Slater had said skewed that reality, turning it just enough to change the view entirely.

“Then there was your jacket,” Slater continued. “She demanded I get it dry cleaned before I came to the hospital then she took off running toward Brooklyn Presbyterian. I seriously thought she’d run all the way to you. She was like a woman possessed. Or a woman in—”

“No. Don’t go there.” It might be a joke to Slater, but my suddenly racing heart wasn’t fooling around.

I could pretend all I wanted that I could turn off my emotions. When she wasn’t near me, I could rationalize
this
—whatever it was—being about her hot as hell body and the fact that I’d never met a woman even a fraction as fierce. We had definite chemistry. If I was conscious, I was thinking about fucking Mia. End of story.

But that didn’t explain the rest. I wanted to hold her after we were together. Would never grow tired of holding her. Hell, just holding her
hand
made me happier than I’d ever been, and that scared the shit out of me.

I wanted to battle her demons. No, fuck that. I wanted to kill them for her—an
d I was beginning to think I wouldn’t just stick to the ones in her mind. I’d kill for her in reality, maybe because no one else ever had. She’d been on her own for so long, and so had I.

Neither of us needed to be alone anymore.

Every cell of my body recognized her as mine. My Mia. And I didn’t care about timetables or common sense or why her, why now, when it hadn’t ever been anyone else. Even her horrific background bringing out some long dormant protective instinct inside me didn’t explain my feelings. Nothing did, other than the possibility that my gut and my heart were a hell of a lot smarter than my head.

I couldn’t wait any longer to see her. To look in her eyes and know for myself if what had happened on Friday had changed anything for us, or if it had just pushed us even further apart.

“I gotta go.” I shifted Vey back and rose unsteadily to my feet. Now the room was revolving. Just lovely. I was really enjoying all the new special effects from my busted eye.

“All right. Take it easy, man.”

I clicked off and scrolled through my dialed numbers, selecting one I’d called a little more than a week ago.

Three rings later, Kizzy picked up. “I thought you were dead.”

Her flat tone made me laugh. If I didn’t watch myself, I’d end up liking this chick. “So sorry to disappoint you.”

”I figured you had to be to let that little shined-up prick get the best of you. What the fuck’s your problem?” Then she made a sound like she’d snapped her fingers. “Ah, I got it, Foxy. Too much sex. Yo
u know you’re supposed to hold back before you fight.”

“Believe me, that’s not my problem.”

Apparently my dry tone amused her, because she barked out a laugh. “She makes you work for it, though now she might take pity on you. You got an eye patch?”

I gl
ared at the silky black item I tugged out of my jeans pocket. “Yeah. Haven’t worn it yet. Looks fucking stupid.”

“Dude, you’ll be swimming in babes. Chicks love pirates.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. Gently, to avoid jostling my eye. “I’m a pirate if I put on an eye patch?”

“Nah, but we can pretend. A
ssuming the size of your sword is worth the fantasy. Hang on.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear as she bellowed a series of commands heavily laced with expletives like
you silly fuckflap
and
you scrawny ballsucker
.

She came back to the phone. “These people don’t want to work.” She sighed. “I don’t put up with laziness on my watch.”

“You’re not at the gym?”

“No. I’m at Misty’s House of Beauty. Some of us have
to work for a living, Foxy.”

I tried to imagine Kizzy in anyone’s house of beauty and gave it up as hopeless. Not that she wasn’t attractive, but her hair needed its own zip code.

“Uh yeah. I’ll let you get back to it. Can you just tell me—”

“She’s working today until six. Then she’ll be at Mark’s. She has a fight in two weeks so we’ll be training hard. Which means if you swagger in there and try to distract her, I’ll pop out your other eye and use it to play pool. Capiche?”

“How about if I walk in and observe quietly?”

“That is acceptable.”

I grinned and hung up then called Carmine. I’d been out of work over a week already and I needed to get back to it. He put me on the schedule for Sunday and I settled on the couch for some one-eyed web surfing. After an hour, my good eye was blurry and I’d found another school with a combination online/residency program in sports medicine that sounded promising. I emailed to get more information then fed my dog and rolled over to take a nap.

Getting hit in the head taxed a man.

By the time I woke up, darkness had fallen and the dog was whining to go outside. Out we trudged into the cold. I had trouble getting my bearings thanks to being half blind, so instead of hauling ass all over the neighborhood, Vey got to pee on the garbage cans three houses down and I got to come back inside and take a shower.

The shower
didn’t relate to my eye. That had to do with me visiting Mia. Though the whole double vision thing added an extra element of fun in the shower, I have to admit.

I walked into Mark’s at eight. The stupid eye mask had itched the entire train ride over. Normally I would’ve walked, but I still wasn’t used to dealing with my new vision issues and the dark made them worse. The glare of the gym lights wasn’t much better.

I didn’t see Mia or Kizzy and had to suffer through even more stares than before. This time they were even above the neck. Happily, I ran into that hard-edged chick who’d called me a dumbass about five times in a five minute period. She was riding an exercise bike while flipping through some girly mag, though when she caught sight of me she had some choice words. Most of them were in Spanish.

Two loops of the workout rooms later, I was ready to call Kizzy and ask her if Mia had cut out early. I could’ve called Mia herself, but I preferred the middlewoman.

Maybe the knock on the head had harmed me more than I thought.

Then I saw someone kicking
the holy hell out of the heavy bag, jerking it on its chain, and I grabbed a seat a few feet away to watch.

Mia made a complete circuit of the bag, kicking her way around its circumference. She wore black shorts and a white tank
, and she’d braided her hair. Sweat ran off her pale skin in rivulets. When she tired of kicking, she started punching, coming in high before jabbing low, her back muscles flexing with each strike.

What seemed like hours later, she stopped to guzzle a bottle of water. She drank half then dumped the rest over her head. The water soaked the front of her shirt. And when I say
soaked, I mean her freckles showed beneath the thin fabric.

I swallowed, hard. Up
until that point I’d done my best to view her coolly, as one might survey a competitor. Judging strengths, identifying weaknesses. But with that one action, my mind took a one-way trip to dirty town.