Trust Me: Matty and Kayla, Book 1 of 3 (The McDaniels Brothers) (6 page)

Rossini looked
Matty over with flinty gray eyes but, to my relief, nodded slowly in recognition. "I saw some tape of you. I like your style. You got brothers too, right?"

Matty's
jaw flexed and without missing a beat, I stepped in to answer on his behalf. "Yes. Not MMA, though. One of them is a traditional boxer, the other a kick-boxer.”

I’d learned a lot about
Matty in the past week and a half just through talking about strategy, discussing past fights and watching his interaction with his brothers on the couple of occasions I’d stopped by the gym. This only confirmed what I’d been feeling. For some reason, it didn't matter whether it was good or bad, the second someone mentioned Bash or Reid, he immediately went on the defensive. We were going to have to have a talk about that moving forward. For now, though, I had to hope he'd keep his trap shut and let me close this deal.

We sat around a long, gleaming conference room table and
talked through all the details. We’d even patched Willie in via conference call and he sounded excited to do it. We talked sponsors, possible dates, media coverage, the whole nine. When, two hours later, everything had been hammered out besides the money, I was brimming with confidence and decided to broach the topic myself.

“Guess that’s it. Oh,” I waved my hand like it was a minute detail, but my heart was pounding so hard, I was afraid they’d hear it. “With regard to the purse, we're willing to split
sixty-forty. Willie's good but he doesn't have the local support or following Matty does. If we’re fighting in Boston, we think that's more than fair."

Carmine rocked back on his chair and eyeballed me. “I never even considered that this would be less than
fifty-fifty. They’re both new, relatively unknown. I’m not sure why we’d give up that extra ten percent.”

“Ticket sales,” I responded with a shrug.
“Simple math. Matty is the hometown favorite. We’re going to sell more seats than you. If you don’t believe me, do an exit poll.”

He frowned and thumbed through some of his notes but didn’t respond.

“Don’t let all this hard work go to waste,” I said, leaning in to rest my elbows on the table between us. “We’ve gotten it all worked out down to the announcer. Let’s make a deal, Carmine.” I held out my hand and offered him an encouraging nod. “What do you say?”

My head was still spinning
twenty minutes later when Matty and I stepped out into the early May sunshine.

“We did it,” I whispered, irrationally worried that someone might be following us and hear my almost childlike glee. “We frigging did it!”

Matty chuckled, and didn’t bother to use his inside voice as we crossed the parking lot toward my car. "I'm not going to lie, it never even crossed my mind that you'd be good at this part of it too."

I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear and tried not to let the pride in his tone go to my head, even if it did lift my spirits.

"Thanks heaps. You're a real charmer."

Part of me was still in knots about the way we’d left things that night when we’d nearly had sex. It had been a
long stretch of rocky road since the second we met and it seemed like that could easily have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but we’d muddled through. Now, aside from the tension that seemed ever-present and my own personal and humiliatingly graphic daydreams, he was becoming a part of my day that I really looked forward to. Which scared the shit out of me.

“I try. But for real, you handled the shit out of him back there. He didn't know whether he was coming or going. We definitely got the better end of things
but Willie still seemed happy enough, and Carmine left the table smiling.”

This time, I couldn't stop the grin from spreading over my face as we climbed into the
car.

Matty
thought I did a good job. Something he already admitted he'd never given me a chance in hell of doing.

"Now that this is solid, we've got to get you ready. Is Felix available to start training seriously?
The sooner the better. We’ve only got three months.”

He leaned forward and flipped on the radio, selecting a rock station before he answered.
"Yeah, about that."

I could already tell I wasn't going to like whatever he was about to say.

“Felix had some family issues and had to go to Guatemala for a month. He'll be home in a few weeks now, but until then, I'm on my own. Don’t sweat it though, I’ll be fine."

I thought back to his weekly wing-fest
at 1984 and shook my head. "No you won't."

"I can start prepping without a trainer, Kayla. I did it my whole life, until two years ago. There was no money for trainers, but guess what? I still won fights."

"You won't be one hundred percent."

"I can take Willie at seventy five percent. You're not going to get me to agree to let yet another stranger into my boxing family out of the blue. I'm putting my foot down here and now."

"What if I do it?" The words were out before I thought them through, but I couldn’t very well take them back, even if being with Matty more often was a heartbreak waiting to happen.

"What if you do what?"

I had to put the job first here. Surely, I could manage to keep it professional for a few piddling weeks. "What if I pull double duty? Things will be quiet on the management end aside from some calls and just me vetting other fighters for after the Martin fight. The rest of the time, we can spend in the gym. Three weeks, just getting you conditioned and making sure you're accountable. I'm not saying I can take Felix's place. I'm just saying I know enough to help get you ready for when he comes back so you're not behind the curve. What do you think?"

At least I wasn't a stranger.

He threw his head back and seemed to be muttering at the ceiling when I risked a glance in his direction.

"Don't be stubborn and short-sighted,
Matty. You have me here, I'm willing to help, so you might as well use me."

***

Matty

It was that
exact thought that had me in knots. She made a lot of sense, and I was already getting comfortable around her. Not in the groin region, that was still decidedly uncomfortable in her presence, but as far as feeling like she was invested in my success and had the knowhow to try to find me some decent match-ups, things were progressing better than I ever hoped.

This would seriously test m
y ability to be around her long-term without trying to jump her bones again. Like some twisted form of exposure therapy.

I was getting by
all right for the last week or so when she’d stopped off at the gym to run over some things with me, but to her credit, she’d always come mid-day when there were at least a few guys there jumping rope or knocking the heavy bag around, and she’d only stayed an hour or so. This would be a lot more than that.

"Are we talking every day?"

"No." She seemed to hesitate, probably because she knew that neither of us could do it every day without cracking. Smart cookie, this one. "Every other. And every Saturday off. Come on, Matty. I've seen you fight and you know you have some issues to work out. You've got to get some more speed if you want to be faster than Willie. I've got lots of tapes we can watch, and I learned some great new flexibility exercises that will make those kicks really fly. What do you say? It could be fun."

For the first time since we met,
I actually got the feeling she believed that. She'd been determined before, and always ambitious, but only now that we were talking about more hands-on work was she lit up from the inside.

"You love it, don't you?"

She pursed her lips and made a show of leaning forward to scrape something off the windshield as she drove. "Love what?"

"MMA.
You love fighting."

"Yeah, I like it a lot."

"No. You love it. So why don't you do it more? You have a real knack for it, you’re quick as hell and you've got all the technical knowhow.”

"Ah, but I'm missing one key component," she said
, sitting back with a wry but sad smile.

"And what's that?"

"A dick."

I let out a short laugh but then frowned at her when I realized she was serious.
"They have a bunch of MMA tournaments for women, and there are a handful of girls who make a living in the cage. Why can’t you be one of them?"

Granted, she wasn't
at the level of Ronda Rousey or anything, but she had a passion and feel for it that I knew in my gut could be something more if she let it.

"Mickey prefers if I stick to the back end of the business."

Who the fuck is Mickey?
I was about to snap, but then I stopped myself. It had occurred to me more than once that they might have been more than boss and employee at some point — Mickey didn’t seem like the type to take people under his wing for nothing— but I couldn’t bring myself to push because I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“We don’t need him.
I’ll help you."

"Help me what?"

"We take this three weeks and train together. Every other day, both getting into condition. Then, you let me find a fight for you. Something in New York, or out of town, Mickey doesn't even have to know."

The MMA ladies circuit was small and didn't have a large following. Unless he was specifically looking for it, Mickey would never find out about it, and what he didn't know...

I couldn't deny that was part of the lure for me. Defying that motherfucker when he thought he had me up and down, dead to rights. What was strange was how small a part that played in my decision.

So what was the rest of it?
Because suddenly I wanted this more than I'd wanted anything in a very long time.

"I just don’t know…
"

I swallowed my disappointment, but nodded anyway. Odds were,
in a battle for supremacy over Kayla's priorities, Mickey was going to win. From what I had gathered, she’d worked for him long enough that she felt like she owed him her unwavering loyalty. And maybe she did.

“He would look at this as a betrayal. I know it sounds old fashioned, but that’s the kind of guy he is.” She flicked a glance my way. “And I owe him. He helped me out of a jam when I was
younger.”

Mickey loved collecting favors.
Seemed to be his favorite pastime. But she owed herself something too. A chance to blaze her own path and find the strength that life in the cage could give you. It was indescribable how empowering it was, especially for people who’d had bad times.

"
Think about it. I’m going to go hard first thing Monday. If you want in, come over after work and we’ll get to it."

She pulled into the gym parking lot and popped the car into park. I turned to face her,
sad to see that she looked more apprehensive than excited now. "I guess I’ll-"

"
See me Monday,” I finished for her. “You deserve this, Red. Don’t let me down.”

As I jogged
across the parking lot, I was more optimistic than I’d been in years and that calmed me right the fuck down because it was the one thing I couldn't afford to be. Shit could —and did, so often— turn on a dime. Today hadn’t changed the fact that my feelings for this girl were as confused as fuck and I was still stuck under the thumb of the devil himself with no way out for the foreseeable future.

But I had to admit, if I
was going to be stuck somewhere, it might as well be next to Kayla James.

Kayla

Don’t let me down.

The words flitted through my mind again, as they had so many times over the past week.

Slumping forward, I laid my head on the desk in front of me and groaned. If ever there was a good time to tell Matty the truth it had been right after he’d selflessly offered to try to help me achieve my dream. It had been on the tip of my tongue, but I chickened out. For someone who’d signed on to be in business with Mickey, he sure seemed to hate him, and I was ashamed that I didn’t. How could I explain that to Matty without having to explain all the rest?

The sordid, shameful, sickening rest.
Knowing that, once I told him, it might not matter anyway. He might still hate me, just by association.

So
I’d blown him off and now, more than a week later, I still hadn’t worked up the balls to face him.

He’d already left four
messages on my voicemail that I refused to check, but I could only bury my head for so long. I still had a job to do and I couldn’t keep letting my cowardice stand in the way of me doing it.

I spared a glance at the clock and stood.
End of my work day. For now, at least, I had an excuse to procrastinate for a little longer. I made my way down the maze of hallways to the open part of the warehouse where the makeshift ring stood. In the center of it was Mickey at a table set for two, each place with a silver dome-covered plate and a wine glass filled with ruby liquid in front of it. Next to him on a white-clothed platform sat a three-tiered birthday cake shaped like gift boxes set askew on top of one another, each in a different buttery pastel shade. It was a work of art and I knew it had cost a fortune.