The Brawler Page 6

  He was The Brawler. His obsession with danger, his determination to base his value on how many times he could walk into pure violence and emerge victorious, scared her on levels she didn’t want to admit.

  Yes, she followed his career but lied that it bored her. It was better than owning up to fear that tore her to pieces every time she tried to watch him fight. It was far better than confessing she was afraid for him.

  “Just give me a sec to change, and I’ll get that coffee going,” she said. He moved soundlessly, so close on her heels that she could smell the cologne she’d breathed in at the Foundation Room, in his truck, and at the gym. Instead of carrying out her initial urge to dive onto the couch and shout, “Take me or get out!” Aly swept up a pair of remotes, twirled them like a Wild West gunslinger, and turned on the television and the electric fireplace.

  Then she hurried to the kitchen before she could circle around to her first urge again.

  She dropped her purse onto the counter, put the brewer to work, fixed herself a mug of Irish tea, and pried off her stilettos. The cabinet she dedicated to comfy footwear offered a variety of plush slippers, cozy socks, and…clogs? Making a mental note to donate the clogs to charity, she pulled on a pair of polka-dot toe socks.

  After arranging the coffee and tea on a tray, Aly realized she had no clue how Jackson took his coffee. An hour ago, the man’s fingers had been doing wonderfully dirty things to her, but she didn’t know how he felt about cream and sugar in his caffeine. If her mother could scrounge up outrage that Gideon Crane hadn’t known her middle name was Chastity, then how would she react to Aly and Jackson’s secrets?

  “Not good,” she mumbled, adding Truvia and Baileys to the tray.

  Did it really matter that he’d been a stranger for four years and in under forty-eight hours had found his way back into her vagina and her heart?

  To the public, to the Greer family, it would undoubtedly matter, because it was a scandal waiting to unveil itself. But Aly found freedom on the fringes of convention.

  She didn’t care that her parents thought of him as a son, and in their minds that made him her brother.

  Even if he wasn’t hers—would never be—she didn’t regret what he’d made her feel tonight.

  “Thought you were going to change,” Jackson said when she returned with the tray.

  “I did.” She passed off the tray to him and wiggled her toes. The purple-dotted gray socks clashed with her outfit, but she didn’t care. “My tootsies wanted to slip into something fuzzy.”

  “Those are some interesting socks.”

  “They make sense. Average socks are for toes what mittens are for fingers—constricting.”

  She took her tea mug and curled up on the club chair where she’d slept last night. The throw blanket over the back smelled cottony fresh and the sticky ice cream smear had been scrubbed away. She’d get the names of the staff her mother had rallied to tidy up and would keep them in mind when she hit up her favorite high-end department stores for last-minute stocking stuffers.

  Without bothering with sweetener or cream, or taking a moment to test his drink’s temperature, Jackson took a swallow. “Good coffee.”

  “It’d better be. It was imported from Brazil, and it was a pricey graduation gift from my sis.”

  “Which one?”

  “Veronica.” Veronica’s gifts—whether it was coffee beans, a handmade garment, or a mansion—were always considerate. Aly had spent so many years envying Veronica’s “perfect daughter” status that she hadn’t realized her sister was more than a people-pleaser and Aly really should try to be less of an asshole to her.

  “And you’re wasting this on me?” Jackson set down his mug. Sweet hell, he was sexy.

  Aly wanted to lick the coffee’s unique berry-and-caramel flavor off his mouth.

  “I don’t think I’m wasting it,” she replied, wiggling her toes and reaching over to rub a foot. “Ow. This is the painful cost of dressing up my feet with impractical shoes.”

  “And diamonds.”

  “You noticed my toe ring?”

  “Isn’t that why you wear it? So people will notice?”

  “Nope, actually. I think it’s pretty and wear it for myself. Just like my other body bling.”

  Aly took a hasty gulp of tea. What in blazes was she doing? Flirting with him like this before had led straight to…the wildest orgasm of her life.

  “What other body bling?” Jackson’s gaze blatantly fondled her. “You’re pierced?”

  “Obviously.” She tossed her hair, exposing an earring.

  “Where else, Aly?”

  “That’s for me to know, and you to find out—if I let you. New subject.”

  With a tight nod—the man really was a master of control, wasn’t he?—he gestured to the shopping bags grouped near the sofa. “What’s all that?”

  “Stuff my mother brought this morning. Christmas décor. My undecorated house is an abomination.”

  “Are you going to put it up?”

  “Maybe. Just another thing Joan can bulldoze me into.”

  “Sounded to me like decorating was something a mother wanted to share with her kid.”

  “Do not use that word in reference to me. I haven’t been a kid for a long time and I don’t need anyone to hover.”

  “You’re Joan’s kid. J.T.’s kid. That’s a privilege.”

  “I didn’t go looking for the privilege, Jackson. I was born into it.”

  Jackson’s parents hadn’t loved him; they’d broken him. Aly knew that. She also knew he’d literally fought for everything he had. But his take on her relationship with J.T. and Joan didn’t acknowledge that she’d carried her parents’ resentment her entire life, and that hanging lights and trimming a Douglas fir wouldn’t change things. Miracles like that didn’t happen—not even at Christmas.

  “Just hear this,” he said. “If you want to face off against Joan or J.T., wait until shit gets real.”

  “Advice you don’t live by,” she retorted. “Did you lose less significant matches to get to the main card? No. You won every fight and you’re here in Vegas now because you intend to keep winning.”

  Jackson’s frown deepened, and she was puzzled that she could at the exact same moment want to slap him and kiss him. “Aly, dozens of times I’ve walked into a club and some asshole tried to get in my face. I’ve had to pass up the easy victories—the hollow ones—because they don’t pave my way to a win that matters. That’s why I’m America’s champion. That’s why I’m the best.”

  Aly’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe instead of being with me, you should go home and work on your self-confidence. I don’t think your ego’s quite ginormous enough.”

  During their back-and-forth, they’d shifted closer. And now they were standing inches apart, and she was annoyed that he wasn’t backing down.

  “I’m satisfied with my relationship with my parents. So, thanks, but no thanks, for your opinion.”

  “What if J.T. and Joan aren’t satisfied with their relationship with you? Joan was pissed when I showed up here this morning.”

  “Not because of some garland and lights. Because a guy spent the night.”

  “Who the hell is he?”

  “No, Jackson. You don’t get to make demands.”

  “Did he fuck you?”

  “In the past, yes. Last night, no. He’s a friend who spent the night along with two other friends, and he didn’t come close to touching me the way you did in the gym.”

  A muscle jumped in Jackson’s jaw. Was he reliving every second of pinning her to that turnbuckle in the ring, of stroking her so, so deep?

  “A man and a woman can be friends without having sex,” she said. “Believe it or not, but I know that to be true.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “People call me a ‘party girl.’ No, I don’t live for the bad moments. Yes, I love enjoying myself. But I don’t need a spreadsheet to ke
ep track of how many men I’ve had sex with.”

  Well, she hadn’t meant for that to go flying out into the open air, but her filter tended to malfunction when she was epically aggravated.

  “Hey,” he said, so gently she was momentarily confused, “who said that?”

  “Not important.”

  “You’re not that woman.”

  “How would you know? Before yesterday, you hadn’t spoken to me in years.” The same years she’d spent tracking his career, worrying about him even as she resented him, because, damn it, someone had to worry.

  Her parents, her sisters, his uncle, his cousins—they were supportive. Proud. But did any of them fear for his safety and wonder how they’d breathe again if they lost him?

  “As much as the misconceptions sting, you’re hiding behind them. And you’re doing that to protect yourself.”

  Aly’s grip relaxed. God, how she wanted to protest. Yet just hours earlier she’d lied to Joan, saying the reason she went “off the grid” was because she was out partying, when the truth was she burned the midnight oil studying more often than she did partying. She’d lied to protect herself…

  “If you’re going to do that, hide like that,” Jackson said, “think about how it reflects on the football team you represent.”

  “The Villains franchise isn’t your concern.”

  “If I owned a team, I’d want it to be a cohesive unit dedicated to business interests—including its reputation. And if there was someone on my payroll who constantly attracted negative publicity, I’d ax them.”

  Scoffing, she carted the shopping bags to the sofa and dumped the contents onto the cushions. “Good thing you don’t run the Villains.”

  “Fair to say. But suppose the people who do run the team think as I do.”

  Aly paused midway through stacking silver stocking holders that spelled the word hope.

  Though not a member of the Villains’ HR staff, she had an educated guess of how many employees her parents had terminated since acquiring the ball club. The number who’d gotten walking papers during the season was staggering enough. Her sister Waverly had been suspended through the exhibition games at the end of training camp for fraternizing with a fellow trainer, whose father had sold the team to the Greers and was now under investigation. Then Veronica had quit the organization altogether after the owners had rehired the scandalicious quarterback they’d ordered her to fire in the first place. Of course, the situation had been tangled by the fact that she’d fallen in love with him.

  An office fling wasn’t in Aly’s future—she had no interest in complicating a professional relationship with one-time-only sex. But if her private life, which hadn’t felt truly private since her parents’ acquisition of Las Vegas’s football franchise, was no longer independent of her professional life.

  She was in deep shit—professionally speaking.

  Her parents had the exact mindset Jackson described. Only, they were blunter, more ruthless about it, which must be a winning formula, as the Villains were invading the play-offs with just one loss.

  Never would J.T. and Joan allow her to cross over to business operations if she approached them with a reputation sullied beyond repair. They’d keep her banished to S-Dubs forever.

  Or… “Jackson, what are their plans for me?”

  The man sighed, cursed. “Keep you on a short leash until after play-offs.”

  “Until they can cleanly cut me from the business, you mean?”

  He stepped beside her, scooped up the stocking holders, and moved them to the cathedral fireplace. “If your job matters, come out of hiding, Aly.”

  “Haven’t you reached your advice quota for the day?” she tossed back, glad that she could still speak through anger.

  “No, ’cause technically it’s a new day.” When Aly jerked around to glare at him, he was all cocky smirk and piercing eyes, and her ovaries somersaulted. “If I end up decorating your fireplace by myself, there’s a hundred percent chance it’s going to turn out ass-ugly.”

  A girl could get whiplash from how quickly he riled her up then turned her on. “All right. I’ll bedazzle the mantel. But only the mantel and only if you give me a hand. You’re tall enough to reach the thing without a stepladder.”

  “Got an aversion to stepladders?”

  “My mother and I had a mini-argument about them this morning.” She turned off the fire, then handed him a solid nine feet of flocked garland pre-beautified with pinecones, berries, ribbon, and clear bulbs. “That’s what you missed before you came in and stared at my butt.”

  Jackson shifted the garland in his arms and bits of frosty dust stuck to his jacket’s sleeves. He looked…embarrassed.

  Great. He had the nerve to annoy her, make her come, annoy her again, and now he’d reached a new plateau of hotness.

  “I—”

  “To deny is to lie…” she said in a lilting voice.

  “Wasn’t going to.” He began to stretch out the garland. “I was going to say that I’d stare at your butt for hours if I didn’t have to fight.”

  Have to? Jackson didn’t have to fight any longer—at least not from a financial standpoint. Her father had steered him toward shrewd investments and that was on top of the wealth he’d accumulated boxing professionally.

  He was rich. He had a name. He no longer risked his life in the ring for those reasons… Did he fight simply because he didn’t know how to stop?

  “How do you gear up to walk into hell like that?” she asked after a while. They’d worked in quiet, with ESPN prattle filling the silences between the occasional “Hand me that over there” and “Move that this way.”

  “Drills, running, jumping rope, getting in the ring, and practicing as if a championship’s on the line every time,” he said, stepping backward to see if the trio of crystal candleholders achieved the symmetry she’d asked for.

  Walking back, Aly examined the fireplace critically and finally nodded, satisfied. “Besides exercise,” she said. “And besides scoping out the city where you’re going to fight.”

  “Mind games help.” He grinned at her curious expression. “I go through with the interviews and promo, but eventually I tune it all out. I pretend that I’ve never won a match, that I’m fighting for my life. That my opponent stole something from me, and the only way to get it back is to go through the motherfucker.”

  “Sounds brutal.”

  “When I fight, it’s art.” Jackson peeled off his jacket, gave a rough swipe at the garland debris stuck to the fabric, and flung it over a nearby ottoman. “Technique is the fine line between brutality and art.”

  The words were laced with a subtle warning: Don’t try to convince me otherwise.

  But could she? She knew more about bodybuilding and football than other sports, but she wasn’t ignorant when it came to boxing, wrestling, and mixed martial arts. She knew that he was a pair of gloves, a few technical rules, and a dash of luck away from a cauliflower ear or worse.

  The dangers of what it took to win a fight, and—God forbid—what it might take for him to lose, frightened her. That it all seemed immaterial to him saddened her.

  He understood violence, was comfortable with it in ways she couldn’t fathom. And yes, he was a trust virgin. Those details intertwined and made her heart ache for him in spite of how thoroughly he’d damaged it before.

  “Jackson, suppose I let you stare at me for hours. Would you still fight?”

  “Yes.” No hesitation.

  “What if I told you where my other piercing is? Would you fight anyway?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll fight until I face an opponent with the physical credentials to outclass me.” He retreated to sit on the sofa. “Oh, and when I find out where you’re pierced, it’s not going to be because you told me.”

  “When? Ha, ha.”

  “Did you forget that earlier tonight my fingers were inside your cunt and you were moaning for me?”

  The word
s, the tension behind them, gave her a wicked chill. “I think I can recall that,” she managed to say, treading cautiously. “About the mantel. It’s not ass-ugly. I doubt even my mother will find fault with it. Thanks.”

  “I just followed your orders. I happened to be where you needed me to be.”

  Yeah. This time he’d been there when she needed him. But how many times had she needed him, only to find a hole in her life where he used to be?

  The man couldn’t be relied on. No matter the good times, his apologies, and their cat-and-mouse games, she had to protect herself.

  Aly sat on the floor near his feet, facing the fireplace. “Now that space has character. It’s how a fireplace should look, with personal touches on the mantel. It’s meant for a family. This whole house is.”

  “You’re going to hang up your dancing shoes and start a family?”

  “Who says I’d have to choose?”

  “Guess you wouldn’t, but I’m picturing you pregnant and doing that stripper dance you were working at Mandalay Bay and it’s—”

  Aly peered at him over her shoulder. “What, ridiculous?”

  “Concerning. And hot.”

  She snorted. “Right. Well, this is a fairy-tale house and someday I’ll have my happy-ever-after here. A wedding, a baby, eventually a puppy. Night after night of slow dancing.”

  “Slow dancing?”

  Aly scooted around and lay back on the rug, propping her polka-dotted feet on the cushion beside him. “Uh-huh. Don’t spill my secret, but I’m a hopeless eavesdropper. For years, up until I moved here, I’d spy on my parents slow dancing. One of them puts on music and they sway in each other’s arms. I watched them every chance I got. It’s what I miss most about not living with them anymore.”

  “They love each other.”

  “It’s so simple, the way you just said it. But what they have is…it’s like a storybook fantasy that transcended into real life. Almost too beautiful for our world—you know, for people like you and me.”