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As I wait in line to be allowed into the restricted access part, the scent of beer and sweat permeates the air. I spot Kyle waving from our seats at the very center to the right of the ring, and I’m stunned at how close the fighters are going to be. Kyle seems to be able to touch the raised ring floor if he takes one step and extends out his arm.
You can actually watch the fight from the far end of the arena without having to pay a dime except perhaps a tip to the bouncer, but the seated tickets run from fifty dollars to five hundred, and the ones Remington Tate sent us are all from the five hundred ones. Being that I’ve been jobless for two weeks since my graduation and I’m stretching the savings for my previous small endorsement deals many years ago, I’d have never afforded these tickets otherwise. My friends, who are all recent grads, couldn’t have afforded them either. They accepted practically any job they could get within this shitty job market.
Crammed among people, I finally get to flash my backstage pass with a happy little smile, and I’m allowed down a long hall with several open rooms along one side.
Each room holds benches and rows of lockers, and I spot several fighters at different corners of the room, conversing with their teams. In the third room I peer into, he’s there, and a frisson of nervousness rushes through me.
He’s perfectly relaxed and seated, hunched over, on a long red bench, watching as a man with a shiny bald head bandages one of his hands. His other hand is already bandaged, everything covered with the cream-colored tape, except for his knuckles. His face is pensive and strikingly boyish, and it makes me wonder how old he is. He raises his dark head, as if sensing me, and spots me immediately. A flash of something strange and powerful sparks in his eyes, and it rushes through my body like lightning. I stifle my reaction and see that his coach is busy telling him something.
Remington can’t take his eyes off me. His hand is still out-stretched, but seems forgotten as his coach continues taping him up and issuing instructions.
“Well, well, well…”
I turn to the voice to my right, and a sliver of dread opens up in my midsection. An enormous fighter stands only a foot away, scrutinizing me with eyes that are pure intimidation, like I’m all dessert, and he has the perfect spoon to use.
I see Remington grab the tape from his coach and throw it aside before he stands and slowly winds his way to my side. As he positions himself behind me and slightly to my right, an awareness of his body close to mine seeps into my every pore.
His soft voice by my ear makes me tremble as he faces my admirer. “Just walk off,” he tells the other man softly.
The man I recognize as Hammer is no longer looking at me. Instead, he looks above my head and slightly to the side. I think that next to Remington, he doesn’t look all that big after all.
“She yours?” he asks with narrowed beady eyes.
My thighs go watery when the answering voice slides across the shell of my ear, both velvet and chillingly hard. “I can guarantee you, she’s not yours.”
The Hammer leaves, and for the longest time, Remington stands there, a tower of brawn almost touching me, his body warmth enveloping me. I dip my head and murmur, “Thank you,” and quickly leave, and I want to die because I swear to God he just ducked his head to smell me.
Unexpected
He’s about to come up on stage, and his name is already shredding through the microphone as the crowd goes wild. “Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Riptide!”
I’m still not recovered from seeing him up close, and my bloodstream already carries all kinds of strange, bubbly, hot little things. The instant he comes trotting down the wide hall between the stands, in that shiny red hooded robe, my pulse jumps, my tummy clenches, and I have the awful desperate urge to flee back to my home.
The guy is just too much. Too much male. Too much masculinity and pure raw beast. Put together, he’s just like sex on a stick and every female around me is shouting at the top of her lungs how much she wants to lick.
Remington climbs onstage and goes to his corner. He yanks off his robe, exposing all those flexing muscles, and hands it to a young blond man who seems to be aiding his bald coach.
“And now, I give you, the Hammer!”
Hammer proceeds to join him up on stage, and Remington smiles lazily to himself. His gaze slides directly to mine— and I realize he knows exactly, exactly, where I’m sitting at tonight. Still smiling that I’m-all-that smile, he jabs one finger in the air towards Hammer, and then points at me as if saying, “This one’s for you.”
My stomach drops.
“Shit, he’s killing me. Why the hell does he do that? He’s so f**king alpha I can’t stand him!”
“Melanie, get a grip!” I hiss, then sit back weakly in my chair, because he’s killing me too. I don’t know what he wants from me, but I’m tied up in knots because I never expected that I would also want something very sexual and very personal from him.
The toe-curling memory of standing close to him only minutes ago sweeps through me, but the fighting bell rings and snaps me out of it. The fighters go toe to toe, and Remy feints to one side while Hammer swings stupidly, following the mock move. Once Hammer’s side seems open, Remington comes at him from the left, jabbing him in the ribs.
They bounce apart, and Remington acts cocky, feinting and pissing Hammer off. He turns to me, points at Hammer, then at me again before ramming him so hard that the guy rebounds on the net behind him, falls to his knees, and shakes his head to stand up again. My sex muscles clench every time he hits his opponent, and my heart grips every time an opponent returns a blow.
During the night, he goes through several fighters in just this way. Every time he’s declared victor, he stares at me with that smug smile, as though he wants me to know he’s the dominating man here. My entire body shakes as I watch his body move, and I’m unable to stop fantasizing. I imagine his h*ps rolling over me, his body inside mine, those big hands touching me, flesh to flesh. During the last few rounds, he wears an intent look on his face, and his chest heaves with exertion and glistens with sweat.
Suddenly, I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.
I want to go crazy. Bungee. Sprint again, even if only in a literal sense. All those dates I never had, because I was training for something that never happened. Rides I didn’t take for fear of breaking a bone which eventually broke anyway. Never drinking. Keeping my grades up so I could do track. Remington Tate is everything I’ve never, ever done, and I have a condom tucked in my bag and suddenly I know exactly why I put it there. This guy is a fighter. I want to touch this beautiful chest and I want to kiss those lips. I want to have those hands on me. When I feel those hands on me, I’m probably going to come the second he thrusts inside me.
This is the most intense foreplay I’ve ever felt, and suddenly I want it to be more than play. I want it to happen tonight.
When he wins for the tenth and final time, I feel his eyes on me again, and I can only stare back at him, willing him to know I want him. He smiles at me, all sweaty and cocky with blue eyes glinting and dimples showing. Grabbing the cord at the top of the ring, he easily swings his body over it and lands gracefully in the aisle before me.
Melanie freezes at my side as his beautifully sculpted and gleaming tan body approaches.
There is no doubt about his destination.
Holding my breath until I feel like my lungs are going to burst, I stand on wobbly legs because I really don’t know what else to do. The crowd roars and women behind me shout.
“Kiss his heart out, woman!”
“You don’t deserve him, you bitch!”
“You go, girl!”
He flashes his dimples at me, and I keep waiting for his hands as he leans over. I can almost feel the way those hands felt on me last time, big, strange, and a little bit wonderful as they practically engulfed my face. I’m already dying. Dying with want. With recklessness. With anticipation.
Instead, he bends his dark head to whisper against my temple, and the only thing of his body touching mine is his breath, bathing my skin with heat as his gruff voice rumbles in my ear, “Sit tight. I’ll send someone over for you.”
He smiles and backs off as the crowd keeps screaming, and he climbs up into the ring, leaving me blinking after him. It takes the woman next to me about a full minute of shaking and hyperventilating to get out, “Omigod, omigod, omigodgodgodgod, his elbow brushed me, his elbow brushed me!”
“RIPTIDE, PEOPLE!” the announcer screams.
My knees go soft, and I drop to my seat, weightless as whipped cream, clasping my hands together to keep them from shaking. My brain is so melted I can’t even think past the point where he swung down from the ring and whispered close to my ear, in his terribly sexy voice, that he was sending someone for me. Just remembering it makes my toes curl. Melanie is speechlessly gaping, and Pandora and Kyle stare at me like I’m some holy being who just brought a wild animal to his knees.
“What the hell did he say?” Kyle mouths.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Melanie says, squealing and hugging me. “Brooke, that guy is hot for you.”
The woman beside me touches my shoulder with a trembling hand. “Do you know him?”
I shake my head, not even knowing how to answer. All I know is that from yesterday to now, there hasn’t been a second when I haven’t thought about him. All I know is that I hate and love the way he makes me feel, and the way he looks at me fills me with wanting.
