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She forgot to add getting her sister in trouble then fucking her senseless, but she didn’t know that part.
“Hold it there, fighter girl.” Fox no longer looked amused. “I’m not twelve, and he didn’t drag me into anything. And trust me when I say the terms he offered will benefit you too.” He gave her a thin smile. “Assuming you don’t nag me to death and make me not want to have sex with you again for the foreseeable future.”
“Ha. Like that’d happen.”
Coughing into my napkin, I glanced at Carly. And found she was staring at me openly, speculation written in every line of her beautiful face.
“There is no trick,” I said quietly, to her as much as Mia and Fox. More so, probably. “I have my reasons for wanting to have a rematch with Fox, but they aren’t sinister so much as self-serving. He stands to make a good amount from the bout, and the attention will—”
“Son, I told you once. I don’t give two fucks about attention. I’m happy slinging drinks, teaching people to fight, and taking sports medicine classes. My glory days, such as they were, are over. And I’m glad.”
Mia speared a tomato chunk. “One night only.”
“One.” Fox leaned forward and grabbed her wrist across the table, halting her tomato’s progress on its way to her mouth. “I’m not asking permission. I’m happy to talk it out, but I’d assume you’d give me the same courtesy I gave you when you started fighting again.”
She inclined her chin at her bandaged arm. She’d broken it on her first fight back out of retirement while fighting Evie Pierce, a former hotshot from Europe who’d been sidelined after an injury herself. “Still not fighting yet.”
“Yeah, but that cast is coming off this week, and we both know then you’ll be back training full speed ahead. Hell, you’ve been doing leg work straight through.”
“Nothing is wrong with my legs.”
“No, and soon your arm will be back to full strength. And I’ll be outside the ring watching you fight, week after week. Because it’s what you want to do, and I support you. I may not always love the idea of it, but I’ll always love the idea of you doing what you need to do for yourself.”
She sighed. “The fact that you’re such a good person is a constant trial to me, Trayherne.”
His only response was a grin.
“Guess the sex is back on again?” I forked up some of Carly’s casserole and caught her eye again, sharing a smile with her before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to. Being friendly with her was absolutely not part of the plan.
She needed to hate me, even if I kept finding ways to sabotage that at every turn.
“I still have questions, Costas. Like your self-serving reasons for staging a rematch with Tray, and if they have anything to do with your unsavory associates.”
“More soda, anyone?” Carly jerked to her feet so fast that she nearly upended the white lace tablecloth she’d thrown on the table at the last minute before serving the meal.
“Your glass is almost full,” Mia pointed out.
“Yeah, but Jenna’s isn’t.” She grabbed Jenna’s half-full glass before Jenna could respond. “Anyone else need a refill?”
“I’m actually go—”
“Okay, everyone’s set then.” Carly spoke over Jenna and carried her friend’s glass into the kitchen to “refill” it.
Guess she didn’t want to be around while I discussed my associates, unsavory or otherwise.
“If I fight Fox, I make money.” I relaxed in my chair and placed my fingers over the top of my own half-empty glass, in case Carly decided to offer me more refreshments as well. “Simple as that.”
I’d also get Marco and his band of merry men betting in huge amounts, and betting in huge amounts would be more likely to lure Roberto Andretti out of his hidey-hole. As would the supposed loyalty I’d proven the other night by being with Carly.
They figured she wouldn’t cry rape because of her stripping—patently unfair or not, her character would be brought into question in court—and I wouldn’t, because I was over the rack if I wanted to be a man of honor in their organization. I was already bucking every established protocol that one family’s men didn’t cross into another, but I’d been very convincing when I’d told them I couldn’t stand my father.
It wasn’t a lie.
He’d run my mother into the ground with his lifestyle and his loyalties, ones he’d claimed paled in comparison to his love for his wife. Bullshit. She’d hated every minute of worrying and knowing she might not see her friends again if they crossed some invisible line within the organization. And then she’d gotten sick, and I’d had to watch her shrivel away into a fragment of the warm, wonderful person she’d once been.
I put all of that at Vincente Costas’s doorstep.
Some days it was a toss-up which of the two men I hated more—Emilia’s father, or my own.
