Brawler's Baby: An MMA Mob Romance (Mob City Book 1) (4 page)

C
onor

Bottles, everywhere.

Two words, but they described the state of my motel room perfectly. I would have felt sorry for the cleaning woman, but she'd get a fat tip. I could be an asshole, but not to people like her. They had a hard enough life as it was. I'd made enough that night to keep me in booze, threads and chicks for weeks, maybe months, so she'd get her slice of my winnings.

The cash was there, just sitting on the bed – neat stacks of hundreds, all with pretty little green holographic paper straps binding them together. Ten thousand here, twenty thousand there, pretty soon you're talking real money.

I didn't care about any of it. How could I when there was only one thing, one girl, on my mind. Maya. Of course, she hadn't been Maya when I first met her…

I jumped to my feet, shaking my head to try and clear away the funk. I needed the place to look presentable, needed to seem like I wasn't two steps away from an early grave by way of the bottle.

Whatever the truth actually happened to be… I grabbed the garbage bag from the can and leapt frantically, frenetically into action, sweeping up whole swathes of empty beer bottles with my arm and sending them crashing into the bag, crushing empty pizza boxes and stuffing them in behind.

Jesus, Conor, this place is a dump. When this is all over, you need to take a long look at yourself.

Two sharp knocks rang out at the door. It sounded like someone was in a hurry. I kidded myself, thinking that it might have been the cashier. I probably owed the motel money.

Or maybe I'd been too loud when I stumbled back in from the bar last night. Maybe.

Truth was, I knew exactly who was on the other side of that door – but for the first time in years I felt the cold clench of nervousness holding my body in its vice-like grip instead of feeling completely and utterly in control.

I stumbled toward the thin wooden door-frame, not bothering to pull the curtains back and peek through the window. It was either her or it wasn't. There were no two ways about it.

I pulled the door open.

She looked every bit as beautiful as the day we'd first met, still I couldn't help but notice that she seemed…tired and not herself. Hell, I didn't even know her real name.

Then again, I haven't seen her in years. I'm not the same guy, either
.

"Hi…"

I looked down at my hand, suddenly remembering I had a half-full black garbage bag clenched between my fingers. I set it down, and the sound of the glass bottles inside clinking against each other finally startled me out of my stupefied daze.

"Rachel." I mumbled.

Her eyes opened wide at the sound, flaring briefly before returning to a suspicious darting motion, nervously scanning the balcony.

"Can I come in?" She spoke hurriedly – uncharacteristically. There was something in that tone of voice, something that I didn't recognize, at least not from her. It was fear.

It felt like a dream. I nodded, pushing the door backward with my thick shoulders as I stood aside to let her pass.

"Close the door, please." She pleaded. I could see her hands trembling.

I obliged without hesitating. I didn't have to be a mind reader to know that whatever the hell was going on here, she was terrified – about as scared as I'd ever seen a girl. I didn't like it.

I felt the familiar prickling of adrenaline on the edge of my consciousness, that oh-so-pleasant rush of endorphins that was the only drug I'd ever needed. To men like me, who knew how to take advantage of it, it was no less potent than anything you can buy on any ghetto street corner.

"What the hell's going on Rachel?" I growled. I didn't know how to react, so my mind fell back into its default setting – anger. It was the protective shell that had carried me through the last few years, and my mind wasn't going to give up on it that easily. "Or Maya – whoever the hell you are."

Something was clutched in her hand, and I saw her hand clench around it, the backs of her fingers whitening with the slight strain.

"I got your message," she said finally, thrusting the hand out toward me, palm facing down. "Thank you."

"For what?" I asked curiously.

She turned her hand over, opened it up and revealed a small yet undeniably ornate orthodox silver cross sitting in the palm of her hand. It was attached to a cheap steel chain and wrapped in a white bar napkin.

She still has it!

"Room fifty-seven, Sunset Motel," she said without answering my question. "What did you make on that fight? Fifty grand?"

"Fifty, a hundred," I grunted. "Who cares – it's just numbers."

She laughed. It was every bit as light, every bit as dainty as I remembered – and it seemed entirely out of place in a place like this. I looked around at the motel room, practically ashamed of where she'd found me. It was faded, old and there were cigarette burns on the sheets, on the pillows, and carpet that made a mockery of the no-smoking sign, yellowed by age and cigarette smoke, on the bedside table. "You haven't changed." She said with a slight smile dancing on her face.

"You have." I said. It was a statement.

My tone of voice was perhaps more accusatory than I might otherwise have chosen, but hell – it was true, wasn't it? I didn't even know this girl's name. Could she just walk in and expect everything to be the same? How was that fair?

I'd searched for her for years, traveled a continent and half a world away from home – and yet it didn't feel as though I'd found salvation, nor the answer, just more questions. But how the hell was I supposed to ask them? How do you ask someone why they just upped and left without so much as a word of farewell, or whether you ever meant anything to them in the first place?

And more than that, it had been so long since I'd accessed a range of emotions beyond simple anger, I barely remembered how. To be honest, if I looked back on my life the only time I'd ever been truly been in touch with anything more than the most heartless, brutish side of myself was during the brief few months I'd first spent with Rachel, or Maya or whoever the hell she was, back home in Dublin.

The years on either side were… emotionally stunted.

Her head dropped, and she didn't even have a sense of what kind of mental gymnastics my mind had just spun through. "That's fair," she said, her face dropping. "I just thought – I dunno – you might have stayed in a nicer place than this."

I spoke before thinking. At least that was nothing new. Even if I
had
thought it through, I probably wouldn't have said anything differently anyway. "And I thought you might have said something before you left, so I guess we're both idiots, aren't we."

She looked back up at me, her eyes filling with hurt tears. "I guess I deserved that." She said, a tremor in her voice. "I didn't mean –."

"I'm sorry," I muttered, feeling ashamed of the way I was treating her. It wasn't a conscious decision, I just felt like my brain wasn't prepared to let its guard down.

Fuck!
This wasn't the way I had pictured things going. You'd think after two years of playing this scene out in my head every night before bed, and another two of practicing and polishing when Rachel, Maya inevitably drifted into my head as she always did, I'd have come up with something a bit more refined.

I hadn't counted on my tongue freezing up, nor my brain turning into mush.

"Don't be. You shouldn't be, it's true." She sobbed.

I bit down on my lip. This wasn't the way things were supposed to go. There was a reason I'd made the decision to stop chasing her, to stop thinking about her, to give up on that dream. It hurt too goddamn much. I'd done fine without emotions for two years, so why start now?

Don't lie to yourself, Conor. You haven't done without emotions, you've just hidden them from yourself
.

"What are you doing here, Rachel?"

M
aya

I looked at him, stunned silent by the callousness in Conor's voice.

Why did you bother inviting me here in the first place if all you wanted to do was hurt me?

I looked more closely into his eyes, refusing to flinch in the face of his cold stare. I wasn't willing to accept that he'd changed that much. He was hurting. I could tell that just by looking into those once-effervescent emerald globes – and it wasn't a great stretch to figure that that hurt had everything to do with me. It had been a long time since I'd stood so close to him, and we hadn't parted on good terms. We hadn't parted on
terms
at all – I'd just disappeared. Was it any wonder that he was still hurting?

No
.

"I'm not really called Rachel." I murmured. If I'd thought that telling the truth would feel like a weight falling off my shoulders, I was wrong.

"I guessed as much." Conor replied dryly, crossing his arms. It was a defensive comment that reflected his closed off posture.

He doesn't want to listen to my excuses
.

I let my head bow forward as I searched for the words that would make everything right again. Why was I here? What the hell was I hoping to achieve? The best case scenario was that I simply raked up old memories, and when Conor left, as he inevitably word, I'd be left to pick up the pieces. My life here was hard enough as it was.

Was he really worth it?

Yes
.
This is what you want, what you've been waiting for.

A drumbeat of nerves played its relentless tune in my head, the knowledge that I'd only get one shot at redeeming myself amplifying my tension. I'd once known Conor better than anyone alive, but that was a long time ago. He was a proud man, and fiercely determined, but if there was one thing I knew, it was that Conor could be set in his ways.

"I'll tell you everything." I said softly. I knew that telling the whole ugly truth was the only option at my disposal that stood even the faintest chance of succeeding.

Can I?

An image of a high school boyfriend's face, bruised and battered at the hands of my father's thugs simply for having the temerity to ask me out on a date, flashed into my mind. Conor wasn't Jake – an innocent, sweet guy who'd barely understood that some people had dads who weren't accountants, or lawyers, or something equally dull – and safe.

No, Conor was a man who came from the streets, a man who could be equally at home in the seedy underbelly of every city he visited, and a man who understood the cliques, the strife and the hard ways of life in the criminal underworld.

Conor was no fool – now that he'd met my father, he would have quickly picked up on everything he needed to know about him to understand exactly how evil a man he truly was.

His weight shifted fractionally, an unconscious response to my distracted silence, and it betrayed his desperate desire to learn exactly why I'd abandoned him without so much as a word of farewell.

But I still couldn't shake the image of Jake's broken face – the cloud that had lain over my life, holding me back from romantic entanglements for years. Perhaps, for his own safety, I didn't have to tell Conor everything…

Seriously, Maya. Don't lie to yourself
.
This isn't about Conor's safety – this is about you being afraid to lose him. Again
.

"My real name is Maya, Maya Antonov," I whispered, struggling to quiet the voice inside me. "Not Rachel. I lied to you, back then. I had to."

"Why," Conor asked, demandingly.

Why?
It was such a simple question with so many answers.
Why
was my father so controlling?
Why
had my mother never challenged him? Why had he sent me to college in Ireland

Of course, there was one answer that lay at the bottom of all the mystery and at the heart of the intrigue. But it was the one answer I couldn't – didn't dare – give.

"Why?" I repeated helplessly, searching for a way to put into words something I'd struggled to overcome for my entire life.

"You've met my father, so you know the kind of man he is. I didn't have a choice. He sent me to college in Dublin to, I dunno, keep me away from his enemies. It was street warfare back then, nobody was safe, not even –." My voice cracked as I was assailed by a wave of grief that I normally kept locked far away, where it couldn't hurt me.

"Not even?" Conor prompted.

I looked him in the eye. "Not even my mother."

He flushed red with embarrassment for making me relive the memory. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." I shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, she was a great woman."

But she was always too scared of Dad to actually stand in his way during his periodic rages. She failed a mother's biggest task – to protect her children. I won't.

Conor filled the silence as I tailed off, captured by my memories. "So you had to pretend to be someone you weren't?" He prompted.

"No!" I exclaimed. "Well, yes. But everything I said, everything I told you – it was all real."

He raised his eyebrows disbelievingly. "Except your name. That seems like a pretty fundamental thing to lie about, doesn't it, now?"

I stared at the man whose memory I'd loved for years, the man I'd had to leave. Was he still the same gentle giant I'd fallen for so many years before, I wondered, or had my leaving changed him somehow – embittered him. And if he
had
changed, was it permanent?

I looked around the room, noticing its disarray as if for the first time – the beer bottles he hadn't managed to clear away, the clothes strewn around the room, the suitcase he was living out of dumped haphazardly next to a wall.

Add to that the fact that Conor was now a traveling martial arts fighter who made his living hitting men in a cage, it was hard to avoid the creeping suspicion that he'd never fully recovered from me leaving. It was what I'd feared all these years, but brought vividly to life.

I pulled my mind back to the present. "Yes. I was going to tell you, I promise, but –."

He interrupted, his voice low and husky, his eyes glinting with the fierce, determined zeal of a man who was finally getting to ask the questions he'd held onto for years. "But you could never find the right time?"

I nodded mutely, tears prickling my eyes as I too was forced to deal with memories I hadn't fully unpacked in years. I let my head sink, unable to bear the pressure of Conor staring back at me with those deep, hurt green eyes. I'd known him long enough to know exactly how he was feeling right now – the same pain as a wounded animal. It was perhaps worse even than the hurt I was experiencing, because he couldn't, or wouldn't, express it out loud. If I knew him, he'd soon be off to look for a punching bag to hit.

He surprised me.

He closed the distance between us, and before I knew it his hand was on my shoulder, pressing down, comforting. The touch was electric. My body remembered it as if we'd only parted yesterday, and it reacted with a shiver. It had always had a mind of its own around Conor…

"Don't cry, girl." He murmured softly, his lilting accent suited so perfectly to providing comfort, so unusual for a man who looked as dangerous as he did, the kind of man you wouldn't want to pass late at night in a darkened alley.

I couldn't turn to look at him, couldn't bear to see that hurt in his eyes. He hadn't moved his arm from my shoulders, nor stopped his hand from gently stroking my upper arm. He smelled the same, too – of the salty scent of fresh sweat on his skin, and the heat of his favorite Irish whiskey on his breath.

"You've been drinking," I whispered back.

He threw his head back and laughed uproariously. "Have you forgotten that much about me? I'm Irish, for God's sake – and I had a bleeding fight tonight!"

I flushed and turned my head automatically to face him. It was like barely a moment had passed, like I was still that same naive young girl who'd wandered into the wrong part of Dublin – his part, and he was still the same eighteen-year-old kid who'd put his fists up and his street-cred on the line to save me – a girl he'd never met before.

I shivered with the memory of how close I'd come to…

Don't think about it
.

He'd saved me once. Could he do it again?

I didn't dare think about it. Long years of bitter experience had taught me that to think about salvation was inevitably to hope for it. And Alexandria isn't a place that rewards an emotion as fleeting or as ephemeral as hope.

No, it was safer to focus on what I had right in front of me. And besides, it wasn't like I was capable of much
thinking
right now, anyway. Not with Conor so close. I'd spent so many years lying in bed at night, dreaming of this moment, dreaming of us being reunited. Okay, sure – this old, faded motel wasn't exactly where I had pictured our reunion going down, and sure, I'd imagined a softer bed…

But what really mattered was that he was here at all.

After all this time, he was here, sitting next to me with his arm around my shoulders. I didn’t even know how we’d come to sit down, like my brain was ignoring anything but his presence, here, next to me And all the rest? The stained, ratty curtains; the springs pushing their way out of the old mattress, all of it. It simply faded away.

My heartbeat was the only thing I could still feel – like my body was extending a lifeline to me, something to hold on to. As for the rest of me? It was numb. It was as though, now that everything I'd dreamed of was actually happening, my conscious brain had decided that this was precisely the right time to switch off, to leave me clinging onto a raft of hope in a sea of emotion,

BOOM BOOM, BOOM BOOM!

The sound of my heart thundered in my ears like waves crashing down on a stormy pebble beach.

"Conor…" I whispered.

Honestly I had no idea whether I actually whispered it or not, because I could already barely tell what was real and what wasn't. I had an awful, lingering suspicion that this was all a horrible dream, and that I might wake up at any time, soaked with sweat in my own bed, and violently gut-clenchingly alone.

If this is all just a dream, you better make the most of it!

Four years of enforced celibacy does things to a girl, things even the most energetic fingers can't fix. Though God, I've tried.

Conor didn't answer me with words. He answered me the only way he knew how – with his body. He pressed his hard, lithe frame against mine, his body searing with heat, and I melted against him, my curves fitting his edges like we'd never been apart.

I felt like I was home, like if he picked me up and held me against him nothing could ever tear us apart. My mind knew that whatever was happening between us right now was as likely to be fleeting as to last – perhaps more so.

I couldn't understand how my father would allow this to happen. Didn't even want to try, because it reminded me of how he'd already once ripped us apart. Even if this didn't stand a chance, I wanted Conor to have me, to hold me,
to possess me
, so I'd at least have one last memory of happiness.

Don't think about that. Be present
.

My body took my brain's mild reproach on-board at full throttle, and I felt every nerve ending in my entire body light up, like an electric current was coursing through my body, heading down my spine and branching off at every joint to fire up my senses and stoke the fire burning between my legs.

I've never accuse Conor of being a wordsmith, but he’s not half bad at using his tongue.

"I'm going to make you scream," he whispered, pressing his face close against my ear. "Until you beg for me to stop."

Just hearing that lilting, soft Irish accent describing the things he wanted to do to me was practically enough to make me come. Feeling his warm, wet tongue licking my ear at the same moment his fiery red Gaelic stubble grazed against my cheek already had me sighing with pleasure.

"I won't." I said with a voice breathy with anticipation. I'd been thinking about him for years – no matter how long we spend on this bed, there was no chance I was going to tire of feeling him on top of me, with me, in me.

And besides, even the memory, the nightmare, of my celibacy was enough to compel me to throw myself into this like this was the last sex I'd ever have. Hell, if my father ever found out, it might be.

"We'll see." He growled provocatively, as if I'd thrown down a gauntlet – like now his manhood was on the line. It only seemed to make him want to redouble his efforts, to caress my body, to stroke it, to pleasure me ever more energetically. I hadn't meant it that way, but I sure wasn't complaining.

Wherever he touched me, I quivered, my body remembered how he'd once played it like a fiddle, reminded of how my legs would clench around his head, how my thighs would tremble, how my back would arch and my hands closed around the bed sheets, grabbing handfuls of the soft white material as my body fell away into orgasm. The muscle memory overrode any conscious thought that still lingered in my brain, unleashed me from the mental bonds that my father's restrictive, jealous captivity had left behind.

Conor slowly began to undress me, his fingers tracing their way underneath my top and leaving fiery lines of pleasure on my hyper-sensitive skin. Suddenly an aching, dull pain coursed through my body. I grabbed his hand.

"Stop." I begged anxiously. "Hold up, will you?"

"What's wrong?" He asked, looking at me with eyes tinged with worry. "If you don't want to do this…"