Crash: A Bad Boy MMA Romance (3 page)

I woke up to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. When I turned over, looking for Harper, she was gone. I opened my eyes with a start, not wanting to believe that she’d left. When I sat up and looked around, it was clear that she was gone. A single pair of footprints led back towards the resort.

I’d been with a lot of women in my life, but the night before had been different. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t understand why it was special. Harper wasn’t the kind of girl that I usually fucked after one of my fights or on a night of barhopping intoxication.

There was something sweet and sensitive about her. There was a cleanness in her soul that I never saw in my world. She’d given herself to me with such vulnerability and trust.

And without a condom.

That was totally against my rules. I always used a rubber with the kinds of chicks that I fooled around with. It was the only way I’d stayed disease-free and hadn’t ended up becoming somebody’s baby daddy. That was the last thing that I wanted. I’d believed Harper when she’d told me that she was on the pill. She was a doctor, or so she’d said. I assumed a doctor knew what the hell she was talking about.

I sat on the beach and looked out at the breakers beyond the shore. A seagull flew overhead, squawking in the early morning sunlight. While I knew that this was probably just some vacation fling that Harper would end up regretting, I couldn’t help wanting to see her again. That was a totally new feeling for me. With most women, I couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. Harper’s innocence and beauty made her irresistible. Just thinking about her made my cock stiff inside my sandy, crinkled board shorts.

I told myself to get over it and get her out of my head. I didn’t have time for a woman, especially a woman like Harper. She was some well-educated doctor while I was just a dirty fighter who put his life on the line for the chance to beat some other dude to a bloodied pulp. We were total opposites.

I’d taken lives while in the military and I beat people for a living. Harper saved lives and healed wounds. It could never work between us. She deserved some professional, stable type of guy who wore a suit to work every day. Not some gritty soldier with a bloodied gash over his eye and chip on his shoulder.

I’d grown up on the wrong side of the tracks with a single mother. Mom had done the best she could with what she had, and I loved and respected the woman. She had never told me who my father was. She’d only mentioned that it was never meant to be.

Even with my mother’s consoling words, I couldn’t forgive any man who would abandon his own child. That was another reason I didn’t want to knock up any of the hoes that I slept with. I didn’t want to play a repeat of my own dad’s lack of fathering. If I ever had a kid, someday in the future, I’d want to be there for him the way my father never was for me.

A confused swirl of emotion churned in my stomach as I stood from the beach and began walking towards the resort. I wanted to find Harper, tell her how I felt and maybe get the chance to see her again. The United States was a big country; it wasn’t very likely that we’d bump into each other again.

I brushed my hand down my side, wiping the grit and sand from my skin. With a sigh, I walked up the beach. For the first time in my life, I felt lonely. I had only known Harper for a night, and already she was under my skin.

This wasn't the way that I was used to living my life. Women came and went as far as I was concerned. That was the way that I liked it. Harper had attracted me with her good girl looks.

I'd been able to get inside her, but now she was inside me. If I'd had any clue that this would've happened, I don't know if I would have gone through with it. In my life, I couldn't afford the distraction of these kinds of feelings.

As an infantry soldier in the Marines, I’d had to have laser focus on my missions. As a fighter, it wasn't much different. The guys who had women and children waiting for them grew soft in my opinion. They couldn't take the risks they needed to take. If something happened to them, the tragedy was much greater than if something happened to a man like me, a man who had a different woman every night.

I walked into the resort and went to the front desk. I didn't know her last name. All I knew was that her name was Harper, she was a doctor, and she was definitely an American. The Brazilian man at the reception desk nodded at me, recognizing my face from the local fighting advertisements.

Mixed martial arts was big here in San Paulo. There weren’t many places I could go without getting recognized.

"Crash Nolan, I heard you were staying here,” he said in a thick accent. I nodded at him. Maybe since he was a fan of mine he could give me the information I needed.

"There was a girl here last night, an American. Her name is Harper. A pretty black girl with cornrows in her hair. She came with a couple of friends. They're all doctors or something or other. Could you tell me what room she’s staying in?"

The clerk smiled, seeming happy that he could help out an MMA champ and a hero like me. I gave him a winning smile and he looked at the computer. After a couple of keystrokes, he frowned.

"I'm afraid the three American girls checked out this morning. I remember the girl you're talking about; she was quite beautiful." He smiled and winked at me as if we had something in common for appreciating Harper's beauty.

Usually I would've told some crass joke about her ass or her pussy. But today it just made me angry. The look on his face made me want to punch him. I didn't want anyone else looking at her. That was a problem. But it wasn't going to stop me from trying to find her.

"Can you tell me any more information? Like her phone number, her last name, where she lives.”

"It was booked through an online travel agency. We just have phone numbers for the website and names."

"Do you at least have her last name?" I asked him.

"Harper's last name is Kelly. I'm afraid that's all I can tell you"

I grunted. “I'm sure there's less than twenty thousand Harper Kelly’s in the United States of America," I said, hitting my hand on the reception desk.

The clerk flinched as if I was going to punch him. Like I would waste my time on a skinny wimp who worked behind the reception desk at a resort.

"Thanks, bro," I said, walking away.

From behind me I heard, "Mister Nolan, Crash, can I have your autograph?"

I didn't even respond. It was a total waste of my time.

I walked up to my room feeling like a complete tool. I'd never gone through that much trouble for a woman I'd already banged.

Not even when I was a young kid and still believed that a woman could give me love and understanding. I’d learned from my time in the military that women were good for only one thing. But now I wasn't so sure.

I made it up to my room and slid my key card into the door. The lock clicked open and I went inside. I needed a shower and a decent night’s sleep before I headed home on a redeye flight back to the good ol’ USA.

After a quick shower, I went into the bedroom and slipped beneath the sheets in my bare skin. Thoughts of Harper flitted through my mind. Even as tired as I was, just the thought of her made me hard. I reached under the comforter and gripped my thick cock in my hand. Fatigue overtook me as I stroked down a few times, uncommitted to getting myself off.

The memory of the look in her eyes when I'd filled her, holding her body close in the moonlight, haunted me. That image was there as I drifted off to sleep. Harper Kelly had gotten under my skin.

If I ever did find her, I'd get to the bottom of it, deep inside her soft, aching cunt. Whatever power she had over me, I would find out why. I would find out what it was about her that made me ache and yearn for a woman, and then I’d make it stop. 

Only two days after arriving home from Brazil, Ava, Mia and I all started our residency on the same day at Santa Monica General Hospital. It was a combination of everything I'd been working for my entire life. All the late nights studying and missing out on the frivolity of youth had come to this.

I was dog tired and jetlagged from the trip. Part of me resented Ava for convincing me to go against my better judgment and take a trip to Brazil right before our residency started. But I couldn't resent her completely.

The night that I'd spent with Crash I should have logically seen as a mistake. But deep down, I couldn't see it that way. It had been the hottest night of my entire life. I’d spent all those years being a good girl, doing everything I was supposed to do.

The night I spent with Crash, I'd escaped all of that, and I felt something tremendous and real, something hot and dirty but pure at the same time.

I kept telling myself that Crash didn't have any real feelings for me. Men like that never had real feelings for women. They just wanted to score with as many broads as they could before dying in some back alley knife fight or from contracting a deadly STD.

As much as I tried, I couldn't see him that way. Deep in my subconscious, I knew there was something else there. Something we had both felt under the moonlight, pulsing to the music and holding each other in the Atlantic Ocean.

It had been beautiful and tender, even though it had been fucking erotic and sexy in a way I'd never experienced before. I'd definitely never felt that with Jeremy.

Just as I was contemplating how much better the sex was with Crash, how much bigger his cock was, how much stronger his hands were then Jeremy’s, my ex-boyfriend walked up to me holding a briefcase and wearing a smarmy smile on his face. I turned away, trying to avoid his eyes. But it was too late.

"Baby," he said, opening his arms.

I turned back to him, giving him a civil smile that I didn't mean. After how he treated me before I'd broken up with him, I really didn't ever want to see him again. Unfortunately, I wasn't going to be able avoid him since he worked as a pharmacy sales rep in my area. We'd probably be bumping into each other for the rest of my career.

"First day on the job?" he said, lifting his briefcase and putting it on the counter in front of the nurse’s station. One of the nurses gave him a nasty glare, but he ignored her. I fiddled with a stethoscope around my neck and straightened my white coat. I was a doctor, dammit. I might be a first year resident on my first day, but I was a
doctor
. I deserved that title, and I deserved some respect. He shouldn't be addressing me as “baby” in the hospital.

"Hello, Jeremy," I said. "Selling a new brand of erectile dysfunction medication?" I gave him a meaningful smirk. I could see the anger flash in his eyes at the insult. Jeremy didn't have erectile dysfunction, per se. He just had an incredibly small cock and zero stamina.

"I'm here to talk with the hospital’s pharmaceutical buyer about this new blood pressure medication. I thought you'd learned more about my work in the three years we spent together," he said, as if trying to insult my intelligence.

"Well, good luck with that. I have my rounds. I'm on call in the emergency room and my attending is expecting me there in two minutes. I don't have time to talk."

"Wait, wait, wait, baby. We haven't seen each other in so long. I thought we could get together and chat about old times."

He gave me that smarmy smile and ran his hand back through his slicked back black hair. He made me cringe inwardly, but I didn't let him see how much he disgusted me on the outside.

I had, in fact, spent the last three years with this man. Thinking too badly about him was a reflection on myself, and my own taste.

After spending a night with Crash, I was beginning to think differently about myself. Crash and Jeremy couldn't be any more different. Not that I had a relationship with Crash. It was a one-night stand for God’s sake. Why was I thinking it was any more than that?

Standing in front of Jeremy and remembering the sex that we'd had over the last three years, I realized it never felt as intimate or as hot and erotic as the one night I spent with Crash. Hell, I didn't even know Crash’s last name. Crash wasn't even his real name! But that night had rocked my world. I'd never be the same again.

“I just don't have time, Jeremy," I said, trying to brush him off as politely as possible. The last thing in the world that I wanted to do was go out with him, for any reason. The entire relationship had been so ridiculously controlling.

A month before I left for Brazil, he had told me that we were going to get married next year. He hadn't even asked me. He hadn't even given me a ring. He just said we're getting married next year.

The year after that, we were going to have our first baby. After the baby was born, I would drop surgery and become a pediatrician. I didn't want to be a pediatrician. I didn’t have anything against pediatricians or anything. My mom was a pediatrician. But I'd spent the last ten years of my life studying to become a surgeon.

I was the top of my class. I was the best young surgeon that I knew. The chief of surgery at Santa Monica General had told me so himself. He'd taken me under his wing and had been mentoring me the entire last year of school. I wasn't going to give away my dream just because Jeremy had decided that's the way things were going to be.

I tried to explain that to Jeremy, but he just wouldn't hear it. He kept insisting that since I was going to be staying home with the baby, I would need to have a less intense job.

He assumed we would be living on his pharmacy sales income and I would work in some upscale clinic giving immunization shots millionaires’ children. Well, that sort of thing might work for my mom. But it was never what I wanted to do.

When I’d chosen to follow in my mother's footsteps and enter medicine, it was never with the intention of becoming anything but a surgeon.

Jeremy knew that, but he just didn't care. He had his own way of looking at things. And he never looked at anyone else’s point of view. If I ever had a kid, I didn't intend to give up my career or my dream. I’d find a way to make it work. I’d get a really great nanny, or maybe two.

"Another time, then," Jeremy said as I walked away. From behind my back, I could hear him flirting with the annoyed nurse who was entering data into her computer. What an asshole.

I made my way into the emergency room where we were doing our rounds with the attending physician. I was right on time, but everyone else was already assembled. This was just not me. If I hadn’t been stopped by Jeremy, I would've been here five minutes ago.

"Nice of you to join us, Dr. Kelly," the attending physician said.

Unlike the chief of surgery, our attending physician did not like me. She was always pushing me and criticizing me. I followed the rest of the junior residents through the emergency room, diagnosing cases and participating in minor care.

By the end of my fourteen-hour shift, I was completely exhausted. When Ava and Mia wanted to go for drinks, I respectfully declined. I had to catch up on sleep after the Brazil trip. And if I wasn't going to be sleeping, I planned to be studying new developments in surgery.

I went back to the little house we all shared since medical school and continued unpacking my bags from Brazil. Since passing my medical exams and receiving my certification, everything had been a blur.

We’d been studying for days straight to pass the test, and sometimes I didn't even know which way was up. Then we went straight to Brazil after passing. I could keep up, like any young resident. I was built for this kind of thing. But that didn't mean it wasn't taking its toll. Unlike Ava and Mia, who had barely passed their exam, I completed the test with an almost perfect score.

I put in more hours studying, which meant I'd lost more sleep. Residency would mean insane hours, working all day and night for peanuts. But medicine was my passion, and I would do anything to achieve my goals. Someday, I knew it would all pay off, and I was willing to sacrifice a little bit of pain for my compelling future.

As I unpacked my clothes, my birth control packet fell onto the bed. I picked it up, remembering to take my pill for that day. I glanced down at the pills and counted them. Even through my sleepy haze, I could tell something was wrong. Then it occurred to me what it was. I hadn't taken the pill in a week and a half. How could I have let that happen?

I had always been so responsible. After all those years with Jeremy, I never missed a day. How could I have been so irresponsible? It was completely unlike me in every way. Even with all of the studying, the travel, and the confusion, there was no excuse.

Then I thought about the night Crash and I spent together. I'd been drunk and stupid. Having unprotected sex with a stranger was the dumbest thing I'd ever done. Now, I realized that I wasn't even on the pill at the time.

Shit, shit, shit.

What had I done? I sat down on my bed, my head in my hand. A tear slipped down my cheek. I couldn't believe that I was crying. Stress usually didn't get to me. But the thought of having made a mistake like this, it could ruin my entire life. It could ruin my career and take all of my chances from me. And to think, it was with a man whose name I didn't even know. My mother would be so disappointed in me.

After all the years she’d spent single and working to support me, she’d just recently met someone. Supposedly, he was some kind of bigshot business person with a huge mansion in Malibu, only a few miles from the hospital, unlike my current house in San Fernando.

Mom kept telling me I should come visit, but I hadn't yet. She wanted me to meet her boyfriend. I couldn't even think about it. I'd made such a massive mistake. Mom always pushed me to excel and to work hard. Having completely unprotected sex with a stranger was not the woman she'd raised me to be.