TKO (A Bad Boy MMA Romance) (5 page)

              “First time for everything. But that’s why I’m here.” He grunted rudely. I stood up and went to pick up some stretching equipment used to loosen and strengthen muscles and joints. It was time to get started, and I was actually kind of excited about it. After all, one upside to being a physiotherapist was that I was in the unique position of getting to torture Montoya with healthy, beneficial, totally necessary workouts. Sure, they would make him feel better and restore him to fighting health in the long run, but in the meantime they’d have the added bonus of kicking his ass.

              Maybe I had been a little too sharp with Gemma at our first few sessions. Not that I cared what she thought of me—after all, she was just a means to an end. But shit, did she ever know how to bite back.

              My first two sessions were a testament to that.

              As we’d gotten started on the actual session, she had me start on some very specific stretches to “identify target areas that will need special attention in the next few weeks,” as she put it icily. I figured they would amount to more or less what I would have gotten out of an average warmup session in routine training.

              I was way off.

              She started instructing me to move my arm at its usual angles as far as I could stretch it, and right off the bat, it was obvious which muscles and tendons were giving me the most pain in an immediately tangible sense. I fought to keep from showing pain, but I could tell that Gemma wasn’t a stranger to reading subtle facial cues. I couldn’t hide my pain from her, and that pissed me off from the start.

              After that, she instructed me to do more or less the same with some leg motions--other general stretches that would move the muscles around my hip and test out what was still in function and what wasn’t.

              Identifying every weakness the injury had given me didn’t put me in a good mood. The thing was, though, that with every pressure point she identified, the more eager she seemed to get to explore the extent of my injury.

              At first, I figured it must have been part of whatever cockamamey exercise routine she’d been taught in college. But as the session went on, she had me moving and stretching in ways I never would have thought to when I was still in full health.

              “Tendons are multidimensional things, and only exploring how they work on a two-way street, as it were, won’t do us much good,” she had said, but with every jolt of pain I felt as I moved my body around, she almost seemed that much more eager to keep going.

              That’s how the next few hours passed--with my being instructed to push my body to its newly confined limits, especially getting prodded onto the borders of those limits at the expense of more than a little pain.

              The session after that wasn’t much different. I showed up to see a lot of resistance training gear laying around the room, but it was all the kind of stuff amateur bodybuilders get started on: rubber bands, hand grips, that kind of thing.

              I was still sore from the first session when we started, so I was in a foul mood from the very beginning. On top of that, I could tell that Gemma hadn’t forgotten our first session. She started me first thing with some heavier resistance training than the equipment in the room seemed to indicate.

              “It’s entirely possible you may be correct in assuming yourself fit enough to recover more quickly than most, Mr. Montoya,” she had said as I bit back intense pain from attempting to use one of the more tense rubber bands she provided for me to stretch with. “It would be helpful to use this time to gauge that assessment.”

              I was determined to make a point, so I powered through the first half hour of grueling exercise.

              “You almost seem disappointed,” I remarked after that point, and indeed, I was starting to get used to the punishment. “Am I not wincing enough today for you?”

              “I don’t care about that, Mr. Montoya,” she said with sigh striding over to me, “but your posture isn’t quite right--here,” she said, pressing into my side from behind while I had the band stretched out taut, and the pain that shot through me was so intense I nearly let the thing fly across the room.

              I could almost feel her smirk behind me as I let it go slack, breathing heavily.

              “I had it just fine.”

              “If your posture isn’t right, you’re just going to train your muscles to function every bit as improperly.”

              We carried on like that for the rest of the session, and by the time I collapsed into bed that night, I was so frustrated I wanted to punch a wall. But the morning after, I was surprised to find myself about halfway out the door of my apartment before realizing I’d hardly winced once since getting out of bed.

              I still felt stiff as a board, and I knew anything overly strenuous would put me out of commission again, but I’ll be damned, it really seemed to be working.

              That put me into a relatively good mood when I reached the gym for our third session.

              “You seem to be in a relatively good mood, Mr. Montoya,” Gemma said as I strode into the training room with a smile on my face.

              “Just happy to see your face in the morning, Gemma,” I said, the hints of sarcasm laid on pretty heavy.

              “Well then,” she said, pointedly ignoring my tone and motioning for me to follow her to another room down the hall, “we won’t waste any time getting to business. Today, you get a break from all that torture you think I’m putting you through. You’ve applied plenty of stress to the tendons we’ve identified, and I think they’re all fine and stable, but now, I’m going to help loosen things up a bit.”

              I followed her a short walk down the hallway, and I gave a smile at her words as she pushed open the door to the next room over. “Loosen things up? What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t think things are casual enough between us? I never knew you felt that way.”

              She shot a look back at me that could kill, and it only made my smile broaden as I lifted my eyes up from her ass. I was teasing her, but the look on her face told me it wasn’t exactly appreciated. Maybe this was my chance to get back at her for all that punishment over the past couple of days.

              “I’m your physiotherapist, Mr. Montoya, and I maintain a professional relationship with all my clients,” she said as she directed me into the room. I rolled my eyes as I stepped in. I’d heard that from a lot of women before, it didn’t tend to mean much in the long run.

              Inside, I was surprised to see a few massage chairs, and I raised my eyebrows. “Huh, and here you were just starting to make me think physiotherapy was just going to be a lot of punishment.”

              Now it was her turn to roll her eyes at me, and she looked over her chart as she made her way to the chair. “Knock it off. Now, I’ll need you to lay down here, face-up. I’m going to start by working on some of your upper arm muscles, and we’ll work down from there.”

              “Sure,” I said, disinterested. For all I cared, this was just a chance to check out mentally for the next few minutes and enjoy myself. “Figure I can use a day off.”

              “This isn’t a day off, Mr. Montoya,” she corrected me curtly as I sat down on the massage table and swung my legs over to lay back, looking up at the ceiling. “This is just as much of a vital part of the healing process as those exercises you seem to hate so much.”

              “Sure, sure,” I said, yawning. “So what do you want me to do?”

              “Stretch out your arm like so,” she said, demonstrating, and I mimicked her movements. To my surprise, she smiled at my response, and I arched an eyebrow.

              “What’s so funny?”

              “See how easy that was?” she said with a nod to my arm. “Two sessions ago, that would have had you wincing. You’re already starting to see some progress. I’m guessing getting up and going in the morning the past few days has been surprisingly easy.” I could see the words ‘you’re welcome’ in her eyes as she smiled at me, so I just scoffed in return to her remark.

              “My body is a few notches above what you were probably used to at whatever university you graduated from,” I remarked lazily. “You were probably treating volunteers from what, the tennis team?” There was some playfulness in my tone, but she didn’t seem to take it that way, her smile dropping into a frown as she set her clipboard aside to move around to my arm.

              “Well, having a highly fit body does count for something, but as they say, the bigger they are, the harder they tend to fall,” she commented, and I watched her hands go to my muscles, starting to feel around at some of the more tense areas. “You may have more muscles than a tennis player, but you can all have the same recalcitrant tendons.”

              As she said that and her fingers started to manipulate my arm and shoulder, I felt a slight wince of pain as she touched a sensitive spot. It was a light touch, but it was a spot she knew damn well was a sore one for me, and I could tell it was a warning. But I wasn’t about to let her off so easily.

              Despite her icy disposition, Gemma’s touch was surprisingly warm. The next few moments passed quietly as she explored my muscles. While her attention was on my arm, I had nothing else to look at, so my eyes almost unconsciously fell on her as she worked.

              I had to admit, she was hot. Gorgeous, even. The past few sessions, I really hadn’t been in a mood to see past her clipboard and instructions, but up close like this, I noticed the smattering of freckles on her cheeks, accentuating her blue eyes. And her eyes were wide and luminous, at that, the room’s lights playing in their intensity as she kept her gaze focused on her work.

              I turned my eyes back up at the ceiling, dispelling the thoughts in my head. But as her strawberry-blonde hair brushed against my skin as she leaned over to start really massaging my side, sending a rippling, relaxing sensation down my laterals, my eyes flitted her way again.

              This time, they fell on her breasts. A slight stirring between my legs told me I liked what I saw.

             
For the pencil-necked university grad I was expecting, I’ve gotta say, I could have asked for worse people to have to look at for the next few weeks.

              I smiled a little at the thought just in time for Gemma to glance up at me and raise an eyebrow. “See? Not so bad as you thought, is it?” I realized she was talking about the therapy, but I wasn’t going to let that line go to waste.

              “I was wondering if you were thinking the same thing,” I shot back with a cocky grin, and her smile dropped. The next moment, I bit back a wince as she pressed her thumb into a spot on my underarm that tugged at a muscle that had been giving me some of the worst problems from the first day.

              “I’m going to work on your hips now,” she went on, her professional defenses back up, and I chuckle.

              “What’s the matter, Gemma? You work on bodies for a living, I figured you’d appreciate good ones when you get the chance to work on them.”

              “I do appreciate good bodies, when I have the chance to work with them,” she shot back without missing a beat, and I felt a little put off by the remark, grunting as I looked back at the ceiling.

              “Relax your leg, I’m going to be moving it around to get some of the fluids in your hip back into action, so to speak,” she instructed me as she picked up my leg a little, her back to me.

              As if on instinct, my eyes drift to her ass as I feel her swivel my leg around, moving my leg around in my hip socket without any effort on my part. Her pants were tight-fitting, and before I realized it, something was stiffening between my legs as my mind drifted to imagining what she looked like without them on as her soft, gentle grip manipulated my leg.

              As she backed up to draw my leg up just a little, I noticed her eyes flit to the remarkably large bulge between my legs. She might have ignored it, trying to stay professional, but I didn’t have such reservations.

              “What, see another leg you’d like to work on after the left one?” I asked with a cocky smile, and as she moved, I reached my hand up and let her ass back straight into it.

              What happened following the indignant gasp she let out made me regret even getting up that morning.