Page 212 of Baby For The Mountain Man

BERKLEY

“I can’t believe you just walked off like that. How drunk were you?”

Naomi was grilling me for the third time since we got home from the fight. She asked me twenty questions at least before we went to bed last night and that had started up again as soon as we were eating breakfast the next morning. “I told you, I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know how I left my phone with you. I was congratulating that fighter and then all of a sudden I turned around and Josh was gone. And those two guys said that they knew where he went, he’d been talking to them earlier about a bet. I assumed they were telling the truth.” My naivety had surely gotten the best of me last night. There was something about all the chaos and the tension of the fight pumping through my system that put my guard down. Those guys could have beat me to a pulp or worse. I’d been so lucky that Dillon had found me when he did. I was completely indebted to him. Pizza and beer didn’t seem like it had been enough. But I didn’t have any way to get in touch with him to say thank you again. I had just left, like a complete idiot. I had an amazing conversation with the most attractive guy I had ever met in my life and yet I had nothing to show for it. Not even his goddamned phone number. I was a female failure.

“Girl, you are so damn lucky I can’t even tell you. I asked Josh and Elliott about those guys and apparently they were trying to shake them down for some bets that they never made. They were thugs.”

She had also told me that little piece of information about eight times. As soon as she sobered up last night and realized what happened, I thought she was going to call Josh and Elliott herself and ream them out for ever letting me out of their sight. When I left the pizza shop, she was hardly concerned with my absence, but by the time we grabbed cab and headed back to the sorority house she was a wreck. Completely annihilated after eight or more beers, and the guys were nowhere in sight. What assholes.

“I guess you won’t be seeing Elliott anytime soon then?” I asked as I sipped on orange juice and picked out some fresh fruit.

“Too loud,” she said, putting both of her hands on either side of her head. I couldn’t imagine her hangover was anything less than massive, and the only reason she was out of bed before noon was because we had a house meeting. First Saturday of the month, like clockwork.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I said are you going to see Elliott again? Because you can leave Josh and I off the guest list. There was zero spark there. Besides the fact that he was hot, he had nothing going for him. And then he lost me! I’m a goddamn person. How do you just lose a person?”

She put her head down on her folded arms. I was raising my voice again and killing her brain cells at the same time. “No, I’m not seeing him again.” I heard her mumble.

“Good, I’m glad.”

She raised her head just an inch. “What about you?”

I scowled at her. “I just told you, Josh and I had no spark.”

She sat up even further, grabbing a bottle of water and sipping it slowly. “I wasn’t talking about Josh. I was talking about that fighter guy. He was hot as fuck, and watching you like you were a piece of meat. You have to call him.”

I sighed, ready to admit my failure, “I didn’t get his number. I still can’t believe he saved me like that, like it was nothing. He just made me feel so… safe.”

Naomi smiled at me. “Are you sure he didn’t also make you feel hot and bothered?”

I blushed in spite of myself. “Yes, he made me feel that way too. But I know hardly anything about him.”

S

he had a spark in her eye that meant that she was hatching a plan. I waited for her to drop it like a bomb. “Then why don’t we just accidentally bump into him again?”

I raised an eyebrow at her, “I don’t think I’ll be hanging out in anymore creepy alleyways in the middle of the night for a long time. Not even for a guy.”

“There’s another fight, Thursday night. We should go! You have got to see this guy again. I just have this feeling, it’s like a fate or something.”

I didn’t think it was fate, but I wasn’t going to argue with her either. I was desperate to see Dillon again, to feel the connection between us. And if I got to see him with his shirt off, that was just a bonus.

SEVEN

DILLON

I trained hard at the gym all that week. Every time I smashed a guy’s face I imagined it was one of those two thugs who had gone after Berkley. I was fighting better than I ever had, anger sitting deep in my belly that came out through my hands. I was just toweling off after another round in the cage with a couple of rookies when a man I had only seen at fights approached me. He was older than me but not by much and in a black suit with shifty eyes. I could tell right away that something was off about him.

“You had a good fight last week. You won a lot of people a lot of money.”

I looked at him, deciding whether or not he was even worth my time to talk. “I’ve had a lot of good fights, I win a lot of people a lot of money. People like that.”

He smiled crookedly. “Yes they do. But fighters deserve a bigger cut, don’t you think?”

He passed me his business card, and it was for a gym on the other side of town. I’d heard of it in passing, but the fighters there weren’t good enough for me. “What’s my fighting to you, anyway?”

“When I see you, I see opportunity. I’m sure you’ve heard of the underground fights in town. My gym hosts them.”

So that’s who this asshole was. The guy who got fighters so beat up in underground fights that they could never go legit again. There were no rules. That wasn’t the type of reward I was interested in.

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