Punching and Kissing

by Helena Newbury

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© Copyright Helena Newbury 2015

The right of Helena Newbury to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

This book is entirely a work of fiction. All characters, companies, organizations, products and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, events, companies, organizations or products is purely coincidental.

This book contains adult scenes and is intended for readers 18+. It contains scenes of violence and a scene that may be triggering for rape survivors.

Cover photo: Mr Big Photography/iStockPhoto

Acknowledgments

Thank you to:

My fantastic street team!

Liz, my editor.

DB, Pearl, Jenny and Olivia, my beta readers

And to all my readers :)

Sylvie

I didn’t belong there.

The crowd was a baying, howling mass of wild eyes and open mouths, leaning far over the concrete balcony to gawp. The heat of a hundred frenzied bodies pressed in on me from all sides until I could barely catch my breath.

I had to get out of there but I needed to stay. I owed it to Alec.

I stumbled through the crowd, making my way around the edge of the huge, circular room. I kept my gaze fixed on the graffiti, on the rusted pipes...anything to avoid looking at what was going on below us.

There was a cry of pain and I glanced down before I could stop myself. One man had the other on the floor, fists pummeling his face. There was only one rule: it went on until someone couldn’t get up.

Welcome to The Pit.

I looked away, disgusted, and tried to move faster. Elbowing or pushing isn’t in my nature and I was the lone woman in a roomful of hyped-up, drunk men. So I muttered apologies and sneaked through gaps. Luckily, they barely noticed me—not the rich guys who’d come there for an edgy walk on the wild side, not the local guys who were one bad bet away from disaster. Everyone was going nuts, jumping and yelling and punching the air.

No, wait. Not everyone.

I stopped in my tracks as I saw him. He stood like a rock in an ocean, a full head taller than the people around him and moving not even an inch as they ebbed and swelled against him. His broad back was like a cliff and his shoulders seemed twice as wide as mine. He was in a sleeveless top, arms folded across his chest, and the heavy swells of his shoulders and biceps led down to thickly corded forearms.
Big,
and ripped, as well. But it wasn’t his size or his muscles that made me stop, nor even the way he stood so still.

His hood was raised, throwing his face into shadow. Who wore a hood, in this heat?

I moved forward and lost sight of him for a moment. When I saw him again, I was closer. I was looking up into that shadowed face, now. I could just catch glimpses: a jaw dusted with dark stubble, a full lower lip pressed into a tight line. He was watching, but he hadn’t lost himself like the others. Maybe he was sickened by what was happening downstairs. Maybe, like me, he didn’t belong in this place.

I passed behind him, willing myself not to look. I made it three feet beyond him before the urge got too much and I glanced back over my shoulder. At first, I could see only shadows under the hood but then—

As one of the cheap fluorescent tubes flickered, I caught a glimpse of eyes: savagely blue and brutally hard. Starkly beautiful, they saw every weakness and gave no mercy.

I tore my eyes away, panting like I’d just missed a speeding truck. I’d been wrong. He wasn’t immune to this place at all—he was already lost. And if I didn’t belong here; he could have been born here.

I tried to move faster through the crowd. A drink. I needed a drink. I headed for the guy I’d seen on the far side of the room, the one who sold sodas out of a cooler at six dollars a time. He knew his market—six dollars was nothing to the guys who came here, the ones who bet thousands of dollars and then drove home in their Lexuses, speed-dialing their wives to apologize for working late. To me, six dollars was a day’s food. But I was going to pass out if I didn’t drink something.

I bought a Dr. Pepper and ran the cool metal can over my forehead, closing my eyes, letting the chill soak into me and calm me, pushing away the remembered fear from when I’d glimpsed that guy’s expression.

Fear and...something else.

The eyes had been gorgeous—coldly beautiful beyond anything I’d ever seen. And that jaw, those lips, that body—the expression had sent ice down my spine but, when it reached my groin, it had turned into something else entirely. Cold had become hot. Fear had become—

I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep breath.
Stupid.
Sure, from the glimpses I’d seen, the guy might just be hot as hell under that hood. But that expression...he was like the distilled essence of this place.

Stay. The fuck. Away.

I popped the top and drank. The cold soda foamed down my throat like liquid sex. A calming chill soaked through me and I felt my heart gradually slowing down.

I drained the whole can before I looked up and saw him. The hooded man. Closer, this time, no more than ten feet away.

And staring right at me.

The momentary cool from the soda boiled away in an instant. A wave of heat shot through me, rippling upward from my groin. I wasn’t ready for how deeply sexual his gaze was, how it connected with me right where I lived.

I told myself,
of course he’s not looking at you.
I’m not much to look at. My brother’s the eye-catching one, all blond hair and muscle, like my dad. I take after my mom—small and slender, with boobs like half-oranges.

I wrenched my eyes from him and stared fixedly into the distance, waiting for him to look away.

But I could still feel his gaze on the side of my face, never wavering for a second.

Aedan

There were about a million reasons I shouldn’t be there: it was too damn hot; I had to be up early for work the next morning; I didn’t want to give
him
the satisfaction of seeing me at one of his fights.

But there was something that mattered more than any of that. That itch, that deep-down itch that can’t be scratched any other way but feeling your fists connect. The rush you get as you duck and weave, hands up, taking the punishment and then returning it tenfold.

I don’t do that anymore. But the itch is still there. Watching it is the next best thing.

By rights, indulging myself like that should have brought something bad down on me. A lightning bolt from above, maybe. But someone saw fit to send me a whole different kind of divine intervention.

She was the only woman in the place, but she would have stood out if she’d been in some uptown club filled with supermodels. Long, black hair, maybe even darker than mine, so dark it was almost blue-black. A slender, lithe body that made me want to take the flat of my hand and run it all the way down from her neck to the curve of her calf, like stroking a cat. She was wearing a bubblegum-pink
Curious Weasels
t-shirt and it molded to the soft swells of her breasts in a way that made my breath catch.

No.
Not her. I wasn’t going to torture myself with a girl like that. Too beautiful. Too pure. I didn’t deserve someone like that. Oh, sure, I could grab her wrist and pin her with my Irish eyes and tell her she was coming home with me,
now
. Maybe she’d see what was underneath the hood and freak out, but maybe she’d be okay with it. Then we could go back to my apartment. My body between those sweet thighs, driving up into her, those cute little tits filling my hands—

Jesus, would that really be so bad?

Yeah, it would. In the morning, she’d realize I wasn’t some fantasy bad boy; I was just
bad.
Not an exciting walk on the wild side but a full-on savage, only good for two things. She’d look down at my big, calloused hands as they roved over her naked breasts and start to think about what else they’d done—how much pain and damage I’d dealt. She’d panic and make excuses and run back to her safe little life, wherever the hell that was, and it’d be over. Or, worse, she’d hang around just long enough for me to fuck up her life. I wasn’t going to risk that. No matter how perfect her tits were.

I watched her moving through the crowd. Damn, she was just a scared little thing. Why didn’t people make way for her? I pegged her for about twenty, five years younger than me. It was only when she glanced my way again that I saw the pain in her eyes. She
was
about twenty, but she’d seen more bad shit than someone her age should.

She bought a soda and ran the can over her forehead—right there, in front of me, like it was nothing at all. I drank in every detail: the slow roll of the can as it kissed her skin, the soft, long lashes as she closed her eyes in pleasure, the drop of ice water that fell from the bottom of the can and fell—