Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper (2 page)

“I know it wasn’t your fault.” More tears rolled down her cheeks. “T-there was nothing you could’ve done.”

“I could’ve swerved the other way.”

Well, there was that.

“I had a couple beers when the ball dropped. I don’t even know why I hung around Chuito’s when I should’ve left for Miami yesterday morning. I just hadn’t seen him in so long. Hell, I thought I was sober. I waited a couple of hours before I headed back home, but obviously—” He paused and then picked up Katie’s good hand, squeezing it tightly. “I really
am
sorry, Katie Foster. You seem like a sweet girl, and you didn’t need my shit luck rubbing off on you.”

“My luck isn’t all that great either,” she confessed as she squeezed his hand back rather than pull away. “Obviously.”

“Feel better. I promise you a messed up arm’s gonna end a lot better than what this accident is gonna do to me. You’ll get your revenge,
chica
.”

She heard the nervousness over the drinks he had. He was likely facing a DUI. He could’ve taken off like the other driver. Instead he was sitting there, jacketless, holding her hand.

“You should leave,” she whispered. “Go, and I’ll forget what your truck looked like. See if it’s still drivable.”

“I’m not leaving you.” He snorted as if the thought were ridiculous.

“But the drinking?”

“Your friend, Jules Wellings, she knew it was me who called 911. I met with her a couple of days ago hoping to get sponsored by the Cellar. Hell, I was staying with Chuito Garcia. He lives above her offices. She knows where to find me. I promise.” He gave her a sad smile, showing off white teeth. The bottom ones were a little crooked, making it obvious he hadn’t suffered through four years of braces like Katie had, but somehow that just added to his charm. “So we’ll just sit here together and face the bad luck head-on. That’s what I usually do. This time I got company. It’s all good.”

She looked back to this stranger with no little amount of admiration for his courage. He was a fighter. Even if he hadn’t just admitted to it, he had the look of a man who spent his days working out in the Cellar.

The Cuthouse Cellar, Garnet’s one claim to fame, was a state-of-the-art MMA training center in town. Every day it seemed more up-and-coming fighters chose the Cellar as their training camp. It was clear he was one of those men who came here looking for fame and glory, but unfortunately for this one, his life collided with hers instead.

What a shame.

She was still staring at him in amazement. Her intrigue with him was enough to keep her from crying. The pain still throbbed in her arm, radiating out to the rapid
thump, thump, thump
of her heartbeat, but with him near, it was almost as if that crazy strength it took to be an MMA fighter was rubbing off.

“Does it work?” she whispered.

He frowned. “Does what work?”

“Just f-facing it head-on?” she clarified. “The bad luck?”

He seemed to consider that for a moment before he grinned. “At least you know when the next punch is coming. Nothing worse than getting blindsided, right?”

“Right,” she agreed softly, looking down to her arm, trying to see how bad the damage was. All she saw was the blood. It made her stomach lurch, and she looked over to the fighter once more. “I’m gonna try that. F-facing things. Not hiding from my problems anymore.”

“Where I come from, teenagers would fuck with me when I was young. Hard kids. Thugs. Nothing fazed them. They’d use anyone to get the job done. They’d make eight-year-olds run their drugs if it kept the heat off them, and I wasn’t ready for all that. Then I figured out it was harder for them to threaten me if I was looking them dead in the eye.” He squeezed her hand once more. “That’s the one thing they can’t take from you. Your courage.”

“I’m not courageous,” she admitted, feeling her cheeks heat despite everything. “I’m the exact opposite o-of courageous.”

“You seem pretty brave to me.” He tilted his head to look at her with noticeable admiration. “All the girls I know would be freaking out and screaming their heads off right about now.”

The wail of sirens had him jumping out of the car before she could respond. He faced a possible DUI head-on, without even flinching. She watched him wave down Sheriff Conner, who beat the ambulance to the accident site. The sheriff came flying out of the car. He didn’t pay more than a passing glance to the young fighter other than to say, “Don’t you be going anywhere, boy.”

Then he was crawling into the passenger side of her car, filling up the small space with his powerful presence. She always forgot just how big the sheriff was until she was next to him. He was one seriously large fella, but Katie’s mind was on her fighter standing out in the snow without a jacket.

The sheriff touched the pulse point at her neck and shined a light in her eyes as he asked, “How ya doing, Katie?”

“O-okay. Listen, Sheriff—”

“Jules is calling your brother. She wanted me to tell you that she’ll make sure he meets you at Mercy General.” The sheriff leaned over her, shining his flashlight toward the door that held her arm trapped. “We need to make sure you don’t move until Tommy and the fire department get out here.”

“Yeah, but Sheriff—”

The sheriff picked up the radio on his hip and started speaking into it. Most of what he was saying was police jargon, but she got the gist of it. They needed bigger equipment out here to cut her out of this car. The fear washed over her in icy-hot waves. She used her good hand to pull the fighter’s jacket tighter around her, seeking comfort from it. Her instinct was to start crying again, but she realized now why her thoughts were scattered in other directions besides the pain. Extreme shock had settled in at some point. Her arm was still hurting, but her acknowledgment of it had faded to the background.

More sirens wailed in the distance. Help was coming. She should be relieved, but instead she looked back to the fighter, standing there illuminated by her headlights. The snow was falling in his dark hair and resting on his broad shoulders.

“It wasn’t his fault,” she said quickly to Sheriff Conner, wanting to get it out before the fire department showed up. “There was another car. This crazy woman swerved into his lane right as he was coming over the hill. None of this was his fault, Sheriff. It was just b-bad luck.”

“Okay, darling.” The sheriff squeezed her good hand. “Just focus on breathing easy and not moving until we can get you out. Can you do that?”

Katie took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah, but about—” She paused, realizing she’d never asked his name. “The m-man out there.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout Marcos. He’s a big boy, and there’s not a scratch on him.” The sheriff squeezed her hand once more. “You’re the one we’re gonna focus on right now.”

“It was just bad luck,” she repeated, thinking of not just the accident, but a long string of rotten luck and getting the impression she wasn’t alone as she stared at the fighter again. “It wasn’t his fault.”

Rather than respond, the sheriff got out of the car to meet the fire truck that pulled up. Katie got the distinct impression the fighter, Marcos, was low on his priority list, but Katie still worried about him.

The entire time they worked at cutting her out of the mangled mess of her car, she thought of Marcos. She would look for him, her gaze searching the accident site when the fear or pain got too much. She’d usually find him standing out of the way with a brown blanket over his shoulders. She wished she could hold his hand again, but there were firefighters everywhere. Tommy, the paramedic, sat next to her taking her vitals, talking in that calming voice of his that made it obvious why he was good at what he did. He had put a brace around her neck. He was getting her ready for the stretcher as the horrible grinding of metal being cut away made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

She was shaking. The shock was still clouding her brain. It blocked out some of the pain, but still she fought for clarity as the relief of finally being free made her vision haze. The world started to spin as they put her on a stretcher. Tommy had to take extra time with her arm, splinting it on a board. Katie didn’t have the nerve to look.

“I-I need the jacket,” she told them, knowing it had been tossed aside somewhere. She didn’t want it to end up at the tow yard. “P-please. I need to take it with me to the hospital.”

“Sure, darling.” Tommy gave her a warm smile that made more than a few Garnet women weak-kneed.

The paramedic was one of their most eligible bachelors, but Katie was still worried about her fighter. She breathed a sigh of relief when Tommy put the jacket over her as they wheeled her toward the ambulance. She was just starting to think everything might be all right when Sheriff Conner’s voice drifted over from the other side of the street.

“Have you been drinking tonight, Mr. Rivera?”

She wanted to scream at him to lie.

Instead she heard her fighter face it head-on. “Yeah, Sheriff, I had a few beers at midnight.”

She found herself staring at the roof of the ambulance before she could hear how it all played out. The sirens came to life. Tommy, the handsome paramedic, alternated between checking her vitals and writing things on his chart. All the while he laid on that charm he was famous for, obviously very accustomed to making horrible situations a little easier with the good looks God gave him.

Yet all she could think about was Marcos, the mystery fighter with kind eyes, dangerous tattoos, and a horrible case of bad luck almost as epic as hers.

Chapter Two

Miami

April 2014

The only good thing to come out of Marcos’s fated trip to Garnet County was getting out of that town without a DUI. Once the sheriff gave him the all clear, Marcos promptly headed back to Miami and attempted to forget everything about that week. To be safe, he went ahead and moved just in case the sheriff decided to change his mind and pin something on him.

Marcos’s past made him more than a little paranoid where the police were concerned. The old apartment had been a shithole anyway. Not that the next place was much of an improvement, but sometimes any change was good. A new place, a new job, a new cell number, a
new life.

That had been his grand plan after his dreams of being a professional fighter had officially ended the moment he ran into Katie Foster. More than losing the fighter spot at the Cuthouse Cellar, it was the accident itself that disturbed him.

He remembered the young, pretty brunette with no small amount of regret. There was something about those wide, honey-colored eyes framed by long, tear soaked eyelashes that haunted him. Her hair was the same shade of light brown as her eyes, long and wavy, the kind a man longed to touch just to see if it was as silky as it looked. Everything about her was soft and innocent in a way the women he knew weren’t. She’d been so pale in the night, making the blood stand out starkly on her cheeks and forehead. He’d seen a lot of terrible shit in his life, but that image disturbed him more than most. Perhaps because someone like Katie Foster was never meant to bleed like that, and knowing it had been his fault had him waking up at night in cold sweats.

That accident was churning up a fuckload of posttraumatic stress.

Even if Chuito had assured him she was recovered, he couldn’t shake the guilt or the strange pang he got in his chest when he remembered how she’d actually been concerned about him that night. Even with painful injuries, she had been willing to cover for him, and it just furthered his determination to stay out of trouble once he got home. He didn’t want to run into another Katie Foster again, and he was officially tired of the fast lane. He could work hard, keep his nose to the grindstone, and stay out of trouble long enough for life to somehow forget guys like him weren’t designed to grow old and live off a pension.

His intentions had been good, but it didn’t take long for it all to go to hell.

“You can’t fire me.” Marcos glared at his boss of the past several months, his eyes narrowed in disbelief. “I’m the best guy you got.”

Sebastian sighed and lowered his head as he mumbled, “You know the heat’s been sniffing around my place ever since you started. We’ve had four salvage inspections in the last three months. The cops came back last night. I can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry.”

Marcos felt that familiar white-hot rush of shame and anger wash over him. He couldn’t argue with that reasoning. If he were in Sebastian’s place, getting shaken down every few weeks by the cops, he’d probably fire the ex-con putting a target on his back too.

Even if he was the best body man in Miami.

“Yeah, whatever.” Marcos turned his back on him, determined to gather up his things and then go and get drunk.

Fuck it, what the hell was staying on the straight and narrow doing for him anyway? Clearly life didn’t want him to stay out of trouble.

“Tell your
tía
I’m sorry.”

Marcos winced, hating the reminder that his aunt—one of the only relatives he still had left—had to turn to an old boyfriend to get him the job in the first place. Something nasty and cutting was on the tip of his tongue. Once upon a time, he’d been guilty of being a mean motherfucker when it came to shit like this. He’d likely have punched this
pendejo
for even mentioning his aunt, but now he just walked out of the office without a backward glance.

With his tools in the back of his pickup, he peeled out of the parking lot of Sebastian’s Auto Body, being sure to leave his mark on the asphalt. He picked up his phone, paging through his old contacts as he kept one eye on the road.

Of course, there was traffic, and he silently fumed as he listened to the phone ring.

“Oh wow.” He threw up his hand after someone cut in front of him. When Marcos missed the light, he cursed, “¡Coño!”

He laid on his horn, hoping the dickhead who cut him off could hear it. He didn’t even notice that the phone had been picked up until his friend Luis laughed in his ear. “Road rage, bro. I thought you were changing your ways.”

Marcos just shook his head. “I just got fired—again. Fuck changing my ways. It never works out.”