I was calming down a little, now. The thing was still huge and ugly and looked like it wanted to eat me, but it seemed satisfied with pizza...for now. I stood up and gingerly approached. “So how does he survive?” I asked. “If he can’t get any food, then—“ I looked at Aedan. “Wait. Do you feed him?”
He flushed.
“Do you feed himevery morning?”I was incredulous and delighted.
“Noteverymorning,” he said testily. “I mean...” His shoulders slumped. “Yeah, okay. Every morning.”
The gull shrieked happily and devoured another crust.
“Aedan O’Harra, youbig pile of squidgy goo!You have apet!”
He’d gone beet red. “It’s just a bird.”
I threw my arms around him and hugged him hard. Therewasa softer side to him. He just hid it very, very well. “You’re just a big softie,” I told him, my face buried in his chest.
“I’m addicted to hopeless causes, that’s what I am,” he grumbled. But he hugged me even harder.
Aedan asked if I wanted to take a day off. “You just had your first fight,” he told me. “It’s fine.”
I knew he was saying it out of concern and that made it even harder because I really, really wanted to. Nothing sounded better than just crawling back into bed and hiding my face from the world.
But if I did that, I knew there was a real chance I'd never come out again. I'd lost the fight and only been saved by Rick, wanting to preserve the finale for the main event. Next time, there wouldn't be any such escape. Next time, I had to win or most likely die.
And that was another problem. I had no intention of killing anyone, but the fight would go on until one of us couldn't get up. Jacki was determined—she wouldn't go down easily and she wouldn't stay down. How hard would I have to hit her, to take her out of the fight? How close would I have to get to killing her? One little mistake, one hard knock of her head against the floor or the wall and I'd be a murderer.
None of this was going to go away. It would all still be waiting for me the next day and the next. So the sooner I got on with things, the better. I only had fourteen days until the fight, now. I couldn't afford to waste one of them.
No one at the gym seemed fazed by my bruises and black eye—if anything, they were still freaked out by the fact I was a woman. And yet, gradually, I was starting to fit in. Maybe it was the sheer volume of time I'd spent there over the previous two weeks, but I felt like I was accepted there, now. Men would nod hello to me when I came in the door. The looks they gave me were respectful—I was one of them. Sure, there were some lecherous glances, but they felt like clean, healthy lust, not that cruel, twisted version the guys at The Pit gave me.
Aedan went easy on me: punches on the light bag and then the heavy bag, some pad work, some speed exercises. We didn’t do any sparring. We hadn’t been in the ring together since he’d taken me down. Funny, how that had happened only the previous afternoon—it seemed like a lifetime ago.
I knew he was avoiding it. Before everything had gone right with the sex, everything had gone horribly wrong—not just him accidentally whacking me in the side but my complete failure to beable to hit him. I still wasn’t sure I was going to be able to and, unless I could, we weren’t going to be able to move on with my training. We also needed to change things up and teach me what I needed to know to beat Jacki, now that we knew what we were up against. Dirty fighting, with kicking, grabbing and gouging.
As the day went on, though, I realized what he was doing: he was building my confidence. Giving me easy stuff to do so that I’d forget how badly I’d lost the fight. Hell, it had only been meant to be a warm-up, something to excite the crowd, and I’d still wound up on my back, bruised and bloody, with my top torn off.
And I’d had all the advantages. I didn’t know how much of Jacki’s background Rick had made up for the crowd, but it was obvious that she’d learned her moves on the street, not in a gym. I’d had two weeks of solid training—she’d just walked in there unprepared. The difference was, she was tough and I wasn’t. She’d been fighting in her everyday life for years. I was a goddamn tourist in this world.
Now that she’d seen me, she’d raise her game, too. I remembered that look of surprise when I’d gotten my one good hit in on her. She’d be prepared, next time.
The hell with building up confidence. I hit that bag as hard as I could.
We were doingtwo hundred punches, then ten crunches,which was one of Aedan’s sadistic favorites. The repetitiveness of it gave me a chance to think...about us.
Us.Just the previous morning, I’d never have imagined using that word about Aedan and me; now, I couldn’t imagine using any other.
What the hell had happened? Apart from the obvious, which was that he’d taken me up on the roof and fucked seven shades of hell out of me. My knees still weakened when I remembered it. This man drove me crazy, with his eyes and his warm, muscled arms that could wrap around me just right and that accent that turned anything into poetry. And now we were together, in some ill-defined way. It didn’t feel casual, like two friends who drunkenly sleep together and then just move on. It felt very, veryun-casual, but was that just me? What washeexpecting to happen, now? Why hadn’t we talked about it?
Actually, I knew the answer to that one. Because we were both scared we were going to mess this whole thing up. It wasn’t just the usual relationship nerves. We both knew something was wrong.
The sexual tension had been building for weeks. I’d felt it on my side and I’d thought I’d felt it from Aedan, too. So why had it taken him this long? He didn’t strike me as a guy who was nervous about going after what he wanted. The polar opposite, in fact.
He’d held back because of something else, some deep-seated fear about us getting together. What worried me was that I wasn’t sure he’d conquered it. It felt more like our feelings had just reached the level where they submerged it. But it was still there, lurking in the depths.
What would happen when it surfaced?
32
AEDAN
