Taking Him Down

And to think he’d earned the chance just by being unbearably obnoxious!

The waitress came by, but Rich didn’t need the menu.

“Four egg whites, scrambled, no salt, and four pieces of dry wheat toast.”

She scribbled on her pad.

“And a glass of skim milk and a piece of whatever fruit you got.”

“Banana okay? Anything else you can only get in pie form.”

If only. “Banana’s perfect.”

She departed along with the laminated sheet showcasing whatever deliciousness Rich was missing out on. At least tonight he’d get a steak. A lean, unsalted steak and a side of equally undoctored steamed vegetables.

Still, the weigh-in would be done the next morning, the fight that evening. Then it’d take a team of horses to keep him off the nearest plate of ribs.

When his breakfast arrived, Rich tried to overlay the image of his mother’s bandeja paisa, an obscene Colombian orgy of a meal. Beans, dirty rice, pork, more pork, plantain, avocado, yet more pork…He’d think of these rubbery, tasteless egg whites when he landed his first kick, this sickly, bluish so-called milk when he caught the guy with an elbow. He’d dedicate the fight to the god of fatty, rare steaks and strong beer, and he’d earn himself a knockout, no question.

It was nice to have an hour away from Chris. His manager was a schmoozy weenie, but apparently schmoozing worked—look where it had landed Rich. But he wasn’t an ace at being told what to do. Chris was busy with prefight stuff that morning, leaving Rich free to enjoy his solitude. Trouble was, whenever he had a little solitude, his brain filled the space with distraction. A sort of five-foot-six-ish distraction, with dark blond hair and insanely blue eyes, freckles and a wry half smile.

That always happened when Rich had his sights set on a girl but hadn’t gotten with her yet. He fixated. Like the ribs, he hungered for what he couldn’t have. Or rather, what he’d chosen not to have, because she’d made him pretty certain in the back of that cab, he could’ve had her.

Then he’d gotten the text from Mercer’s number.

Before you get any ideas, champ, you should probably know Lindsey’s got a live-in boyfriend. —Jenna

Yeah, he should have known that. Too bad Lindsey hadn’t been the one to inform him of it.

Jesus, nearly ten months ago that had happened, and he was still hung up. It made no sense, but he could remember her face better than that of the last woman he’d woken next to, only a few days ago. The road must be making him crazy. Or Lindsey made him crazy. She certainly had that night after the fight—not just the messing around, but the way he opened his mouth when her eyes were on him and…stuff just came out. Stuff he never shared with people, except maybe his mom and sister. Emotions and crap.

The waitress came by. “Anything else?”

“Just the check.”

She tore the item in question from a pad and set it on the table.

“Thank the cook for accommodating my ridiculous eggs,” he said with a smile.

“We’ve been getting lots of weird requests. You must be with the…sorry, I’ve forgotten what it’s called. The kickboxing thing.”

“I’m sure we’ll drive you all crazy tonight, ordering chicken breasts with no skin or oil or salt. Worse than a bunch of supermodels before a runway show.”

She smiled at that, and Rich tried to imagine her naked, just to see if the image banished Lindsey’s smirking face from his head. No such luck. The waitress wandered off, but the only backside preoccupying him was two thousand miles away, for better or worse.

Definitely worse.

Rich wasn’t a saint by anyone’s standards, but it had stung, discovering he’d made out with another man’s woman. His younger self wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but he was older and wiser and generally less of a self-centered dick. Even if he didn’t feel an obligation to the poor jerk—probably out of town on a business trip or something—he had the pride to think he deserved the attentions of a woman decent enough not to cheat on someone.

Weird, though. Lindsey had seemed so like the opposite of that kind of woman. No time for B.S. Hell, the girl was a matchmaker.

Still, none of it kept him from imagining everything he’d opted out of.

He wouldn’t be back in Boston until Christmas, once the last of his three contracted fights wrapped in Cleveland. Three matches in the big leagues in less than a year. Hell of a run. But it was also a hell of an opportunity, and he was in freaky-good shape. If lightning struck, he’d win tomorrow, earn himself a title no one expected him to, and hopefully get to drop that December bout in favor of something a bit further out, maybe even a main event. Even if he lost, he could sleep easy knowing where the cash was coming from to pay his mom’s hospital bills. Knowing there were no financial clouds looming while she recovered from her heart valve replacement…Though it stung that he hadn’t been there to hold her hand. He’d been training, as always, cuffed to his coaches in the run-up to his April match in Vancouver.

It was a stroke of astounding good fortune that he was good enough at what he loved to support his family doing it, and to be a viable age when MMA had all this commercial steam. The chance to make up for everything his father had fallen short on.

Rich’s father had been a small man, in both stature and character. He’d been crippled by a depression Rich had found alternately heartbreaking and infuriating. He knew the depression had come about because the man mourned his homeland, his culture, his identity. But that didn’t make it okay.

Rich’s sympathy had run out at puberty. He’d gotten lucky, though, and stumbled into boxing, a pastime built for seething young men looking for the next best thing to hauling off and punching their fathers in the face.

Now he was twenty-nine—a little old to just be breaking out, but he had a hotter fire under his ass than plenty of these twenty-four-year-olds, and no ego aside from the act he put on for the audience and acquaintances, for everyone but his mother and younger sister. Strip all that bravado away, leave Rich alone with himself—here in this restaurant, in fact—and he felt like little more than a dog. A tough, loyal dog, alternately protective and savage.

It left no room for a life outside the ring and the bonds of his family, but in no time at all, he’d wake up and find he was thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven…past his prime, shunted to the backseat to train or manage younger prospects. A worthy and important role, but one Rich wouldn’t ever take to without bitterness, not the way Mercer had. But he still had five good years or more, hopefully enough to banish the Estradas’ financial worries for good, so his mom could quit giving herself Catholic guilt fits every time she needed a procedure to keep her heart beating.

Every time she cried, another patch of Rich’s heart turned black toward his father, another vertebra calcified, rock-hard, steeling his determination that he’d never be like his dad. Better a strong, dumb dog than a weak, cowering ghost.

He tossed his banana peel onto the plate, fished out some bills and weighted them down with the otherwise neglected saltshaker.

Back to the grind. Back to the routines that kept this body sore and brain quiet, kept his mind off his anger and worry. Kept his muscles taxed and his energy spent, too beat to succumb to any distracting thoughts about Lindsey at night, in whatever anonymous motel room he called his kennel that week.

“OH, SHUT UP! It’s starting.” Lindsey waved her hands, shushing Brett and Jenna’s conversation about…whatever they’d been talking about. She cranked the volume as the pay-per-view coverage began, heart thumping in her throat.

The announcer ran down the event’s matchups, and she whooped along with Jenna when head shots of Rich and his opponent slid in from either side of the screen, their stats appearing beneath them.

“Wow,” Jenna said. “Second-to-last fight. What a difference a few months make.”

Nine months and three weeks, to be precise, since that fight in Boston. And yeah, a lot had changed.

Jenna was engaged. Mercer had won the money to buy her a ring back in the spring, his first paid boxing match in years. Seemed fast to Lindsey, but the two had been living together since the week they’d met. At this clip, Jenna would be pregnant with twins by Halloween.

Lindsey, on the other hand, was still thoroughly not engaged. So not engaged, in fact, that she and Brett were officially over, even if they’d agreed to share the apartment until Lindsey found a new place she could afford. And in this college town, that wasn’t likely until September rolled around. Five weeks was a long time to cohabit with your ex, civil though things were.

At least work was good. Her own relationship might be over, but she could still drum up enthusiasm for other people’s, and she seemed to be pretty adept at matchmaking. A few of her clients were pains in the butt, but on the whole, she looked forward to going to work. Though some of that could be attributed to her desire to escape her awkward living situation.

Brett stood. “Anything from the kitchen?”

Lindsey handed him her empty beer bottle. “Thanks. And thank you for coming over,” she added to Jenna. “I would’ve thought you’d had it up to your eyeballs with fighting by now.”

“I have to see if Rich wins, live and in color.”

Lindsey nodded, filled as ever by a stupid rush of badgirlfriend adrenaline at the mention of his name. Though she wasn’t anybody’s girlfriend now.

“And a night out is nice,” Jenna said. “Beats watching at Hooters with the guys from the gym and all that testosterone. You’ve certainly gotten into all this—enough to shell out to watch.”

“Oh, yeah,” Brett said, returning to the couch with two bottles. “You should see Lindsey’s porn stash.”

She rolled her eyes as Jenna’s widened.