31. Sylvie
SYLVIE
I yawned and stretched and looked at the ceiling, trying to remember where I was.
Aedan. Aedan’s place. And then the pain returned, throbbing from my hip and my cheeks, and it all came back to me.
He was still sleeping, spooning me from behind. The feel of his naked body against mine was incredible—hard, warm muscle kissing up against my back, nestled against every inch of me from shoulder to ankle. I wanted to never move. But I had to see.
I gently lifted his arm off me and slipped out of bed. In the half-light of dawn, I checked the mirror.
Eurgh! The bruises seemed to have gotten darker overnight, finishing their parade of colors to settle on ugly purples and greens. The one on my hip was the worst, but at least that would be covered up. My face, though….
I knew I couldn’t show up for work like this.
What the hell would I say—that I’d been mugged?
I couldn’t be around hotel guests with my face all banged up.
My manager would be outwardly sympathetic, but would quietly stop giving me shifts.
I’d be branded as trouble. I’d have to call in sick, instead.
No one at the hotel knew what was going on.
I’d told them only that my brother was ill, and that I needed to look after him.
A few of the other maids had asked what was happening with me, commenting that I looked different since I’d started training.
I’d been tempted to confide in them but, every time I opened my mouth, I’d stopped.
There just seemed to be a yawning gulf between their safe little world—the one I used to inhabit—and mine.
The only people I felt close to, now, were Aedan and my sleeping brother.
And the doctor at the hospital, Heather.
She’d spent more time with me than she probably had time for, sitting next to me while I held Alec’s hand.
If I came through this, I really owed her a thank you.
If I came through it.
I was walking back to the bed when I heard it. A hard tap at the window, as if someone wanted to come in.
We were five floors up.
I stared at the ragged curtain that covered the glass. The sound came again. Something hard was banging against the pane. A tree? We were right by the docks—there wasn’t a tree for miles.
I moved right up to the window, putting my arm over my naked breasts. I told myself it must be a washing line or a cable or something, swaying in the wind, and tugged the curtain back.
A face stared back at me, pressed right up against the other of the glass. Snow white, with two gleaming, beady eyes. I froze.
It opened its mouth and screeched at me. I screamed and staggered back, knocking the back of my legs against the bed and landing on Aedan’s sleeping form. He grunted. Outside, the monster was battering at the glass, screeching and....
...flapping?
“Oh,” said Aedan, sitting up. “You’ve met.”
The thing was still staring at me through the glass. I grabbed the covers and wound them around me. “What is it?”
He looked bemused. “It’s a seagull.”
“That’s not a seagull! It’s the size of a—a—“ I tried to think of a big bird. A vulture? A buzzard? “It’s a freakin’ pterodactyl!”
“Yeah, I think its mother slept with an albatross or something.” He got up and walked over to the window, completely at home in his nakedness, and opened it. The gull—or whatever the hell it was—gave a last screech of satisfaction and then quieted down. It eyed me.
Hungrily.
“It’s kind of sad,” said Aedan. “His wing’s weak on one side—I think he must have been in a fight or something.
He can fly, but not fast. So whenever the other birds see food, he always gets there last and there’s nothing left.
” He dug around in an old pizza box and found a crust, then threw it to the bird.
It snapped it out of the air and gulped it down without chewing, then screeched for more.
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 him every morning?” I was incredulous and delighted.
“Not every morning,” he said testily. “I mean...” His shoulders slumped. “Yeah, okay. Every morning.”
The gull shrieked happily and devoured another crust.
“Aedan O’Harra, you big pile of squidgy goo! You have a pet!”
He’d gone beet red. “It’s just a bird.”
I threw my arms around him and hugged him hard. There was a 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 be able 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 doing two 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, very un-casual, but was that just me?
What was he expecting 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?