Rough Hand (Bad Boy Fighter Romance) Read online

  "Good taste?"

  He barked a laugh, dry and rasping and full of vinegar. "Hardly. Your mother used to watch it. I always told her it would rot her brain."

  "That's exactly what it'll do. You should watch something else."

  Dad's head laid back on the pillow. "I'm sorry, sweety; I'm a little tired. You mind if I just turn over and sleep a little bit?"

  He looked tired, she thought, as she looked at him. Too tired. She tried to ignore that fact as she kissed him goodbye, tried to ignore it as she went home.

  Taciturn was one word for Shannen. He was a thousand things, all at once, and none of them fit right together. He was quiet and distant, and at the same time he was exuberant and friendly. He was energetic and he was lethargic at the same time.

  In spite of herself, she wanted to talk to him. Wanted to tell him about her trip to Dad's room. Maybe, if she talked about it, she wouldn't have to worry. He could reassure her, maybe, she hoped. There was work to be done in the morning, but she couldn't sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, even for a moment, all she could see was the positively skeletal figure of her father, his eyes drifting shut even as he tried to hold them open for her.

  He was going to be alright, she reminded herself. He didn't have much else choice, no matter what he thought. He was going to be alright because she wasn't going to let him die. She still hadn't even gotten married yet, and she wasn't going to have a child never meet her grandparents.

  She'd never had any herself, and that was enough to tell Caroline that every child should probably have some. From both sides of the family, preferably.

  Her shoulders slumped as she looked over at the clock. It read 12:32, and her body hurt from tiredness. Her eyes hurt. She had to be gone in the morning, and no doubt, so did Shannen. He was gone as often as not before she had even woken, the sound of his car door slamming shut waking her from her sleep a minute or two before her alarm did.

  Today, though, he wasn't home, and he certainly wasn't beating her to bed. She frowned and looked at the clock again. 12:33, and she was up far too late. Her eyes stung with lack of sleep but she forced them to stay open as long as she could.

  Which, as it turned out, was not much longer. She couldn't have said when she fell asleep, but she could say when she woke up, which was exactly when the alarm started blaring in her jeans' pocket, beeping simultaneously with low battery.

  She cursed herself, plugged the phone in, and hoped that thirty minutes' charge would get her through the day somehow. She had things to worry about, but Shannen, home or not, wasn't on the menu. She couldn't afford to worry about him when she had work to get ready for, and things that needed forgetting.

  His cock, of course, did make that list.

  6

  Caroline's eyes drifted shut as she sat in the passenger seat of the little coupe. She ought to have insisted on dinner. He would have given it to her, and she was hungry. The feeling was gnawing at her stomach, but her eyes just refused to stay open a moment longer than necessary without coffee, and she'd tried valiantly to convince herself that it was too late to drink any.

  "You know what? I changed my mind," she said, her voice loose and uncontrolled. He pulled over without a word, stepped out and when the door opened and closed again, he pressed something cold and glass into her hands.

  Caroline twisted the cap off and drank deeply from the sweet, cold drink. The energy didn't hit her right away, but the knowledge that it wasn't going to be long until it did finally helped her find the motivation to open her eyes the rest of the way.

  "God, thank you. What do I owe you?" He made a noncommittal noise and kept his eyes on the road. "Okay, fine, then."

  They drove a little ways in silence. She was the one to break it, for a second time.

  "You know what, if you don't talk to me I think I'm going to go insane. That, or I'm going to fall asleep right here, and you're going to have to carry me inside."

  "I'm not going to carry you inside, so you'd better get ready for the fancy coat and the padded walls."

  "See, that wasn't so hard, was it?"

  "What do you even want me to talk about? I've got nothing to say to you. Nothing of any interest to you at all, really."

  "Anything. What is it that you, like, do exactly?"

  She braced herself for an answer she wasn't going to like. The first day she'd seen those knuckles, and the blood on them. Blood was a pretty specific indicator of a job that she wasn't going to like, no matter what it was that he did specifically.

  She didn't want to let him know how she felt about violence in general because she wasn't about to kick someone out for what they did to earn the money that he paid to her. If she wasn't going to kick him out, then she wasn't going to cause tension if it wasn't necessary.

  The only thing that made her even ask was that she had hopes, somewhere deep down in her gut, that she had interpreted the whole situation wrong from top to bottom in the first place. Maybe he wasn't any kind of rough and tumble knee-breaker for the mob.

  Maybe he had gotten it scraping his hand at a construction site, and they'd, she thought, needed him on a job site.

  That didn't really seem to fit him, though it was certainly masculine enough. She sighed as he drove on in silence. She forgot about the question entirely and watched the lights passing the car by, trying to pretend that she didn't feel the least bit offended that he wouldn't tell her anything. That he wouldn't even talk to her the least bit.

  He had a bad habit of being quiet when he should talk, and talking when he should know to be quiet. She wanted to just slap him in his stupid face, but that wasn't exactly an option. She needed the money, after all. But all the money in the world didn't make it alright that he was a rude son of a gun. There was basic human decency to be considered, damn it.

  "I'm a fighter," he said. She'd asked so long ago that she wasn't even sure he was speaking to her when he said it, and when she decided he couldn't have been talking to anyone else, it still took her a minute to remember precisely what it was that he was supposed to be answering.

  "What, like..."

  "A professional fighter. I'm in town for training, and I didn't exactly have a hotel room lined up."

  "Like, on television?"

  "Not your television," he said, his voice darkly sarcastic. "But yeah, like on television."

  "Is that good money?"

  He let out a breath and pulled off the freeway. "You sure you don't want something to eat? I'm starved."

  "If you're hungry, I guess I could eat." It wasn't totally honest; after all, she was so hungry that she could eat a live cat. The only thing that had stopped her feeling it so far was the tiredness, and as that faded she found herself wanting food more and more. But she also knew that there were two chicken drumsticks in the freezer with her name on them, if he decided he wasn't interested in paying for two.

  "Well enough, I guess," he answered.

  "What?"

  "The pay."

  "Oh," she said. She'd been perfectly ready to accept him changing the subject, and it was a surprise when he answered her, even if it was a little bit later than she'd expected. "I can't imagine how that must be. What do you even do during the day?"

  "Mostly? I train."

  "So you don't just beat people's noses in?"

  "Not when I don't have to," he said. As if it were nothing at all. In her tiredness, all the serenity and peacefulness seemed to melt away a little.

  "'Not when you don't have to?' I don't know about you, but I've never had to bop anyone in the face, not even in sport, and I just, well. I don't know. Fine. It's your career, not mine, and I should keep it to myself."

  "It's not usually that bad," he said, as if that made it better somehow. As if he could just make the violence go away because it wasn't all that bad. Because, well, he only beat them black and blue, he didn't break their bones. That was totally different, right?

  "Just drop it," she said. Then, a moment later, as if she hadn't heard her ow
n advice, she turned and glowered at him. "You think you can just beat up anyone, don't you?"

  He looked over at her with a raised eyebrow as he pulled into a parking lot. "Yeah, I pretty much do. Anyone under two hundred pounds, and most folks over it, at least."

  "I bet you can, too," she said, her eyes sharp and pointed and her face drawn up into an angry snarl. "But do you ever think about what happens after you beat the hell out of some poor sap? He comes to me, and he's got to lay up in the hospital, sometimes for days or weeks, and all so that you can make your blood money and people on television can watch someone get beat halfway to death."

  "I gather you're not a fight fan," he said, his voice impassive.

  "If I had my way, you'd be out of a job," she said. She shouldn't have lost her temper like that. "But I'm not going to have my way, so in that case, do whatever."

  "Look at it this way. You want to put up my room and board for free? I can call my manager, call off the fight, and I can be your kept man. There's plenty of other things I can do to pay you for your time, if you'd rather I do that."

  The way he waggled his eyebrows was as much a serious suggestion as it was a joke, and she wasn't sure which she preferred.

  "Shut up," she said, but the edge was out of her voice, and he knew it immediately.

  "Trust me, I'm quite good at all that stuff. The fighting is just a hobby, my real talent, my real calling, it's girls like you."

  "Like me, huh? You have a lot of girls 'like me'?"

  "None of them are quite like you, Caroline."

  "Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. O'Brien. But if you want to keep telling me how wonderful I am, I certainly won't say no."

  She looked at him, at his bandaged-up hands, and her eyes ran up and down his body against her better judgment.

  She'd done a lot of stupid things in the past few days. Letting Shannen stay, regardless of how much it was that he was giving her, was one of the stupidest. She still hadn't managed the stupidest thing of all, but if he kept coming at her like that, one of these days she was going to have her guard low enough, from the tiredness of working late hours and the enticement of having a man that looked like he did around.

  Then she'd make the biggest mistake of all, and more of her than she wanted to admit was thinking very, very hard about how much she was looking forward to it when the dam finally broke. She'd never done anything like that before, but from the look that Deborah had on her face when Caroline had walked in, she was sure of exactly one thing, and that was that she must have been experiencing something pretty out of this world.

  7

  Caroline's eyes were roving across the room; waiting for someone to tell her what time she was supposed to be working wasn't exactly the most entertaining thing in the world, after all, and she wasn't exactly in a hurry to go around this morning doing everything.

  There were few enough times as it was that she was able to get time off, and if she wasn't going to use them to relax then she wasn't going to get any time to relax at all. Dana was supposed to be getting her schedule, and it wasn't supposed to take this long, she figured, but 'supposed to' didn't count for a whole heck of a lot when you were actually waiting for it.

  She sipped the coffee slowly this morning. It was one thing to have a cup in order to keep yourself sane; it was quite another to have time to actually savor the taste, and she was more than just enjoying it, she was actually looking forward to the cup. To the sweetness. To having a little bit of coffee with her sugar, she thought, quoting Dad in her head.

  She'd go by the hospital in a few hours, but first she was going to settle down with a book, and actually do some of the reading that she'd been hoping to do. That was what she hoped for, at least. Sometimes she got distracted doing other things. Like, for example, skimming through Twitter.

  There were plenty of things that she could do to pass the time, if she wanted to. But that wasn't what she was aiming for. She was aiming, if at all possible, to try to actually do something productive with her time, which was exactly what wasn't likely to happen.

  Her face dropped. Now she just had to figure out what else she was going to do while she waited. Her fingers rapped on the table, and she looked around. The bookshelf, sadly, was on the wrong side of the room, and after she'd forgotten to plug her phone in for the night, Caroline wasn't about to unplug it while she waited for Dana to get back.

  She could hear someone coming up to the phone. Another voice answered this time. "Hello, who's this?"

  "Hey, Shelly, it's Caroline."

  "Oh, hey, what's up?"

  "Do you see Dana around? She's supposed to be getting my schedule for next week."

  The woman on the other end of the line audibly sighed. "No, I don't, sorry."

  "Great." Caroline's eyes shut and she tried to quiet the sense of frustration that had long-since started building up inside her. "Thanks, Shelly. Hey, have a good day, will you?"

  "I'm trying my best," Shelly answered, her voice resigned. The shift change was only an hour ago, and people were likely only just getting into the groove. Six, seven hours from now, and everyone would be hours past worn out, but they'd at least be working efficiently. But for now, the tiredness of the day before still hadn't washed off, and the long hours hadn't yet put them into the mindset that there was nothing to do but to wait and keep working.

  "Yeah, thanks."

  "Oh, here she is," Shelly said, and Caroline could just about hear the voices speaking far away from the phone's mouthpiece. Too quiet to hear the words, but loud enough to recognize the voices. A second later, the sound of the handset being picked up again and Dana's voice spoke to her.

  "Yeah," she said, "Sorry. I had to go looking, it wasn't posted here."

  That was a mistake, but as Dana started to go on, another sound caught her attention. The sound of the bathroom door turning. Her eyes naturally flicked over, and as Dana started telling her that she was going to be working next Tuesday, Caroline stopped listening as her roommate, all six-foot-three of him, all hundred-and-ninety pounds of him, stepped out.

  Notably, there wasn't much else that stepped out with him. It wasn't the first time that she'd seen him without his clothes on; after all, the very first one had been in flagrante delicto.

  But it was the first time that he'd walked around the house without any clothes on. His hair, always dark, was almost black, matted to his hair by the water of the shower, and he walked more confidently than he had any right to past. She watched his ass, tight and muscular, sway as he walked.

  Then, right as he was about to step out of view, he turned to look over his shoulder and actually winked at her. Winked! Jesus! Caroline's face blanched, and then turned a deep shade of scarlet to match the red shirt she'd slept in the night before and hadn't bothered to take off.

  "I'm sorry, Dana, what was that? I was distracted for a second."

  "I'll say you were," Dana replied. "What happened, you see a unicorn?"

  "Uh, not exactly, no."

  Dana repeated the schedule. Caroline, for her part, wrote it down on a pad of paper and then read it back. Dana confirmed, and Caroline thanked her, and then they hung up the phone. Her heart was pounding in her chest. He'd known she was watching, that was for sure. Had it been intentional, or was he just not particularly opposed to her seeing?

  He certainly wasn't shy, she knew that much. She'd already seen enough of him that there weren't many surprises to find, before he'd ever even moved in. But that was a little bit different than seeing him wandering around, his cock dangling out for the whole world to see.

  Something inside her bent and threatened to snap. She couldn't walk around like that. She'd loved being naked, loved how freeing it all felt. Loved how much more convenient it was not to have to wash clothes that she only wore to keep herself covered in her own house.

  It wasn't really her house, of course, it was Dad's house, but six months by herself had given Caroline plenty of time to get used to the idea of running around in he
r skin, and she'd been the one that had to give that up for a roommate. Now he was doing the exact same thing, and to make matters worse he apparently thought it was something she wanted to see!

  'Wasn't it?' A voice in her head whispered. 'You certainly didn't seem too opposed to seeing him like that when he was fucking Deborah. You can't lie to yourself; you were thinking about what it must have been like. To fuck like an animal.'

  She pushed the thoughts away. That might have been true, at the time, but she wasn't about to let herself think it. She certainly wasn't going to let herself imagine what it would be like to have him behind her, digging at her insides with that long, hard...

  Think of something else, she insisted. Think about television shows. Think about food. Think about anything but him, because if she did, then she wasn't sure how long precisely she was going to be able to stay out of the spare room. And she knew, in spite of herself, that if she wanted it then all she had to do was ask.

  She could ask, of course. It wouldn't hurt anyone but her. It could even be fun, in its own way. She could get as much enjoyment out of it as she gave, and it wouldn't have to be surrendering to him. Something told her that there was never any other way with Shannen O'Brien. When he went for something, he never gave. He took.

  She imagined for a moment what that must be like. Her stomach twisted up and she forced herself not to think about it. Again. And hopefully, maybe, this time it would actually stick for a second.

  Her body tingled in the space between her hips. She squeezed them together, checked the charge on her phone, which was barely adequate, and decided that whatever she was going to do, she'd need to be able to concentrate first. That meant that she had to get certain things out of her head, and the only way she was going to do that was either in his bedroom, or in the privacy of her own.

  She headed for her room, locked the door, opened up her laptop, laid her head back against the headboard, and tried to think about anything other than her tenant as her fingers started to move, started to tease out feelings that she knew deep down that she couldn't keep going without for much longer.