“That’s what he wanted to know when he called.”

“Brooke! Has he or hasn’t he called?”

“What do you think, Mel? He’s got how many Twitter followers? A million?”

“He’s actually got two point three mil.”

“Well there’s your damned answer.” Now, I’m just angry, and I don’t even know why.

“But I was sure he had a real big craving for Hooky with Brookey last night.”

“Someone’s already taken care of that by now, Mel. That’s the way these guys work.”

“We still need to go Saturday,” Melanie decrees with an angry scowl that makes her pretty face almost comical. She’s just not the type to ever be angry at anyone. “And you need to wear something that will make his eyes bug out and make him regret not calling you. You guys could’ve had a rocking one-night stand, and I mean rocking.”

“Miss Dumas?”

We’re heading back to my apartment and I peer through the morning sunlight at a tall, fortyish woman with a short blonde bob standing on the steps of my building. Her smile is warm and almost confused as she holds out an envelope with my name written on it. “Remington Tate wanted me to personally deliver these to you.”

Hearing the name from her lips makes my heart stumble, and suddenly, it’s racing harder than it did during my morning run. My hand trembles as I open the envelope and take out a huge blue and yellow pass. It’s a backstage pass to the Underground with tickets for Saturday clipped to it. They’re front row center seats, and there are four of them. My insides do funny things when I notice the pass has my name written on it with manly, messy letters I suspect to be his.

I seriously can’t breathe.

“Wow,” I whisper, stunned. A little bubble of excitement builds rapidly in my chest, and I almost feel like I need to run an extra couple miles just to pop it.

The woman’s smile widens. “Shall I tell him you said ‘yes’?”

“Yes.” The word leaps out of me before I can even think about it. Before I can even further contemplate all the headlines about him I read yesterday, most of them highlighting the words “bad boy,” “drunk,” “bar fight,” and “prostitutes.”

Because it’s just a fight, right?

I’m not saying yes to anything else.

Right?

I stare in disbelief at the tickets again, and Melanie gapes at my profile as the woman climbs into the back of a black Escalade. As the car roars away, she playfully hits my shoulder. “You whore. You want him, don’t you? This was supposed to be my fantasy, you idjut!”

I laugh as I hand her three tickets, my brain spinning with the fact that he actually made some sort of contact today. “I guess we are going, after all. Help me recruit the gang, will you?”

Melanie grabs my shoulders and whispers in my ear as she steers me up the steps to my building. “Tell me that didn’t just make you feel a little tingle.”

“That didn’t make me feel a little tingle,” I automatically say, and before I slide into my apartment, I add, “It made me feel a big one.”

Melanie squeals and demands to come in to select my outfit for Saturday, and I tell her that when I want to look like a whore, I’ll let her know. Eventually, Mel gives up on my closet, saying there’s nothing even remotely sexy in it and she needs to get to work, so she leaves me alone the rest of the day. But the little tingle doesn’t go as easy. I feel it when I’m getting showered, dressed, and when I’m checking my emails for more job openings.

I can’t explain why I’m so nervous at the thought of seeing him again.

I think I like him, and I dislike that I do.

I think I want him, and I hate that I do.

I think he truly is the perfect material for a one-night stand, and I can’t believe I’m starting to wonder about it too.

Naturally, like any female with working cyclical hormones, by Saturday, I’m at a total different point in my monthly cycle, and I’ve regretted over a dozen times having said I’d go to the fight. I console myself with the fact that the gang, at least, is excited about it.

Melanie summoned Pandora and Kyle to come with us. Pandora works with Melanie at the interior design firm. She’s the resident, cutting-edge Goth with whom every man wants to decorate their bachelor pads. Kyle is still studying to be a dentist, and he’s my apartment neighbor, longtime friend, and a friend of Mel’s since middle school. He’s the brother we never had, and he’s so sweet and shy with other women that he actually had to go pay some professional to take his virginity at twenty-one.

“I’m so glad you’re driving us, Kyle,” Melanie says as she rides in the back with me.

“I swear that’s all you guys want me for,” he says, but he’s laughing, clearly stoked about the fight.

The crowd in the Underground tonight is at least double what it was the last time we were here, and we wait about twenty minutes to climb into the elevator that lowers us into the arena.

While Melanie and the gang go find our seats, I slip the backstage pass around my neck and tell her, “I’m going to slip some of my business cards somewhere some of the fighters can see it.”

I’d have to be crazy to let this opportunity go to waste. These athletes are major, major muscle and organ destructors, one lethal weapon fighting against the other, and if there’s ever a chance to do some temporary rehab work, I’ve just figured it’s here.

As I wait in line to be allowed into the restricted access part, the scent of beer and sweat permeates the air. I spot Kyle waving from our seats at the very center to the right of the ring, and I’m stunned at how close the fighters are going to be. Kyle seems to be able to touch the raised ring floor if he takes one step and extends out his arm.

You can actually watch the fight from the far end of the arena without having to pay a dime except perhaps a tip to the bouncer, but the seated tickets run from fifty dollars to five hundred, and the ones Remington Tate sent us are all from the five hundred ones. Being that I’ve been jobless for two weeks since my graduation and I’m stretching the savings for my previous small endorsement deals many years ago, I’d have never afforded these tickets otherwise. My friends, who are all recent grads, couldn’t have afforded them either. They accepted practically any job they could get within this shitty job market.

Crammed among people, I finally get to flash my backstage pass with a happy little smile, and I’m allowed down a long hall with several open rooms along one side.

Each room holds benches and rows of lockers, and I spot several fighters at different corners of the room, conversing with their teams. In the third room I peer into, he’s there, and a frisson of nervousness rushes through me.

He’s perfectly relaxed and seated, hunched over, on a long red bench, watching as a man with a shiny bald head bandages one of his hands. His other hand is already bandaged, everything covered with the cream-colored tape, except for his knuckles. His face is pensive and strikingly boyish, and it makes me wonder how old he is. He raises his dark head, as if sensing me, and spots me immediately. A flash of something strange and powerful sparks in his eyes, and it rushes through my body like lightning. I stifle my reaction and see that his coach is busy telling him something.

Remington can’t take his eyes off me. His hand is still out-stretched, but seems forgotten as his coach continues taping him up and issuing instructions.

“Well, well, well…”

I turn to the voice to my right, and a sliver of dread opens up in my midsection. An enormous fighter stands only a foot away, scrutinizing me with eyes that are pure intimidation, like I’m all dessert, and he has the perfect spoon to use.

I see Remington grab the tape from his coach and throw it aside before he stands and slowly winds his way to my side. As he positions himself behind me and slightly to my right, an awareness of his body close to mine seeps into my every pore.

His soft voice by my ear makes me tremble as he faces my admirer. “Just walk off,” he tells the other man softly.

The man I recognize as Hammer is no longer looking at me. Instead, he looks above my head and slightly to the side. I think that next to Remington, he doesn’t look all that big after all.

“She yours?” he asks with narrowed beady eyes.

My thighs go watery when the answering voice slides across the shell of my ear, both velvet and chillingly hard. “I can guarantee you, she’s not yours.”

The Hammer leaves, and for the longest time, Remington stands there, a tower of brawn almost touching me, his body warmth enveloping me. I dip my head and murmur, “Thank you,” and quickly leave, and I want to die because I swear to God he just ducked his head to smell me.

Unexpected

He’s about to come up on stage, and his name is already shredding through the microphone as the crowd goes wild. “Once again, ladies and gentlemen, Riptide!”

I’m still not recovered from seeing him up close, and my bloodstream already carries all kinds of strange, bubbly, hot little things. The instant he comes trotting down the wide hall between the stands, in that shiny red hooded robe, my pulse jumps, my tummy clenches, and I have the awful desperate urge to flee back to my home.

The guy is just too much. Too much male. Too much masculinity and pure raw beast. Put together, he’s just like sex on a stick and every female around me is shouting at the top of her lungs how much she wants to lick.

Remington climbs onstage and goes to his corner. He yanks off his robe, exposing all those flexing muscles, and hands it to a young blond man who seems to be aiding his bald coach.

“And now, I give you, the Hammer!”

Hammer proceeds to join him up on stage, and Remington smiles lazily to himself. His gaze slides directly to mine— and I realize he knows exactly, exactly, where I’m sitting at tonight. Still smiling that I’m-all-that smile, he jabs one finger in the air towards Hammer, and then points at me as if saying, “This one’s for you.”

My stomach drops.

“Shit, he’s killing me. Why the hell does he do that? He’s so fucking alpha I can’t stand him!”

“Melanie, get a grip!” I hiss, then sit back weakly in my chair, because he’s killing me too. I don’t know what he wants from me, but I’m tied up in knots because I never expected that I would also want something very sexual and very personal from him.

The toe-curling memory of standing close to him only minutes ago sweeps through me, but the fighting bell rings and snaps me out of it. The fighters go toe to toe, and Remy feints to one side while Hammer swings stupidly, following the mock move. Once Hammer’s side seems open, Remington comes at him from the left, jabbing him in the ribs.

They bounce apart, and Remington acts cocky, feinting and pissing Hammer off. He turns to me, points at Hammer, then at me again before ramming him so hard that the guy rebounds on the net behind him, falls to his knees, and shakes his head to stand up again. My sex muscles clench every time he hits his opponent, and my heart grips every time an opponent returns a blow.