Hard (Sexy Bastard #1) by Eve Jagger
To my wonderful husband....you really are the Sexiest Bastard I know. xoxo, e
RYDER
CH. 1
There are two smells in the world I love more than any others: a woman right before sex and this warehouse right before a fight. They’re different, of course. There’s nothing like a naked, wet, waiting woman, the scent of her skin salty with sweat but sweet at the same time, like swimming through an ocean of roses. The warehouse’s odor is far less pleasurable, phantoms of last round’s knocked-out teeth, bruised faces, and aching bones making the air heavy, grimy, stifling, like the smell of fresh dirt. But both are thrilling and unpredictable and make me want to explode.
Even when it was me in the ring a few years ago, my ribs about to get punched, my knuckles about to crash into someone’s cheekbone, the smell of this place would intoxicate me. Facing off with a guy whose sole intention for the next several minutes is to pummel you into submission is as terrifying as it sounds. And as exhilarating. The policy of bare-knuckles brawls is no shirt, no shoes, big problem standing right across from you. But all I had to do to calm myself was take a big inhale of this warehouse air, let the molecules seep into my lungs, into my bloodstream, and I won every match.
I always win.
So tonight, after Crutcher beats Miller in an upset, a big win for me for sure, when Tyler tells me that some kid is in for $10,000 and has disappeared, I tell him he’s got to have it wrong. “I would never have let Jamie McEntire run up that kind of tab,” I say. “I’ve seen him around. I wouldn’t give him ten dollars, let alone ten thousand.” When I took over running fight night two years ago, I did a little cleanup from the mess my predecessor left. No five-or six-figure debts to people we don’t know, no credit to anyone who’s welched more than once. We may be an underground operation, but there are standards. There’s also a dress code: women in heels, men in collared shirts, and our crowd is the type who likes to drop a lot of money on both. We have security guards. The bartender will call you a cab if you get too drunk. I run a tight ship. Even the police think so. That’s why they don’t hassle me. Sometimes they even take a try in the ring.
Tyler shrugs. “It’s been gradual. Losses on a couple fights, loans to cover him,” he says. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But I double checked the ledger, and it adds up.”
“Fuck me,” I say, and a blond woman in high heels and a dress so tight she must not have exhaled all night turns toward us. She raises an eyebrow at me, smiles like she might take me up on the offer.
And with the way she wraps her mouth around the neck of that beer bottle, keeping her eyes locked on mine as she takes a drink, I might just let her.
Tyler’s voice yanks me back to the problem at hand. “So what do you want to do?” he says. “He’s offered his house as collateral.”
I shake my head. “This isn’t a swap meet.” Sometimes people think that just because I run an illegal fighting circuit and betting ring, I must be dishonest or inattentive to keeping the books, or maybe just dumb. So they try to take advantage of me occasionally. They think I won’t notice or care if they siphon a little cash or don’t pay in full or don’t pay at all, that I’m just a guy who made his money beating the shit out of strangers while debutantes and their dates made their bets. All brawn and no brains. But they’re wrong.
In the ring, I didn’t mind being underestimated. It helped me win. Some spectators think when you look like me, tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, you won’t be agile enough to dodge a right hook. So they bet against you. They don’t realize those muscles aren’t just for showing off to the female members of the crowd—not that I minded when they noticed. Those hard biceps mean you’re strong, and those washboard abs make you quick, and it all adds up to making my bank account big.
But as the boss outside the ring, I can’t have people not take me seriously. The Armani suits I wear on fight nights look damn good on me but they don’t come cheap, so when I loan money I expect to get it back when the handshake said I would. It’s only fair. I’ve got a reputation to protect, not to mention a legitimate business career to support, owning two of Atlanta’s most popular nightclubs, a cocktail lounge, and Altitude, a bar some buddies and I run together. I got to the top flying like a butterfly in the ring, but I stay there because I sting like a bee outside it.
And Jamie McEntire’s about to feel what I mean.