“You’ve been watching me sparring for the last two weeks,” I replied. Despite Alexa’s prim and proper posture, I had caught her watching the practice matches from her office with a quizzical look on her face. She had been paying attention to the details of what I was doing, just like she paid attention to her numbers. I liked that about her. “Show me what you’ve learned.”
She laughed. I liked it when she laughed. It was as if she lit up from the inside. I found that I wanted to get to know her better. She had already carved out a little place for herself in my life, and instead of finding it irritating as all hell, I liked it. And since she knew where I spent every penny of my money, she probably knew more about me than anyone else in the world. Despite that, I hadn’t sensed the slightest bit of judgment from her. That made her even more intriguing to me. It was also surprising to realize that I had started to trust her. Our relationship was settling into a kind of pseudo-friendship.
I thought she was going to refuse my request when she slid off her jacket and tossed it into the corner of the ring. Then she took off her kitten heels and tossed them over toward her jacket. Hot damn, I remembered her stripping for me in my locker room after the fight, and I felt my cock starting to harden.
She put up her fists and faced me. “Okay, now I’m ready.” She started bouncing on her heels.
I chuckled as I moved toward her. “Think you’re hot stuff, huh?” Before I even had my hands up again, she landed a hard jab in my side that caught me by surprise. “Hey!”
She winked at me. “Full contact sport, right? Not a lot of rules from what I can see in what happens in the ring.”
“There are rules,” I said as I blocked another of her soft handed punches. She was aggressive as she went after me and that was fucking hotter than anything I ever expected. We started to spin as I slid backward and started to shuffle around the ring. I blocked another punch. I had no intention of throwing one of my own, even in mock fun. This was all about Alexa and letting her see what she could do.
“Oh yeah? I’ve watched some of the replays of your last fights,” Alexa said as she continued to chase me. I threw a mock jab into the air to her left and watched her sink in her knees and duck to avoid any contact. She had some moves. “There’s not a lot of rules that I could see.”
She impressed me more by the day. “Checking up on me, huh?”
“I had to make an educated decision on who to bet my money on for Saturday’s fight,” she said in a coy voice. “So I watched the last fight between you and Hammer. That’s why things have been so tense between you and Maury, isn’t it? You didn’t tell me that you fought him before.”
My hands dropped a few inches. “That was a long time ago. It was when I first started, and before I knew what I was doing.”
“I saw the interview before the fight. Is it true what you said then? That you joined the MMA on a dare?”
She was edging too close to some topics that I didn’t want to talk about. There were a lot of things about that time in my life that I deliberately chose not to think about. “Stop talking and focus,” I said. “Otherwise, your opponent will do something that will take you out in no time flat.”
“I’m focused,” she said. Her hair streamed down her shoulders, and the way that her skirt rode up with each one of her moves to throw a jab was driving me to distraction. I was focused too. Focused on a thrust and parry game of a much different sort.
I reached out and grabbed her arm and pulled so that her body flew forward against mine. Then I twisted her body around so that her back was against me. I slipped my other arm across her shoulders just above the rise of her breasts. I knew that she’d be able to feel how hard I was through my shorts. Maury had said I was distracted, and he was right. I had to get this girl out of my system.
“Are you really focused?” I asked as I breathed in deep the scent at the base of her neck. “You seem a little bit…distracted. If we were really fighting right now, you’d be down for the count.”
When her teeth bit into my forearm, I cursed. Then she bent over and kicked her leg back between my legs. Alexa whipped around, and I felt her knee connect with my thigh, and the movement was just enough to throw me off-balance. She pushed against my chest, and I went over. I landed on the mat flat on my back and looked up to see her smiling triumphantly down at me.
“Who’s the one who is distracted?” I saw something in her expression change as she realized that my gaze had traveled to attempting looking up her skirt. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t spent my fair share of time on my back in the ring, but this was by far the most fun. She also had another thing coming if she thought I was going to stay down for long.
I arched my back to spring up to the balls of my feet and then back up to a standing position. I had her by the elbows before she could blink. I propelled her backward onto the ropes. “You aren’t playing fair,” I growled.