Mel’s eyebrows sweep up. “Are you actually bragging to me?”
“No! I’m actually honestly—no sarcasm here—admitting to my best friend that I’m eager to give my guy my first ever bee-jay as soon as I can manage to take my mouth off his delicious lips.”
The unbelievable has happened. I think I just managed to make Melanie blush. She’s red-faced as she stares at me like I just confessed to an orgy. “My god. What did you do to my friend? Where the hell is she, you alien? Brooke, you are madly in love with this dude. Since when do you talk BJs to me?”My smile suddenly fades, and so does my voice. “Please stop saying the L word, it only makes my stomach clench.”
“Love. You love Remington. Remington loves you,” Mel taunts.“Here, girl.” With a playful glare, I hand her a piece of bubblegum I stole from Pete. “Put that in your mouth, will you? It’s made of glue and it will seal your trap together. Now tell me if you spot Nora anywhere.”
“I see her at three o’clock.”
Surprise siphons the blood off my face. “You do?”My frame tenses when I see her. It’s Nora. In a deep, innermost part of me, I’d hoped it had been a nightmare, and that the chick with the blood-red hair, the pale face, and the black scorpion tattoo had been someone else. But no.
It is. Nora.
This sad-looking waif of a girl.
And I have to save her from herself.
As Nora takes her seat across the ring from us, I clench Melanie’s arm and shove a little paper I’d been clutching into her palm. “Okay, you need to take her this, very discreetly, so those big types near her don’t really notice the exchange.”
“Gotcha.” Melanie flicks her ponytail and walks around to the other side of the ring. Nora hasn’t seen me, I think, but tenses when she spots Melanie. Mel walks by, all flirty and bimbo-like, when she stumbles with one of the men, then bends to apologize to Nora and pats her hands as if saying there, there, no harm done, and then she’s heading back to her seat beside me.
My insides tighten with tension as my eyes stay trained to Nora. She glances down at her lap and reads the note, and hope and excitement twirl inside me when she seems to read it a second time. So she’s interested?
“Done,” Melanie says, and when Nora lifts her head, she sees me, her hazel eyes flaring slightly, and I exhale a long breathe of gratitude that at least she isn’t running away. When our stares hold for several seconds, I smile at her, just so she knows that I want to see her in “friendly” mode. She smiles back, barely, almost shakily, and then tears her eyes free as the presenter begins. My chest swells with even more determination to save my baby sister, and suddenly I can’t wait for it to be tomorrow. I just pray she’ll come.“And nooow, ladies and gentlemen…”
“He’s coming out.” Melanie squeezes me.
Just knowing he’s going to come out has me on hyper-excitement mode, and when his name rings across the crowd, my heart has already kicked into overdrive and I’m quaking in my skin. “… Remington Tate, your one and only, RIPTIDE!! RIPTIDE!! Say hello to RIPTIDEEEEE!”
He comes out like a sun after months of night, and the world can’t stop shouting in gratitude. He swings up to the ring and whips off his red robe and, at the center of the ring, there he is. Doing his signature turn as the crowd roars his name, his muscular arms outstretched, chorded with veins, and the screams get louder and louder, for the people love the way he turns, his boyish face and manly body, the wicked glint in his eyes that promises them a good show. He stops right where he always does, and his dancing blue eyes tell me that he knows he’s the bomb and that I want him, and his dimples come out to kill me. Kill. Me.
The fact that I know that man is mine at night won’t even let me breathe.But I thankfully manage a smile. Boy, I’m so bursting with excitement, I can definitely smile back at him from my seat.
The fight begins, and I sit drooling next to Melanie watching those arms with the vine tattoo where his shoulders and biceps meet flex out to strike his opponents. His strength, his footwork, his speed, mesmerize me.
Melanie shouts to him all the things I want to tell him and more, delighting me. “Kill him, Remington! Yes! Yes! Omigod, you’re a god!”
Laughing with pure joy, I hug her. “Oh, Mel,” I sigh, then I whisper in mischief, “Tell him he’s hot.”
“Why don’t you, little chicken?” She narrows her eyes and shoulders me. “You little nugget, tell him!”“I can’t. I can never seem to shout in a crowd. I was the one usually shouted at,” I admit, shouldering her back. “And I feel like my voice will distract him. Come on! Tell him from me. Tell him he’s so hot.”