Brooke.
My.
Brooke.
On tiptoes. Mouth puckered. Kissing Scorpion. My blood drains, then shoots back through me with desperate anger. I don’t know what happened. Why I’m looking at this. But I shoot to my feet and send the table crashing to the ground. Coach ends up on the floor as I throw my cell phone and it crashes into the wall. Then I start for her.
“No, Pete, no!” she bursts out, panicked from her seat.
My blood boils as she calls out to her precious Pete, my body suddenly trembling as betrayal and hurt flood me. God, I want to shake her. I want to do more than shake her. I stop before her, breathing and trying to calm myself, squeezing my fists together with the urge to pound them on something. Brooke’s eyes are bright with worry, and the truth in them makes my gut sink.
“Do you want to talk to me, Remington?” she asks me, in deceptive calm.
My god, the gall of this woman. I’m shaking so bad my arms tremble beside me. My throat feels so raw, I can barely talk. I can barely even breathe. I’ve never given myself to anyone, and yet I’ve fallen like some fucking imbecile for her. I have never shared my music with anyone. I have never, ever, believed anyone could love me until I looked into her eyes and I thought I was her god. . . .
But I’m nobody’s god.
I’m just a fucking sick fool.
The pain is excruciating. I want to do some damage, but I just don’t want to damage her. My voice is grim with rage, and it’s a miracle I can even speak as I fight to stay in place, to keep my hands down, to try to control myself. “I want to do more than talk to you,” I rigidly tell her.
My nostrils flare, and I don’t want her to look at me in fear, but all I can see is her mouth.
Her beautiful mouth.
On that motherfucker’s face!
“All right, let’s talk. Excuse me, Diane.” She surprises me by saying it almost as calmly as if I’ve just proposed a fucking picnic to her! She pushes her chair back and makes a whole circus about folding back her napkin.
The anger builds inside me and I keep seeing, in my mind’s eye, her mouth puckered and kissing the very man whose fault it is I’m no longer a boxer. I want to grab her. I want to crush her to me and shake her. I flex my hands at my sides to keep them from doing that and more, and I can’t breathe right, I can’t think right. I want to kill Scorpion and carve his motherfucking skin off!
I want to throw something. I want to yell. I want to take her clothes off and fuck her and show her She. IS. MINE! Mine to touch, to hold, to protect.
“I just went to see my sister,” she breathes.
My gut coils in rage that she would not trust me to get her sister back to her like I’d promised.
I reach out, and my hand trembles as I touch her mouth, then I duck and angrily bite it. She gasps at the feel of my teeth, and it gives me pleasure, perverse pleasure, that she is reminded that that mouth is for me.
“You go negotiate with scum like him? Without me knowing?” I scrape my thumb across. I want to drag her up to my room and wash her mouth with soap. I want to lick it clean and then make her tell me that picture does not really exist!
“I went to see my sister, Remy. I couldn’t care less about the scum,” she softly tells me.
I touch her hair, trying to be slow while my insides roil and pull and twist, and I keep rubbing her lips. These are lips I love, lips that move me, that kiss me, the only lips I have ever thought loved me. “Yet you kiss that fucking asshole with the same mouth you kiss me?” I growl.
“Please just count to ten.” She touches my sleeve, and the anger rises in me even more. She thinks that I can count to a fucking million and forget this?
“One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten,” I angrily rush out, then I grab her collar and pull her to me, leaning over her with narrowed eyes. “You kiss that motherfucker with the same mouth I would kill for?”
“My lips hardly touched the tattoo,” she whispers pleadingly. “I did just what you do when you let them get a hit and give them false confidence so I could see my sis.”
I slam my chest. “You’re my fucking girl! You don’t get to give anyone false confidence!”
“Sir, we need you to leave the premises now.”
I swing around to watch some idiot coming over. Pete and Riley stop him and start telling him I’m going to pay for all the shit I do, and, hell, the man has no idea I have done nothing yet. He can stay and watch me break everything in this stinking place, and then I’ll gladly invite him to come over and watch me crack Scorpion’s skull in two.
Shooting him a warning glare, I turn back to Brooke and slide a finger down her pretty jaw, watching the way her breasts rise and fall with her panting breaths. “I’m going to go break that fucker’s face,” I whisper to her, then I lean over and push my tongue into her cruel, delicious little mouth, “and then I’m going to break you into submission.”