Submission Specialist(Still a Bad Boy #2)(3)

I squeezed past him as a chorus of “I do!” “I will” rang out behind me. One of them said “How come the cleaning lady gets to go in?” Another said, “I’ll deepthroat your-” just as the door clicked shut.

Stepping into a Tier-1 dressing room after working on the other side for so long was like stepping into first-class on an airplane after only ever flying coach. They had all the same stuff that we had, but instead of bare concrete, there was actual paint on the walls, a permanent massage table, a brand new heavy punching bag hung from the ceiling on a chain. Plenty of bells and whistles.

Steam poured out of a cracked-open door and I could hear a shower running. I walked over and paused by the door, before knocking even more tentatively than I had on the other one.

“Austin? I’m here for the-”

“I told Ross to tell you I wasn’t ready!” he yelled out.

“Uh… no I’m not… uh… I work here? Henry said you needed a massage?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll be right out.”

The sound of running water stopped and I caught a flash of movement in the steamed-up mirror through the opening. Quickly, I turned and faced the other way, ashamed at the flush of excitement that came unbidden and made me bite my bottom lip without thinking about it.

After a couple minutes I felt the waft of air as the door was pulled open behind me, and turned to face him. Standing there, wearing only a towel, with beads of water dripping down his neck and torso from his hair, was fan (and my) favorite, Austin “The Killer” Aquila.

That perfectly sculpted body looked like it was made from granite by an artist with an eye for sin, then decorated with ink in designs that curled all over. His thick arms had contours that drew my eyes up to his broad shoulders, and then sent them down across his pecs and over each and every bump of his abs.

His lower abdominals formed lines that narrowed as my eyes roamed lower… lower… lower until the visual ride was abruptly cut off by the towel, which he held up by one hand.

I looked up and heard my jaw click shut when our eyes met. I only hoped I’d closed my mouth before I drooled. If I was looking at him like a piece of art, he was looking at me like a piece of food, and it took all my willpower not to find a plate to climb on to.

All heavyweights have a certain presence. It would be hard not to when you’re a tank that has briefly assumed human form, but Austin had presence that almost seemed to make the air crackle between us and around him. His eyes, they were looking at me in a way that would give my dad a stroke. That brought me partway back to reality.

“Um… over there?” I pointed at the massage table.

“You sure you work here?” he asked.

“Yeah, I… I normally work in Tier-2…”

Austin closed the distance between us and leaned down towards me. My heart tried to jump up my throat to get a better view out my mouth at all that solid muscle so close to me, and my ability to breathe be damned.

“Because, if you’re another girl that stole a uniform just to get in here… well, I’ll have to do to you what I did to her.”

A drop of water fell from his head and landed on my ear, making me flinch. The scent of soap and the faint musk of him filled my lungs as I took a deep breath to offer whatever reassurance I could.

“I promise I work here,” I squeaked.

I’d been around men before, I’d seen Austin on TV before, but I’d never felt anything like this. I’d always been able to keep what my father called my evil nature shut up in a box, but something about this was different.

Maybe it was the way he carried himself, that presence I felt. Maybe it was the fact that he was the hottest man I’d ever laid eyes on and he was only wearing a towel.

Whatever it was, that part of me had kicked a hole in the side of its box and was yelling at me to reach out and run my hands all over that perfection. I gulped, because that’s exactly what I was supposed to do, in my professional capacity.

“Hmmm. Too bad. All those rules, huh?” he said.

No doubt he was talking about the rules concerning no sleeping with the fighters. I got that talk during my induction right after the fire safety lecture. Despite that, if rumors were true, then Austin had taken liberties with more than one ring girl in his time with the NHBFC.

The tattooed fighter walked over to the massage table and climbed on, leaving me in a daze for a few seconds before I followed. There was a fully-stocked basket of massage oils on a shelf underneath, and I pulled one out at random while he settled himself in.

I poured a little on to one palm and rubbed my hands together to warm everything up. That was lesson one in the massage course I took earlier in the year, and although there hadn’t been anything in that lesson about chanting “professional, professional, professional” in your mind, I did that for a moment too, before I touched him.