Then curiosity got the better of me. “Hello.”
A long silence before a brisk voice came on the line. “I got us a meet up with Carmine Rossini next Saturday at three. Can you make it?”
I leaned back into the cushion and flicked off the television, stunned into silence. Carmine was big shit in the Northeast, and that he wanted to meet with me this soon, before I’d really even landed any major fights, was huge.
“How did you manage that?”
“I called him an hour ago. I sent him some artfully edited video of you and he likes your style. He wants to talk about setting something up down the line. So are you in?”
Her tone was clipped and all business, but there was an underlying sense of desperation there. Like she was waiting for me to steer the conversation elsewhere and the thought scared the shit out of her.
“I can do that. What did Mickey say about it?”
That was my pathetic attempt at finding out if she’d contacted her boss after our near-miss earlier. If he knew we’d been messing around, the status of our business relationship might be taken out of our hands. Everybody knew it was risky to dip your pen in the company ink.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Mickey gave me free rein? I’ll give him a schedule when we have one and that’s that,” she snapped.
I shifted the phone to my other ear. “Okay, take it easy.” Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was still a ball of frustration after our grappling. It was a herculean effort not to tell her that I could make it better if she wanted me to.
“So yes or no? I’ve got to call him back.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll come by the gym on Thursday…during the day time,” she added in a breathless rush, “and we’ll talk about our approach with Carmine, go over strategy and you can show me your training regimen.”
She didn’t say goodbye but a second later, a dial tone sounded in my ear.
“Okey doke, sounds good. Nice talking to you, too,” I muttered into the receiver before tossing the phone onto the couch beside me.
I’d known Kayla James for four days now, and somehow she’d managed to work her presence into every one of them. Whether we were sparring verbally or sparring physically, trying to tear each other’s clothes off in real life or in a dream, she was taking over half my waking thoughts and all my sleeping ones.
And that shit? Had to stop.
Chapter Five
Kayla
"Matty, meet Carmine Rossini. Carmine, this is Matty McDaniels.”
I gestured between the two guys with a sweep of my hand and put on my most winning smile.
“He's the middleweight coming up through the Boston circuit that we talked about last week. We're hoping to match him against one of your guys. After some discussion, Matty and I decided Willie Martin would be ideal. We think it would be a great fight for both of them, and they'd both stand to gain lots of new fans."
Rossini looked Matty over with flinty gray eyes but, to my relief, nodded slowly in recognition. "I saw some tape of you. I like your style. You got brothers too, right?"
Matty's jaw flexed and without missing a beat, I stepped in to answer on his behalf. "Yes. Not MMA, though. One of them is a traditional boxer, the other a kick-boxer.”
I’d learned a lot about Matty in the past week and a half just through talking about strategy, discussing past fights and watching his interaction with his brothers on the couple of occasions I’d stopped by the gym. This only confirmed what I’d been feeling. For some reason, it didn't matter whether it was good or bad, the second someone mentioned Bash or Reid, he immediately went on the defensive. We were going to have to have a talk about that moving forward. For now, though, I had to hope he'd keep his trap shut and let me close this deal.
We sat around a long, gleaming conference room table and talked through all the details. We’d even patched Willie in via conference call and he sounded excited to do it. We talked sponsors, possible dates, media coverage, the whole nine. When, two hours later, everything had been hammered out besides the money, I was brimming with confidence and decided to broach the topic myself.
“Guess that’s it. Oh,” I waved my hand like it was a minute detail, but my heart was pounding so hard, I was afraid they’d hear it. “With regard to the purse, we're willing to split sixty-forty. Willie's good but he doesn't have the local support or following Matty does. If we’re fighting in Boston, we think that's more than fair."
Carmine rocked back on his chair and eyeballed me. “I never even considered that this would be less than fifty-fifty. They’re both new, relatively unknown. I’m not sure why we’d give up that extra ten percent.”