Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance)(107)

Chapter Thirty Nine





There’s blood in his teeth, but it doesn’t stop his smile from being so utterly infectious.

“Good job,” I say, nodding, rubbing his shoulders. I look at him in the mirror. We’re in a private room at the back of the basement. Everyone has filtered out now, and a lone man comes in and drops a duffel bag on the ground.

“Your payment,” he says. “Stay down here as long as you like.”

Duncan laughs. “Like hell we’re going to stay down here.”

“Suit yourself, mate. We got showers around the corner, fridge over there, take anything you like. Good fights tonight. You kicked arse, mate.”

“Thanks,” Duncan says, his eyes returning to me in the mirror.

“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” I ask him. The fights were hard for him in his relatively untrained state, but he still ended up winning through sheer heart and skill.

He took his lumps, though. This fight was far more organized than I had expected… they had a doctor on site in case of injury, not the sort of thing you find usually in a dusty basement cage tournament.

“I did,” he says. I appreciate his immediate honesty. “But not enough.”

“No? You sure?”

“I’m sure, Dee.”

“You were slow.”

He rubs his jaw. “I know.”

“Here as well,” I say, pointing to the blotchy black-and-green bruise he’s got on his ribcage where he took a violent knee.

“Yeah.”

“And here,” I say, bending over him to slap open his thighs. He winces, but as his legs come apart from each other, I see the bruise there, above his knee, from where he had to worm himself out of a leg lock. “These guys weren’t just nobodies. Some of them obviously had training.”

“Well, I won.”

“You did,” I say. “You did good.”

“Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“You don’t want to shower first? You’ve got blood all over you.”

Duncan looks down at himself as if noticing it for the first time. “Damn,” he says.

“Go on,” I tell him, guiding him down the room toward the back. There are just a few showers side-by-side, nothing luxurious but they’re clean at least.

I watch him as he stands beneath the faucet, water pouring down his muscled body. There’s a weight to his shoulders, something that didn’t used to be there.

He finishes, and I help him get dressed, pull a complaint from his lips: I’m not a fucking cripple, Dee. It makes me laugh.

Then we count the money. It’s all there, fifty-thousand. It’s not going to last forever, but it’s certainly enough for an emergency fund.

“I’ll take you out for dinner,” I tell him. “Anything you want.”

He smirks. “We living large now, are we?”

“You earned it.”

Together we take the steps slowly up the basement. I can see that Duncan’s in pain, even if it would take a two-hour interrogation session for him to admit it.

He tells me he wants a steak, which is pretty much what I expect, and so I take him to a nice place I know nearby my apartment.

The staff look at us funny, of course. Duncan’s bruised visibly on his face, but nobody asks us anything out of politeness, which is good.

After an entirely too-large dinner – Duncan wolfed down his steak, and I settled for a bite of his and some soup and a salad – we leave the restaurant hand-in-hand. It’s almost like we’ve forgotten that we’re not yet at the end of it all. It’s a nice moment of respite, though, just going out for dinner together. It’s something we couldn’t really do very often back home, lest one of Dad’s men be watching us.

The night is chilly, and Duncan draws me into him as we walk toward the car. “Sometimes,” I say, looking up at him. In the harsh yellow street light, the cut of his jaw creates a straight-line shadow on his neck.

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes I feel like I could forget it all, you know?”

“I know.”

I rub my belly, then pull my jacket closed over it. “Have you heard anything from your… fans?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve got a guy trying to hack into your father’s email right now, but he says it’ll take time. Called it ‘brute force’ or something.”

“Dad is good with numbers. He’ll have a long password. It’ll take forever to crack.”

“Other than that, nothing. I don’t really talk to them much because I don’t want to be too active, you know? Draw attention.”

“I can’t believe I looked at your fan page on Facebook. I hated reading it.”