Faking It

by Nikki Bella

  I felt myself falling back, back toward the dresser. Only my hands, my nails digging into the back of his neck saved me. As the thundering ecstasy pounded through my head, my eyes opened long enough to look down my slim, naked form, passed my breasts as they bounced in time to Tyler’s urgent thrusts, over my tight stomach as it curved to better angle my pussy for him, down to the bare mound between my thighs and the incredibly erotic sight of his great rod rhythmically appearing and disappearing as he slammed it inside me.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, fuck!” Tyler startled me by suddenly growling. Somewhere deep inside me, even among my wild thrashing, I felt him tense and pulse.

  “I want it, baby,” I managed to breathe. “Shoot your load in my pussy! Give me everything you’ve got!”

  He let out a loud, animal roar and I couldn’t help grinding on him even harder, trying to cram as much of his marble-hard cock into me as I could, before his swollen erection finally burst inside me, throbbing uncontrollably as he spilled his hot seed deep in my pussy, shooting out volley after volley until I thought I couldn’t hold any more.

  His legs seemed to give out but he still had enough control to guide us toward the mattress. We tumbled slowly until Tyler landed on his back and I just about stayed on top of him, his twitching member still buried inside me. I giggled as we hit the floor, then stayed still. A small gasp escaped my lips as I felt his final shot expelled deep within me, before we both let out a deep, satisfied sigh.

  Still straddling him, I bent forward to kiss him on the lips. “Oh, my God!” I breathed, “and to think I’d decided not to see you again.”

  “You really feel that way?” he asked. I looked questioningly at him for a second. “Henry did a lot of digging very quickly to try and figure out where you were.”

  That knot began to form in my stomach again, even as I could still feel his dick softening inside me. What has he found out?

  “I know about your father, your family, your dad’s business and what my father made happen,” he said. I went to lift myself off him but he held me in place. “And I’m sorry. He was a bastard!” Tyler hissed. “He didn’t care about the thousands of lives he ruined by breaking up companies and laying people off, and he didn’t care about the two lives he ruined more than anyone. My mother’s and mine. She was beautiful, but as soon as she passed thirty-eight he was fooling around with younger women. Girls really. He didn’t even try to hide it. If my mother spoke up he’d hit her. If I tried to help her, he’d punch me. We went to the police, but his lawyers made sure no one knew anything. We became prisoners in our own home until he eventually did the decent thing and died,” Tyler finally seemed to notice that tears were running down his cheeks, “Even then he made sure that my mom got nothing. Everything went to me, but only if I kept running his firm. The only thing I can do is try to not be like him, every chance I get.”

  I lay down beside him stroking his cheek softly. “So, you knew I was only looking for you for revenge?” I asked him.

  “I figured it out,” he replied.

  “And you still came to find me?”

  “I fell in love with you. It felt like you’d fallen for me too. I had to find out. Besides,” his mouth shifted into a grin, “I’m now majority shareholder and executive VP of a yacht building company, and I clearly know nothing about yachts. I had to find me an expert.” He laughed as I bit his nipple.

  “So, how did you find me?” I asked, kissing my way down his chest.

  “Odd thing,” he began, “Henry was trying everything. He hired two PIs, expensive ones, and we got ready for a long wait before we heard anything. But last night we got a message from Rufus.”

  “Rufus, downstairs Rufus?” I gasped. I’d almost licked my way down his stomach.

  “Yeah. I guess he heard we were looking for you and called us direct, saying you were here.” I heard him sigh as my lips found their way further down still, my fingers gently running along his cock, coaxing it back to life.

  I smiled to myself. It felt good to have people that cared so much about me. Rufus, putting his feelings aside so I could be happy. I thought of Tarquin and Tanya, and the kindness shown by Captain Harper. And then I thought of Tyler. I gently licked my way up his stiffening shaft, pausing before taking the head of him in my mouth.

  “Does that mean,” I asked quietly, “that you’re not a billionaire anymore?”

  “If I say ‘no’, are you going to stop what you are doing?”

  “…”

  The End

  Real Dirty (Bonus Book)

  Chapter 1

  No matter how many times I saw it, I was always stunned by the brutality of mixed martial arts. Not that I was complaining, mostly. The two men in the octagon in front of me were formidable specimens, and as tough as they came. They would have looked right at home on a battlefield a thousand years ago. These men...the joke was always that other men hated the fighters because they could show up at a bar, take your girl, then kick your ass if you protested.

  They just had a different gear. Driven, obsessed, and maybe a little bit insane. Three things of which I was maybe, if not the exact opposite, at least very, very different.

  Thud. After a particularly fierce blow landed by the impossibly hot Braden Dean, a fine sheet of sweat and blood was knocked off of one fighter’s face onto the people in the front row of the media section, including me, the intrepid spectator known as Alyssa Edwards. I closed her eyes and wiped my face with my forearm. What would it feel like to get hit so hard that this happened? What would it be like to get paid for it?

  “Oh my God!” squealed my friend, Chantelle. Unlike me, Chantelle looked like there was nothing she would rather be doing. I think she was even jealous of the ring girls, professional hot chicks who pranced around the ring in between rounds, waving signs advertising the round number, which of course, no one ever noticed.

  When the round ended Chantelle still hadn’t wiped the sweat off her face, like she was going to take it home as a stinky memento of a raucous evening. It was her first fight night and she was revving on all cylinders. “I can’t believe you got to grow up around this!”

  Sometimes I couldn’t believe it either, but the fact that I was accustomed to the fighters and fighting didn’t make me less nervous. My father was a legendary MMA coach and his gym was highly sought after by pros and up and comers alike. I had always been the cute—or insufferable, depending on which fighter you asked—kid running errands, reading in the corner, emptying spit buckets and mopping (her first job in junior high). It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, or the best.

  The legendary Mason Edwards kept his friends close, his enemies closer, and me closest of all.

  “Can you tell what his tattoos are?” said Chantelle.

  She was talking about Braden. The other guy was that MMA rarity: a fighter without a single visible tattoo. “No, not sure.” Braden had something on his right arm that came down into an ornate chest panel, and something on his right calf. But in the blur of the action there was no way to see the details.

  I started biting my nails, a fact I was not aware of until Chantelle slapped my hand. I had told her to do this if she saw me chewing, but it still annoyed me. No one likes to get hit. Except the maniacs in front of us, of course.

  “It’s going to fine,” said Chantelle. “You’re going to be great.”

  Was it that obvious that I was nervous? Ugh. “I’ve just never interviewed any of these guys,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true. I ran a popular podcast about sports—over one hundred thousand downloads a month, thank you very much—High Impact. It wasn’t just about sports, though, which was part of the hook. I knew a lot more than I let on about athletics, but on the podcast I played a little dumber about it all. It took a “Naive girl enters the world of professional macho men angle.” I’d go in wide-eyed and innocent, make them feel good, and then jab them with the sort of open-ended questions they weren’t used to getting in interviews. It would put them so off guard in the mom
ent that I’d often wind up with serious interview magic.

  I would go anywhere for a story, as long as they would let me in. Sometimes even if they wouldn’t. Locker rooms, courtside, press conferences, and I had never been shy about ambushing players in public if I thought I could get a good sound bite out of it. A sprinter from a college in Vermont had yielded a particularly wonderful example. He had been accused of raping another student and had then been acquitted. The entirety of the female population on campus had risen against him, rallying under his bedroom window at night and staring up at it in silence. It had nearly driven him crazy.

  As for my part in it all, I bribed his roommate to let me hide in the closet. When the sprinter came home and shut the door, I burst out with my microphone and said that if I could interview him openly and honestly, I would try to talk the mob outside into dispersing. It hadn’t worked out that way—the mob wasn’t about to be appeased, and I was proud of them for it—but I did get an amazing interview.

  Barging in where you’re not supposed to be usually provokes people to great heights of quotableness.

  “Oh, you’ve interviewed tons of them. You’re just telling yourself it’s different. All these guys are the same guy, way down deep. You’ve got to be a psycho to make it to the top of anything.”

  Did that include me? “I just mean, none of the guys that my dad trained. Trains. It’s different.”

  The referee signaled for the fighters to stand up as the next round began. Braden Dean, the impossibly hot guy who, yes, was being trained by my father, beat his chest and stomped the mat of the octagon like he had seen the biggest spider on earth. The other looked like he had broken mentally. He took his time getting off of his stool, which was never a good sign. Braden had certainly noticed his reluctance as well. Then they were back at it and I forgot that I was anxious about the interview and became nervous instead about the two men.

  It was always a wonder to me when they were conscious after the first ten seconds. How in the world would they feel tomorrow? Even the winner was going to take upwards of a hundred shots to the head. And torso. And body. And and and...ouch. I pictured Braden waking up and mumbling, “Uh....did a train run over me?” Then he would reach over for me and gently stroke my hair, then...oh my God, focus, Alyssa.

  “So your interview is right after the fight?” said Chantelle.

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my idyllic vision of fighter lust out of my brain. “I’m supposed to meet him in the locker room.”

  Chantelle sighed. “I’d give anything to get into that locker room. Oh wow, can you imagine? But you don’t have to imagine! What the hell am I doing waiting tables? Is there any chance that—”

  “Nope. Put it from your mind, my friend.” If I took Chantelle back there no one was going to pay attention to anything I said. I wasn’t any slouch in the looks department. In fact, I was almost volleyball player tall, with great legs and gorgeous black hair. But Chantelle had the kind of personality that made everyone else seem a little drab. Or at least, that’s how it had always felt. Men just didn’t gravitate towards me when there was a bigger personality in the room. Especially in a locker room, I’m guessing, I thought.

  Braden threw his opponent into the fence in front of us and slammed a knee into the poor bastard’s midsection. He was a wrecking ball. I’d seen him fight a few times on TV, and had seen the occasional bit of sparring in the gym, but Braden was something to behold in person. It was nuts that something so violent could also be so elegant, but it was undeniable: he was a graceful killing and kicking and punching and stomping and elbowing machine. His business was fractures and bruises and making other people wish they’d never been born.

  “Do they get those bodies just from all the cardio?” said Chantelle. “Maybe I should start fighting.”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of their workouts. When you see how hard they have to push it, you start to understand why they can’t sustain an ounce of fat on their bodies.”

  Braden smashed the guy into the fence again, like he was trying to push him through the links. I pictured him squishing through like Play-doh. Braden looked over the guy’s shoulder and me and grinned. In the middle of all that and he was grinning like there had never been a more wonderful moment in all recorded history. I had a new question about him every second I watched him, but every time I’d try to write one in my notebook for the interview, the crowd would go wild and I’d forgot what I was going to jot down.

  Chantelle slapped my hand away from my mouth again. I’d been biting the nail so hard that if I’d slipped, I might have taken my entire fingertip off.

  The crowd roared. When I looked up the other guy was facedown on the mat with his eyes still open, motionless. Braden had finished him by punching him in the stomach, shoving him off balance, and then nearly kicking his head into the rafters.

  “I don’t get how his foot doesn’t break,” said Chantelle. “Will you ask him? If I tried to kick something like that I think my whole leg would shatter.” Her voice held the kind of wonder that a child might have while watching a magician perform, if the child was also ablaze with arousal.

  Yuck. So far the night had yielded little besides bitten fingers and thoughts I didn’t want to be having. Now it was time to get to work.

  The announcer stepped into the octagon and gave Braden the mic. He immediately called out Vlad Stanton, the current lightweight champion. “And when you get done hiding in the mountains out in Romania or wherever the hell you’re from, you come take your ass kicking and give me what’s mine! I’m coming for that belt! You can run, but you can’t hide. If you don’t show your face down here I’ll come take down the mountains and drive you out of whatever little hole you’re cowering in.” He thanked the fans, his coach, his friends, and then, with an exaggerated bow, he said, “And most of all, thanks to me!” He waved at the crowd and opened the gate to the octagon.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “I think that was hot,” said Chantelle. “I want him to make a speech to me. He should let me write his speeches, actually. Oh my God, he is so hot.”

  She wasn’t wrong. There was something to the unapologetic posturing. I wasn’t sure what the appeal was, but damn if it didn’t rev me up a little. Me and every other woman, from the look of it. It was such a cliché, but clichés don’t come from nowhere. Maybe he wasn’t the kind of guy you married, but for a little fun? Or a lot of fun? It made me purr, even as I tried to concentrate. As Braden walked by on his way to the locker room I expected a storm of thrown panties to drown him, but he escaped.

  “All right,” I said. “Five minutes and I go. Wish me luck.”

  “You’re not going to need luck. I know how hard you thought about that outfit.”

  I started to protest, but Chantelle’s raised eyebrow told me I was getting nowhere. Oh well, she wasn’t wrong. I was in a green dress that showed off my pale skin and contrasted with my dark hair in a way that I’m sure Cosmo would have said made me a puma or tigress or whatever feline currently represented female allure.

  But I hadn’t done it for him.

  I had done it for a successful interview.

  I gulped. Keep telling yourself that, Alyssa.

  I went to the locker room three minutes later. One of the cut men let me in. I took a couple of what Oprah called deep, cleansing breaths, and walked into the fumes of sweat and liniment and testosterone.

  Braden was sitting on a bench laughing with one of his sparring partners while another team member cut his wrist wraps off with a small pair of silver scissors.

  “You go ahead,” said Braden when he saw me. “I’ll be in in just a minute.”

  What was he talking about? “In where?” I said. I waved my microphone. “I’m here to—”

  “In the shower. I won’t keep you waiting long.” He winked. “But I’ll take my time once we’re in there. We can give it as long as you need.” He bit his lower lip and leaned forward.

  “—to interview you.
For the podcast?” I hated the sound of my voice rising, turning what should have been a statement of fact into a question. What was wrong with him? Some of the fighters I knew postured for show, for their brand, for bigger checks and bigger fights, but this seemed real. Apparently, Braden wasn’t going to break character, because it wasn’t a character for him.

  “But I’m in the middle of getting naked, as you can see,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. The remainders of the wrist wraps dropped away and I saw his bruised knuckles and massive forearms all at once. He rolled his head a little, trying to loosen up his neck. His traps bulged and flexed. It took a second for me to get my breath again. Why the hell did he have to be so hot? Could nothing ever be simple?

  Then he raised his arms above his head and started making arm circles to loosen himself up after the rigidity of the fight. I felt like I was gawking at an exhibit in a museum. A sweaty, stinky museum that had so far exceeded any of Chantelle’s wildest speculations.

  “I don’t like to get interrupted when I’m in the middle of getting naked,” he repeated. “Unless you’re in the mood to help. I might be able to find a job for you.”

  “Yo man, that’s Edwards’s daughter,” said one of the corner men. “Treat her with some respect.”

  Braden looked at me with eyebrows that he had somehow managed to raise even higher. Wondering, no doubt, how a soft little marshmallow like me was sired by the formidable Mason Edwards. I watched him take in the green dress, my hair, my skin, and I fought the urge to cross my arms and stammer. I put my shoulders back and raised my chin, like my dad had taught me. Always project confidence was his personal broken record speech.

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “But this interview does, and you agreed to it. Now you need to honor your contract.”

  Braden cracked his knuckles and sighed. “My manager might have. I don’t remember agreeing to anything. Not saying you’re forgettable, not exactly.” He smiled and I wanted to slap him. Now there was a laugh. Me, trying to get tough and stand my ground with a man who wrecked people for a living. And, apparently, for fun.