A Man Who Knows What He Wants Box Set 5

by Flora Ferrari

  It’s been twenty years after our first holiday. We went to Puerto Vallarta way back then on the break in-between my classes and thought it would be fitting to return twenty years later.

  What an incredible run it’s been. And it feels like we’re just getting warmed up.

  Sandy is 12 and Randy is 13. We had the kids a year apart right after I started my legal career. I think at first the partners were wondering if my childbirth was going to be a yearly thing. But after two I knew I was finished.

  One boy and one girl. Perfection.

  And I was focused on becoming a real lawyer. Working real cases and getting results.

  It was easier than I though with a husband on the police force to consult with and get non-confidential information from each and every night.

  But this holiday is anything about work…with the minor exception of celebrating me making partner at the firm.

  And I’m not the only one who’s seen a lot of success lately.

  Julian was named captain of the force, which I told him means he can spend more time with me.

  He agrees, but he also says it means he needs to be more available to his team and the citizens of our community as well.

  I don’t know how he seems to always “find” extra hours in the day but he does. And I never feel like I’m missing out.

  Whether it’s the numerous text messages of encouragement or praise I receive each and every day, or the breakfasts we share together each morning or the family meals we have each night, Julian’s always found time to make me his number one priority as he said he would.

  And what better way to remind me of his love than to take me and our kids to Playa del Amor. It’s a beach literally engulfed by a cave with a large open “roof” that lets sunlight in.

  There’s even flora and fauna here and coral reefs which I’m itching to snorkel.

  And once we’re all worn out from the beach activities we’ve got a sandbank so I can work on the tan I don’t get from being indoors so much, and some shady areas where we can have our family picnics…just like the one he took me on in the forest the day we first made love.

  And twenty years later I can see that look in his eye that tells me there will be lovemaking today. Probably when the kids are facedown snorkeling or some other time. He’s a master of the quickie, just ask the flight attendants on the way down…but then again they wouldn’t know because he’s always discreet and so possessive of me. He doesn’t want anyone else to know about me or our sex life so he always finds a way to give me the excitement, but spare us the possibility of being found out…although the rush often feels like we will.

  But he takes care of the logistics just as he’s taken care of everything all these years.

  I always thank my lucky stars he’s there for me and my children, freeing us of the many burdens that life throws your way.

  These days I wouldn’t even know what those burdens are because he’s been wrapping us up in his big strong “shield” for years keeping us safe and sound and completely stress free.

  And that’s what today is all about, at least I think so.

  I see him pick up Randy and toss him into the water. What seems stressful for me is the complete opposite for our son.

  “Whoooooa!” Randy says just before he lands horizontally in the ocean.

  “You’re next!” Julian says to Sandy, but she’s too quick, jumping in herself.

  “I guess it’s just me and you now. Just like old times,” he says.

  “Just like old times,” I say and he leans in for a sizzling kiss in the sunshine.

  “Everything old is new again,” I say. “Just like our love.”

  “Every day I wake up next to you is like a new day. Always has been always will be. Every morning I feel the excitement like I’m meeting you again for the first time. It’s like a little bit of me disappears every night and I get to relive that excitement each and every morning when you bring me back to life and I start each day as the luckiest man to ever live.”

  “Awww,” I say, hugging him again. “How about we live right now?” I ask.

  “I’m in. What’s the plan?”

  “No plan, just this!” I say and grab ahold of him tight and pull us both over the side of the boat and into the azure blue waters.

  I can do that because I know no matter how choppy life’s seas get or how deep and dark the waters are below me he’s always there to protect me from things I’m not even aware of.

  Yeah, he’s possessive and he owns me. Every single part of me including the most important part of all.

  My heart and my love.

  I feel his arms wrap around me and suddenly I’m lifted to the surface.

  He holds me in place as I kick my legs but there’s really no need. He’s strong enough to do it for the both of us.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let me sink to the bottom,” I joke.

  He kisses me as we swim.

  “Never, because you’re mine forever. Mine and only mine. You belong to me and not the sea.”

  “She’s mine!” he yells and it echoes off the walls of the surrounding beach and out through the roof to the heavens.

  “Mine and only mine!”

  “Fooooorever!”

  57) COACHED BY THE MMA FIGHTER

  COACHED BY THE MMA FIGHTER

  The first time I laid eyes upon my dad’s best friend I became obsessed.

  But I don’t have an athletic or sporty bone in my body and he’s an MMA cage fighter, meaning he’s caught entirely off-guard when I ask him to coach me on ways to protect myself before I head off to college.

  * * *

  I’m an older man and she’s a younger woman. I’m a MMA fighter, not a coach.

  But when my best friend’s daughter asks me to coach her I accept on the spot for the first time in my life, knowing I want to coach her in more ways than one.

  * * *

  Once we start rolling around on the mat, I’m wondering if my instalove fantasies with my coach are just may december madness filling my brain, or if he’s really considering filling me with something else for the first time ever.

  * * *

  I know how to fight MMA, but my greatest fight of all time won’t involve my fists…it will be convincing my best friend that what his daughter and I have is real.

  And I’ll fight tooth and nail to show the whole world, including him, that’s she’s mine and only mine…forever.

  *Coached by the MMA Fighter is an insta-everything standalone romance with an HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

  Chapter One

  Maddox

  “Damn! Look what just walked in the front door,” my sparring partner Royce says.

  My eyes temporarily lose sight of the heavy bag and I see her.

  No f’ing way.

  I cock my fist back and land the hardest punch I’ve ever thrown in or out of ring into the bag, knocking it back with a vengeance and taking Royce down with it.

  “What’s your problem, man? We’re just training. Chill!”

  “What’s my problem?” I say looking at him as he lies on the mat. “You should be asking what your problem is if you talk about her like that again and the answer is me.”

  “Okay. Okay. Sorry. Jeez,” he says holding his arms crossed in front of his face just in case I lose it and follow him to the mat and show him a blaze of fists and elbows.

  “I’m sorry, miss. We don’t train women,” Rico says as he looks her up and down at the door.

  An audible growl leaves the depths of my stomach and fills the gym I own.

  “Everybody out!” I yell.

  Fifty or so trained fighters turn and look at me like I’ve lost my damn mind.

  And I have.

  Or should I say I did long ago…the first time I ever saw her face to face just a month ago.

  But this isn’t her parents’ backyard barbecue anymore this is my turf…and my rules.

  I bailed on that barbecue after less than an hour because
I could feel my obsession for her growing by the second and I didn’t want to cause a scene or do something I might regret.

  I thought leaving and getting back to training would get her out of my mind, but it’s only made things worse.

  I’m up here in the mountains of Bear Lake, California training at altitude with a bunch of professional fighters and not a single woman in sight.

  Not that another woman on this damn planet could hold a candle to her.

  “But it’s your rule, Mayhem,” Rico says as he turns to look at me and extends his palms upward at chest level.

  “Out dammit!” I yell and watch as the other fighters scramble for the back exit.

  I step away from the punching bag as Royce slides out of the main training area and is the last one to disappear.

  As I walk toward that front door I can’t help but feel like the feral man that I’ve become training out here in the woods.

  Running the trails at zero dark thirty in the morning. Hunting and eating freshly killed meat plus all the other protein sources I’m supplying my muscles with on a daily basis has my testosterone levels through the roof so high I have to be careful my pre-competition test don’t come back with a disqualification.

  Not that I’d ever cheat and take steroids or any performance enhancing drugs, nor would I ever need too, but all this meat…this training…and now the sight of her sends my manliness to a higher level than humanly possible.

  And who the hell does she think she is that she can walk in here in that little thigh-high virginal white dress?

  Doesn’t she know all the lust I have pent up inside me is for her?

  Did the competition send her here to wreck me? To torment me? To interrupt my training so they can slide in and take the million-dollar prize the title fight pays?

  My last title fight. My last chance.

  But all I can think of right now is my first chance…with her.

  And no way in hell am I blowing it.

  As I approach her drenched in sweat and my heart already racing I feel the blood pumping through my veins.

  And I can see she’s practically trembling like the little deer I see in the woods out back of my cabin each day.

  The cabin I want to take her to right now and lay her down and make her a woman…my woman.

  I think of everything we could do as we inhale the high levels of oxygen that you can only get up here at this elevation. I imagine how we would grow light headed before I’d grow lightheaded for a different reason.

  “Anastasia,” I say as I approach her.

  I can see she’s scared…nervous. It must have taken a ton of courage to come up here and walk into my gym like this.

  And I have to know why.

  And when I find out why she walked in I’m going to make sure she never walks out…of my life ever.

  Chapter Two

  Anastasia

  I sat in my beater of a car in the parking lot for over half an hour listening to music to pump me up enough to walk into his gym.

  And by him I mean Mayhem Maddox. The man who built this gym with his own hands, literally and figuratively.

  He took all the money he won prize fighting and came up here to set up his own camp and part of the training was the old school kind…

  Chopping down trees.

  Hammering nails.

  Laying a cement foundation.

  And that’s exactly why I’m here.

  I want to lay a foundation with him.

  A foundation in self-defense to protect myself in the crazy world out there, but more importantly a foundation between the two of us. Something we can build on.

  A spark in the kindling from the forest that turns into a fire that burns out of control.

  This part of California is already know for that, but I want to start another kind of fire.

  The fire that I feel inside that can only be put out by him. At least that’s what I tell myself, but I know no matter how much of him I might get it will never be enough.

  I’d seen pictures of him before…my dad’s best friend.

  The guy who spent so much of his life in secrecy in the middle of nowhere. Up here training with a bunch of hot sweaty men…and he was the alpha of the alphas.

  But for some strange reason he’d never gotten a title fight…until now.

  And I wasn’t here to interrupt that at all. No way.

  But I wanted to be here to be around that energy that I could feel in the pictures my dad had in his scrapbook. Those shots of my dad lifting him up in the ring after he won his first fight. The pictures of them hunting and fishing and doing everything that guys who are as close as brother’s do.

  And I want to be in the next picture that gets taken. The one when he wins and he gets the kiss from the pretty girl.

  I want to be that pretty girl.

  I mean, I’m not the best looking girl that ever lived, but I like to think I have a kind of natural beauty that guys like.

  I may not wear a lot of makeup or spend a ton of time on my looks each morning, but I have spent a ton of time developing my mind and that’s more important right?

  Reading. Studying. Thinking.

  Yeah, I’m the introvert of introverts. But like a lot of introverts I’m a deep thinker and a deep feeler too. Small things affect me greatly.

  And nothing affected me more than when he took a day out of his training last month and came to our family barbecue.

  Although I’d never met him before and had only seen photos of him before, like the one I keep in my panty drawer that I made when I “borrowed” the original and made a reprint at Costco, I knew immediately who he was.

  Who wouldn’t?

  The tallest, biggest, baddest man I’d ever seen in my life.

  The way people immediately moved out of his way when he just looked in any direction. He could clear a path like a celebrity bodyguard and he was a celebrity…

  But one without a title.

  I could see the intensity in his eyes that afternoon and I knew he was focused on his dream. He was a man with a plan and I really admired that…so much so that I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.

  I’d never seen anyone so obsessed with anything in their lives and then to see the focus he’d pursued that goal his entire life? Incredible.

  At least I thought that focus was solely on his MMA career.

  Until my best friend and I were giggling around him in the backyard and then I looked over her shoulder and saw the intensity with which he was looking at me.

  I felt like I was watching Animal Planet when they have those deadly predator weeks.

  The ones where they feature sharks, wolves, even the prehistoric Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  And he felt like all of them rolled in one and I was his next meal.

  But before he took a bite into one of my dad’s famous summer barbecue cheeseburgers…he was gone.

  Never to be seen again.

  Until today, because I couldn’t have that. Couldn’t tolerate staying up thinking about him all night long anymore.

  And couldn’t tolerate not taking a chance in life and seeing if what I thought I saw at that barbecue was just my imagination or something real.

  Like the realness I feel right now…as his eyes dilate and I see him fighting not to look me up and down like that guy who answered the door.

  I can see he wants to be a gentleman, but I want to tell him neither one of us really wants that now do we?

  Because I want the animal that’s inside. That feral beast.

  And up here in the mountains I know animals do three things…

  Eat, sleep, and have sex.

  And the first two are the farthest things from my mind…unless he wants to eat me up…

  As in swallow me whole in one giant gulp.

  Chapter Three

  Maddox

  “What are you doing here?” I ask her.

  All these years I’ve been trained to be aggressive. It comes to me naturally. It’s my M.O.
<
br />   But it’s like a switch has flipped inside me and suddenly I want to use my strength and power to protect…to shield her from harm. To wrap my big arms around her and make sure nothing or no-one every harms her ever in this lifetime or the next.

  I know my question shows my surprise to see her, but it’s not the kind of unwanted surprise that those words can convey.

  It’s the surprise of a man so shocked, in the best way possible, that he needs to know to who or what he owes his good fortune to.

  “I’m heading to college in the fall with everything that’s happening these days I want to learn some self defense,” she says.

  People have been asking me to train them or their kids for over half of my thirty-eight years. Yeah, I could have set up one of those MMA gyms in some strip mall in Southern California, or anywhere for that matter, like so many other “pros” do, but that’s not me.

  My dream was to be a champion…not handing out glorified black belts to people who don’t deserve them.

  Fighting is real and pure to me, and I know she’s pure too…and I want her to be my pure possession now and always.

  “You’re smart,” I say and I mean it. “With all the revelations in Hollywood and U.S.C. being so close to a dangerous part of town it’s a smart move.”

  “How did you know I’m going to U.S.C.?” she asks with a look in her eyes that says maybe it’s me she needs to watch out for. Maybe I’m the stalker who’s more dangerous than anyone she can meet in a dark alley at night.

  “I know your passion for storytelling and I know U.S.C.’s film school is the best in the world. You’re going there, aren’t you?”

  She nods.

  Now I know to who I owe my good fortune to…her father, my best friend.

  “Your dad sent you?” I ask.

  She’s still nodding when her head movements turn from an up and down motion to a side-to-side motion.