Just for Christmas Night

by Lisa Marie Perry

  A red-hot holiday

  Pro football publicist Martha Blue has something to prove. To protect the image of the Las Vegas Slayers—and stay employed—she has to shed her party-girl reputation. Fast! So no more mistakes. No further scandals. And absolutely no falling for the one man who can give her everything she wants…and nothing of what she needs.

  Danger and desire never mixed well for undefeated prizefighter Joaquin Ryder. A friend of the Blue family, he’s a man who knows his boundaries…boundaries he has secretly crossed only once before. Now that he’s back in Sin City to train for the biggest fight of his career, he can’t afford to let a sexy distraction like Martha put him against the ropes. Revisiting their sizzling past is something he isn’t willing to risk—until a steamy Yuletide encounter, where for just one night, they’ll surrender completely….

  “C’mere. We do this accurately, or we don’t do it at all.”

  Martha pushed off the ropes and positioned herself against a corner post.

  “I hadn’t laughed, cracked a smile—none of it—in weeks,” he recalled, advancing toward her in a few careful steps. As he had four years ago, he gripped the top rope on her left and the one on her right. “And you told the lamest-ass joke I’d ever heard.”

  “It was beautiful, your laugh,” she whispered, pensive, her expression drawn in a frown. “So rough. Unexpected. I felt it everywhere. All over me.”

  “Then you put your hands on me, Martha.”

  She coiled her fingers over his forearms, her nails imprinting on his jacket. “I wanted to make you feel the heat I felt just being near you.”

  Past and present collided as her palms skimmed his arms. He’d lived this moment before, only now there was more. More sizzle in his blood at the brush of her hands on his collar. More urgency in the crash of their bodies….

  Books by Lisa Marie Perry

  Harlequin Kimani Romance

  Night Games

  Midnight Play

  Just for Christmas Night

  LISA MARIE PERRY

  thinks an imagination’s a terrible thing to ignore. So is a good cappuccino. After years of college, customer service gigs and a career in caregiving, she at last gave in to buying an espresso machine and writing to her imagination’s desire. Lisa Marie lives in America’s heartland, and she has every intention of making the Colorado mountains her new stomping grounds. She drives a truck, enjoys indie rock, collects Medieval literature, watches too many comedies, has a not-so-secret love for lace and adores rugged men with a little bit of nerd.

  Just for Christmas Night

  Lisa Marie Perry

  Dear Reader,

  Sleigh bells. Crisp, pine-scented breezes. Mistletoe. These are all tiny somethings that I adore at Christmastime. Beyond that is what I treasure most: hope. During my journey with Just for Christmas Night, I lost someone who was precious to me—and I spent countless hours grieving. In myriad ways, I still am. But I believe in little miracles, in hidden blessings and holiday magic. I believe that on the other side of the unknown and the unexpected, of changes and surprises, are hope and opportunity.

  The wildest of the Blue daughters, freewheeling flirt Martha, has plans for herself. But as her life jumps the rails, she gets a spectacular holiday surprise of her own: brooding boxing champ Joaquin Ryder. Watching Martha and Joaquin figure each other out showed me just how steamy the holidays can be!

  Here’s to hope, opportunity and little miracles.

  XOXO

  Lisa Marie Perry

  For Ruby—

  Because you volunteered to be my angel when I needed one.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  Gone too long…

  Miami was the place he had depended on for the past four years. It was his refuge…where he slept. Partied. Trained. Decompressed after championships. Lived as a prince who finally knew the vices and virtues of luxury, yet refused to quit fighting dirty with his fists, like the pauper he’d been for most of his existence.

  But Florida wasn’t where Joaquin “Sinner” Ryder belonged. Las Vegas—no, Ryder’s Boxing Club, the single-level concrete gym built on the labors of friendship, favors and six-packs of beer, with the hands of men whose aged Polaroid photographs were stuck with tape, tacks and wads of chewing gum to a chipped cork bulletin board in the lobby—had possession of his heart.

  Without the place that anchored his entire damn life, without the place his soul’s compass had always pointed toward, he’d begun to drift. Now wasn’t the time to veer off the narrow road to victory. He was a man whose wealth could satisfy his greed, but he couldn’t afford to let the international hype surrounding his upcoming pay-per-view fight, his ex-fiancée’s malice or the pressure to remain America’s undefeated super middleweight champ get to him.

  So he’d found his way back to his uncle’s gym, where it had all begun. He was making the boxing ring his own again. Here, he found his greatest strengths and laid down his every vulnerability.

  In this gym, he followed the establishment’s cardinal rule: no lies, no bullshit. The truth was rarely a pretty thing, and the men who trained and sweated and mingled with triumph and defeat inside these walls never expected it to be.

  Which was why he felt no stirring of remorse or apology when he let out a gritty curse and motioned for his uncle, Jules, to drop his hands. “Got company,” he ground out, making a concentrated effort to relax his stance in spite of the tension pouring over his spine like liquid lead. It wasn’t the tension of channeling his thoughts, instincts, emotions and maneuvers into a trainer-versus-student session with a man who never gave less than his strongest assault in the ring.

  This sensation was foreign, exotic, and had everything to do with the woman who knew she had no right to be in his arena but was invading it anyway.

  “Company? Eh, what the hell you talkin’ about?” Jules jabbed his chest, his eyes alight with camaraderie Joaquin couldn’t force himself to imitate, then snapped up his chin at his sons, who’d been circling the ring, observing. “The Blues are as good as family ’round here.”

  Tor immediately took to the ring, loose-limbed and ready to remove his father’s battered boxing gloves, which could’ve been as old as Tor himself. His younger brother, Othello, three years past Joaquin’s thirty-three years, remained stationed at one of the posts, looking past Marshall Blue to the waiflike woman trailing in his shadow.

  Beautiful destruction. That was Martha. Spontaneity and lust and complication packaged in a little-bit-of-nothing dress that appeared too flimsy for a fifty-degree December day and cemented Joaquin’s belief that he would never see a sexier pair of legs.

  You don’t want to tangle with her, man. The word of caution was skating around on his tongue, but he clenched his teeth. For four years it had served him well to see no Martha, hear no Martha. Getting involved, even just to advise his Casanova cousin to direct his curiosity elsewhere, would do him no good. Wild, unwise and as deep as a puddle of dog piss she might seem, but Martha knew too much. Always had.

  “Big man! Came this way to see Vegas’s prince?” Face sweaty, hands taped, Jules hopped off the platform and cut across the room to shake Marshall’s hand.

  Topping six and a half feet, strapped with muscles and both blessed and cursed with a hard face that set strangers on
edge, Jules was the harshest opponent Joaquin had ever sparred with. Being rescued from a crack house and brought into the man’s household a skinny, self-conscious kid with a stutter had been a terrifying hell with two older cousins to whip his ass, until Jules had taught him to defend himself…to fight for respect.

  Jules rivaled Marshall Blue in height and bulk, but “big man” referred to Marshall’s status. Damn near a baron in this city, he had social influence and a Midas touch when it came to wealth. Investing in BioCures West Energy Corp., one of the country’s most prosperous power companies—a move that had doubled his net worth—wasn’t enough for Blue, who regarded everything in his world as a competition. He and his wife had purchased the city’s NFL franchise, and if the sports section of the Las Vegas Sun was right, the Las Vegas Slayers were looking at going into play-offs with a near-perfect season.

  One loss. That was a luxury Joaquin didn’t have. He was undefeated, and was bent on staying undefeated. That was what coming home to Las Vegas, reconnecting with his roots, was about.

  “He’s gonna be ready for Eliáš Brazda next month. He’ll make us proud at MGM Grand,” Jules assured Marshall, as if Joaquin wasn’t pacing the platform several feet away. “He’s looking good. His eyes. They’ve got passion.”

  Joaquin spared Martha a fraction of a sideways glance as he crossed to the corner of the ring where his cousin Othello now waited with a towel and a bottle of water.

  “She’s grown up.” Othello reached to assist with Joaquin’s gloves. “What is she—twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Flexing his fingers, Joaquin took the water but ignored the towel despite the rivulets of sweat traveling down his bare chest. The residue of jet lag from last night’s flight from Florida to Nevada had bogged him down this morning, so when he’d showered and thrown on a hoodie and athletic shorts, he hadn’t given two craps about style—only the basics.

  He didn’t bother to zip the black hooded sweatshirt as he assessed Martha. The details struck him down. Skin the color of pale caramel. Gilded brown hair in thousands of springy spirals that would feel weightless bunched in his fists. Cleft chin that made him weak to distraction when she frowned. Plump lips that could whisper the sweetest venom.

  Her eyes—dark as a night abandoned by the moon and stars—were different. Shuttered. Guarded. Protected.

  He knew her—closely, intimately, tragically. To pretend he didn’t was a lie he lived with every day.

  Yanking the hood over his head, Joaquin turned back to his cousin. “Gotten older, yeah. We all did.”

  “Get the sweat out of your eyes and look, bruh.” Othello swore under his breath, shaking his head. “If I suffocated in those tits right now, I’d die a happy, horny man.”

  “Maybe if you’d paid more attention to either of your ex-wives’ tits, instead of other women’s, you’d be a happy married man.”

  “First wife told me I was perfect until the day we said ‘I do.’ Then she started a campaign to change me. Second wife wanted a baby to ‘strengthen’ our marriage, miscarried, went all crazy-ass, then ate her way to three bills.” Othello shrugged. “My appreciation for the female sex wasn’t the problem.”

  It was, if that appreciation was what the first wife had wanted to change or the reason the second wife had hoped a baby would keep their marriage intact.

  “Just know that Martha doesn’t need your appreciation, Othello.”

  “But that’s what this gym is missing. Women like her.”

  “Any woman’s welcome here if she wants to learn how to fight. I don’t think Uncle Jules has changed his mind on that. The fight is what this place is about. Why do you think it’s still standing after forty-something years?”

  “Too stubborn to burn to the ground.”

  Joaquin’s eyebrows furrowed under the edge of his hood. “What the hell?”

  “A joke. Just a joke. Get your head out of the ring once in a while. In the land of the living people jive around.” Othello exited the ring and smiled at Martha in a way that revitalized Joaquin’s need to crush something with his fists.

  His cousins took off for beers and a card game in the lounge—the section of Jules’s gym that had been completely upgraded after Joaquin’s first big-money fight had earned enough profit to make his uncle-slash-trainer a financially comfortable man in his own right.

  Martha approached the ring, wrapping her hands around the bottom rope. There hadn’t been so little distance between them in four slow-motion years. She’d trusted him then, and he’d used that trust to hurt her.

  When a man was against the ropes and had only one desperate shot, he had to take it.

  “The prodigal play-boyfriend returns.”

  Play-boyfriend. It had been her nickname for him when he’d been a teenager and she a coltish chatterbox, admiring him as though he were an older brother but convinced that she loved him. If he hadn’t been so focused on being her father’s protégé, and sopping up the blessing of being welcomed into a family with riches he’d never dreamed of, he could’ve avoided tearing Martha apart.

  He could’ve avoided hurting her in a way that froze solid any affection his bastard heart could hold.

  “I stayed off your territory, as you’d asked.”

  Joaquin hadn’t asked—he’d given her enough hostility to remove any doubt that she’d come back to this gym.

  “You’re here now.” The words scraped his tongue like sandpaper on gravel. The water offered no relief, but he drank anyway.

  “Pop and I have a lunch date. This pit stop was his idea—I had no say.”

  “Could’ve told him no.”

  “Could’ve told him a lot of things, Joaquin.”

  Joaquin screwed the cap onto his water bottle, bent to set it on the stool in exchange for his gloves. “Sounds like a threat.”

  “But it isn’t,” she said solemnly, reaching through the ropes impatiently for the gloves. When he crouched and let her help him secure them, she pressed those luscious lips together before speaking again. “Your four years in Miami haven’t changed the fact that Marshall and Tem consider you the son they never had. Their admiration, pride, respect—you have it. I’m not vindictive enough to take that away from them. Or you.”

  “You don’t owe me protection. If they ever ask me whether we crossed the line, I’m going to tell them the truth. I won’t lie.”

  “Noble of you. But what I owe you is a word of gratitude.” Was that sarcasm or sincerity? “What you said to me that night left an impression. What happened—worse, what could’ve happened—then was as much my fault as it was yours.”

  “As much? Sixty-forty,” he said, straightening and then for a moment sliding his eyes shut against the recollection. Martha had been so persuasive, unraveling every strand of his resistance…

  She tugged on the rope, and the guard over her emotions slipped. Apologize to me. Give me back the dignity you stole.

  Those words she would never tell him, but she didn’t have to because he’d already found them in her eyes. A boxing ring could make anyone vulnerable—even Martha Blue.

  “How are you, Martha?”

  “You know me—every day’s a party.”

  “Marshall,” he said to the man who’d begun as his mentor but was now his friend, “if you want to talk, get a couple of punch pads and get in the ring. Can’t take a break—got a fight to train for.”

  Martha released the rope as her father accepted a pair of pads and took to the corner steps in a dark suit complete with gold cuff links and a handkerchief that probably cost more than the materials purchased to build this gym’s original structure. “I’m going to the lounge. Tor and Othello might have something interesting to say. Escort me, Jules?”

  Joaquin’s gaze followed her. Silently he warned her against getting in over her head because she wasn’t a kid anymore and his cousins—one married and the other twice divorced—had noticed.

  But she didn’t turn back.

  “Good to have
you home,” Marshall said, raising his hands and gesturing for Joaquin to punch.

  “Being in Vegas is good for my mind.” Joaquin focused less on speed and more on crisp jabs and technique. “Fight night is what it’s about, but there are people who helped me get to this point. I’m going to make time for them.”

  “Mean that?”

  “‘No lies, no bullshit,’” he said, quoting the sign mounted over the gym’s exit. The words governed his life. Anyone who wanted a spot in his circle had to live by those words; he refused to tolerate neither lies nor bullshit.

  Marshall’s bald pate glowed under the white-gold lighting as he nodded. “I can appreciate that. When Charlotte and Danica met you and brought you to the family, and I got you started in business and investing, you offered to reciprocate my wife’s and my kindness.”

  An offer Marshall had brushed off with a jovial smile on a face that, of a certainty, had limited experience smiling. Just make damn sure none of those fights knocks the knowledge out of your head, son.

  But Joaquin knew Marshall was a man who never forgave a debt and never forgot a favor extended to him.

  “Christmas is coming up. I want peace in my family, and there’s a way you can help me achieve that.”

  Jab. “How?” Jab, retreat, jab. “I heard about what went down with Charlotte this past summer in Mount Charleston. And I heard Danica resigned as GM. Neither of those problems has anything to do with me, my friend.”

  “Right. I’m in this ring to talk about Martha.”

  Joaquin missed his target and swore. Rolling his shoulders, he resumed with two words echoing in his brain. Concentration. Accuracy.

  “I’m accepting that offer, Joaquin.” Marshall lowered his arms, and Joaquin halted. “My daughters have embarrassed me, kept secrets, sacrificed the integrity of our team and the game to go after what they wanted. But at least Charlotte and Danica know what they want. They know who they are now. They grew up to be strong, decisive women. I can’t help but treasure that.”