Game On (A Bad Boy Sports Romance)

by Olivia Lancaster

  I had a tendency to be pigeonholed as the sweet, clueless ingénue type.

  But I had been through a lot more than people gave me credit for, and I was a harder worker than anyone expected. I constantly had to prove my worth and talent to others, and Montoya would be no different. Taking a deep breath, I straightened my shoulders and collected all my things, then headed out of the apartment to go to work.

  “I got this,” I mumbled to myself as I got into my car. Just as I started the engine, I got a text from Alice.

  Kick ass and take names today.

  I smiled down at the words on the screen. I had told Alice about meeting Montoya and how nervous I was about how he would handle being bossed around by someone like me. Alice, in her usual style, reminded me that he was at my mercy, not the other way around. Sure, he was a tough-as-nails fighter, but in the physiotherapy rooms, he was just another patient. I possessed the skills which could make or break his career, so he’d better be nice to me.

  I typed out a reply: Watch your language… but thanks. I will.

  Feeling a little inspired by my little sister’s simple advice, I jammed out to some Rolling Stones on the commute to work, even rolling down the windows to let the fresh air lift my spirits. By the time I pulled into the parking lot behind The Fighting Chance, I was already feeling that veil of dread starting to draw back to let in the sunshine.

  Fuck it! I was a strong, talented, ambitious woman and I was not about to let some hot shot MMA fighter with an attitude problem drag me down. I would approach him the way I did all my patients-- with honesty, professionalism, and genuine care. If that didn’t work, then I’d call in the big guns… whatever those were. I’d cross that bridge once I got to it!

  Some of my nervousness resurfaced when I walked through the back door, humming to myself, and almost collided with Danny. “Oh, sorry!” I gasped, nearly dropping my bag.

  “Oh, thank god you’re here,” he muttered, shaking his head. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the physiotherapy rooms and added in a hushed tone, “Montoya is already here and he’s been asking about you.”

  My eyes went wide and my stomach plummeted about fifty floors.

  “Wh-what?” I stammered, feeling exasperated. “I’m early! We have an appointment time and it’s not for another twenty minutes!”

  Danny groaned, swiping a hand back through his hair as he looked down at me with an apologetic expression. “I guess he’s just eager to get started. He’s used to doing things on his own schedule, Gemma.”

  “Well, um, I better get in there and introduce myself,” I mumbled, more to myself.

  “Yeah, and remember, he’s your patient. I know he looks like a big, mean bull in a China shop but he’s hurting and his career is on the line. So, just try and be sympathetic?” he advised.

  “Of course, of course,” I answered quickly, pushing past him and hurrying down the hall.

  My heart was pounding in my chest when I opened the door to the big, airy therapy room filled with therapeutic equipment. The far wall was lined from floor-to-ceiling with a giant mirror, and I could see my own pale, worried face gawking back at me when I walked in.

  There he was.

  Marc Montoya stood in the center of the room with his arms folded over his broad, impossibly muscular chest. He wore an expression of ultimate impatience and annoyance on his surprisingly handsome face. I gulped hard. He was even taller and bigger than I expected.

  He really did look like a bull in a china shop, and I was the tiny, intimidated matador who had to tame him and nurse him back to fighting condition. And at the moment his dark eyes landed on me, I felt like I was wearing red.

  Montoya was ready to charge.

  “I don’t have time to wait for you to show up,” he said by way of a greeting. My first instinct was to cower and grovel, beg for his forgiveness and promise not to let it happen again. But then, I remembered, I hadn’t actually done anything wrong! He was the one showing up way too early. I wasn’t late by any means!

  “Well, you see, that’s why we set appointment times, in the hopes that we both show up at a previously agreed-upon hour,” I snapped. “Nice to meet you, too, by the way. My name is Gemma Knight and I will be your physiotherapist until whatever’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with you anymore.”

  I could tell he was not used to receiving the same kind of snark he dished out. Montoya’s face went ruddy-dark and he frowned at me, his arms falling to his sides. For a moment I honestly expected him to rush at me and tackle me to the ground like he might do to an opponent in the ring. But instead, he merely shrugged.

  “I’m Marc Montoya, but you already know that. Now, I’ve been friends with Danny Gilchrist for a while now and he usually seems to know what he’s doing. But I have to ask: are you even old enough to have a license to practice physical therapy?” he asked.

  I had to fight the urge to scream at him.

  There were few things which angered me to the point of losing patience: people mistreating Alice, people talking shit about my dad, and people questioning my abilities.

  “Yes, sir. I’m twenty-five, I am perfectly qualified, and I am ready to get started, if you don’t mind,” I replied sharply. He spread his arms in a gesture of faux-welcome.

  “Oh, by all means. I don’t have all day,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “Well, then. First of all, I’d like to discuss what you hope to gain from our work together. You can begin by describing the kind of pain and difficulty you’re experiencing. Tell me how the pain started,” I said, trying to keep my tone professional. I pulled a clipboard and notebook from my bag and sat down on a bench against the wall. Usually, patients would sit down next to me while I wrote down their history, symptoms, and concerns.

  But Marc Montoya just stood there in the middle of the room, looking down at me like I was some nuisance, like a flea or something. I’m here to help you! Cut the attitude! I wanted to yell at him. However, I refused to let his rudeness make me sink to his level. I thought about Alice and how much her tuition was, how desperately we both needed this job to work out.

  “I’m a fighter,” Montoya began sarcastically, “so you can imagine the kinds of occupational hazards I encounter in my field.”

  “Mhmm, yes. More specifically?”

  Reluctantly, he gestured to his left hip and shoulder. I felt just a pinch of sympathy for him as he winced in the process. I could tell that it was not only physically painful, but emotionally difficult for him to admit any kind of weakness. He definitely wanted people to think he was invincible, and that made sense considering his line of work. As an MMA fighter, your whole identity was wrapped up in how much pain you could take and how much suffering you could endure versus how much of each you could deal out against your opponents. So it was understandable that he’d be defensive in his current position.

  I wanted to tell him not to worry about keeping up that tough-guy image. I was not a fighter, and I didn’t give a shit about his machismo. I just wanted to help.

  “I see in your chart that you’ve never really had any kind of injury like this before,” I commented, softening my voice a little.

  He regarded me with suspicion for a moment, as though he didn’t trust my compassionate tone. I wondered if maybe he just wasn’t used to people being nice to him. Well, duh, I thought to myself, he’s used to people punching him in the face.

  “First time for everything. But that’s why I’m here.” He grunted rudely. I stood up and went to pick up some stretching equipment used to loosen and strengthen muscles and joints. It was time to get started, and I was actually kind of excited about it. After all, one upside to being a physiotherapist was that I was in the unique position of getting to torture Montoya with healthy, beneficial, totally necessary workouts. Sure, they would make him feel better and restore him to fighting health in the long run, but in the meantime they’d have the added bonus of kicking his ass.

  CHAPTER 5 - MARC

  Maybe I had been a litt
le too sharp with Gemma at our first few sessions. Not that I cared what she thought of me—after all, she was just a means to an end. But shit, did she ever know how to bite back.

  My first two sessions were a testament to that.

  As we’d gotten started on the actual session, she had me start on some very specific stretches to “identify target areas that will need special attention in the next few weeks,” as she put it icily. I figured they would amount to more or less what I would have gotten out of an average warmup session in routine training.

  I was way off.

  She started instructing me to move my arm at its usual angles as far as I could stretch it, and right off the bat, it was obvious which muscles and tendons were giving me the most pain in an immediately tangible sense. I fought to keep from showing pain, but I could tell that Gemma wasn’t a stranger to reading subtle facial cues. I couldn’t hide my pain from her, and that pissed me off from the start.

  After that, she instructed me to do more or less the same with some leg motions--other general stretches that would move the muscles around my hip and test out what was still in function and what wasn’t.

  Identifying every weakness the injury had given me didn’t put me in a good mood. The thing was, though, that with every pressure point she identified, the more eager she seemed to get to explore the extent of my injury.

  At first, I figured it must have been part of whatever cockamamey exercise routine she’d been taught in college. But as the session went on, she had me moving and stretching in ways I never would have thought to when I was still in full health.

  “Tendons are multidimensional things, and only exploring how they work on a two-way street, as it were, won’t do us much good,” she had said, but with every jolt of pain I felt as I moved my body around, she almost seemed that much more eager to keep going.

  That’s how the next few hours passed--with my being instructed to push my body to its newly confined limits, especially getting prodded onto the borders of those limits at the expense of more than a little pain.

  The session after that wasn’t much different. I showed up to see a lot of resistance training gear laying around the room, but it was all the kind of stuff amateur bodybuilders get started on: rubber bands, hand grips, that kind of thing.

  I was still sore from the first session when we started, so I was in a foul mood from the very beginning. On top of that, I could tell that Gemma hadn’t forgotten our first session. She started me first thing with some heavier resistance training than the equipment in the room seemed to indicate.

  “It’s entirely possible you may be correct in assuming yourself fit enough to recover more quickly than most, Mr. Montoya,” she had said as I bit back intense pain from attempting to use one of the more tense rubber bands she provided for me to stretch with. “It would be helpful to use this time to gauge that assessment.”

  I was determined to make a point, so I powered through the first half hour of grueling exercise.

  “You almost seem disappointed,” I remarked after that point, and indeed, I was starting to get used to the punishment. “Am I not wincing enough today for you?”

  “I don’t care about that, Mr. Montoya,” she said with sigh striding over to me, “but your posture isn’t quite right--here,” she said, pressing into my side from behind while I had the band stretched out taut, and the pain that shot through me was so intense I nearly let the thing fly across the room.

  I could almost feel her smirk behind me as I let it go slack, breathing heavily.

  “I had it just fine.”

  “If your posture isn’t right, you’re just going to train your muscles to function every bit as improperly.”

  We carried on like that for the rest of the session, and by the time I collapsed into bed that night, I was so frustrated I wanted to punch a wall. But the morning after, I was surprised to find myself about halfway out the door of my apartment before realizing I’d hardly winced once since getting out of bed.

  I still felt stiff as a board, and I knew anything overly strenuous would put me out of commission again, but I’ll be damned, it really seemed to be working.

  That put me into a relatively good mood when I reached the gym for our third session.

  “You seem to be in a relatively good mood, Mr. Montoya,” Gemma said as I strode into the training room with a smile on my face.

  “Just happy to see your face in the morning, Gemma,” I said, the hints of sarcasm laid on pretty heavy.

  “Well then,” she said, pointedly ignoring my tone and motioning for me to follow her to another room down the hall, “we won’t waste any time getting to business. Today, you get a break from all that torture you think I’m putting you through. You’ve applied plenty of stress to the tendons we’ve identified, and I think they’re all fine and stable, but now, I’m going to help loosen things up a bit.”

  I followed her a short walk down the hallway, and I gave a smile at her words as she pushed open the door to the next room over. “Loosen things up? What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t think things are casual enough between us? I never knew you felt that way.”

  She shot a look back at me that could kill, and it only made my smile broaden as I lifted my eyes up from her ass. I was teasing her, but the look on her face told me it wasn’t exactly appreciated. Maybe this was my chance to get back at her for all that punishment over the past couple of days.

  “I’m your physiotherapist, Mr. Montoya, and I maintain a professional relationship with all my clients,” she said as she directed me into the room. I rolled my eyes as I stepped in. I’d heard that from a lot of women before, it didn’t tend to mean much in the long run.

  Inside, I was surprised to see a few massage chairs, and I raised my eyebrows. “Huh, and here you were just starting to make me think physiotherapy was just going to be a lot of punishment.”

  Now it was her turn to roll her eyes at me, and she looked over her chart as she made her way to the chair. “Knock it off. Now, I’ll need you to lay down here, face-up. I’m going to start by working on some of your upper arm muscles, and we’ll work down from there.”

  “Sure,” I said, disinterested. For all I cared, this was just a chance to check out mentally for the next few minutes and enjoy myself. “Figure I can use a day off.”

  “This isn’t a day off, Mr. Montoya,” she corrected me curtly as I sat down on the massage table and swung my legs over to lay back, looking up at the ceiling. “This is just as much of a vital part of the healing process as those exercises you seem to hate so much.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, yawning. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Stretch out your arm like so,” she said, demonstrating, and I mimicked her movements. To my surprise, she smiled at my response, and I arched an eyebrow.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “See how easy that was?” she said with a nod to my arm. “Two sessions ago, that would have had you wincing. You’re already starting to see some progress. I’m guessing getting up and going in the morning the past few days has been surprisingly easy.” I could see the words ‘you’re welcome’ in her eyes as she smiled at me, so I just scoffed in return to her remark.

  “My body is a few notches above what you were probably used to at whatever university you graduated from,” I remarked lazily. “You were probably treating volunteers from what, the tennis team?” There was some playfulness in my tone, but she didn’t seem to take it that way, her smile dropping into a frown as she set her clipboard aside to move around to my arm.

  “Well, having a highly fit body does count for something, but as they say, the bigger they are, the harder they tend to fall,” she commented, and I watched her hands go to my muscles, starting to feel around at some of the more tense areas. “You may have more muscles than a tennis player, but you can all have the same recalcitrant tendons.”

  As she said that and her fingers started to manipulate my arm and shoulder, I felt a slight wince of pain as she
touched a sensitive spot. It was a light touch, but it was a spot she knew damn well was a sore one for me, and I could tell it was a warning. But I wasn’t about to let her off so easily.

  Despite her icy disposition, Gemma’s touch was surprisingly warm. The next few moments passed quietly as she explored my muscles. While her attention was on my arm, I had nothing else to look at, so my eyes almost unconsciously fell on her as she worked.

  I had to admit, she was hot. Gorgeous, even. The past few sessions, I really hadn’t been in a mood to see past her clipboard and instructions, but up close like this, I noticed the smattering of freckles on her cheeks, accentuating her blue eyes. And her eyes were wide and luminous, at that, the room’s lights playing in their intensity as she kept her gaze focused on her work.