She mewed softly with heat and yearning.
She caught sight of something bright flashing on her hand. Of course, it was her ultimate Christmas present. He was her Christmas present—him and everything he brought to her life. Her old life withered into nothing. It no longer called to her.
Marlee would go home to that house and stay there with him, he would become her life, and she would become his. They would have Colton over for Christmas dinner. They would joke and laugh together and enjoy the holiday in the city. She would create a new family, a new tradition, a new world with him.
THE END
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VIRGIN FOR THE BEAST
Chapter 1
Cloe paused with her hand on the doorknob.
Every man in the boxing gym stopped what he was doing and turned around to stare at her. A few brazenly scanned her up and down, and the boldest even leered.
It made her mad. She marched into the big, echoing chamber and let the door slam behind her. The sound crashed off the concrete walls, but she didn’t blink. She stomped across the gym on a beeline for the office in the far corner.
She got halfway across the room when a burly guy intercepted her. He blocked her path with his hulking shoulders and wagged his head. “Sorry, ma’am. Don’t pay any attention to those guys. Their mamas never taught them any manners.”
Cloe had to smile at this. “That’s okay. I wasn’t really expecting anything else. I’m Cloe Fallon, from the Daily Star. I’m here to interview Sonny McCain. Can you tell me where to find him?”
“He’s not here, ma’am. He….well, to tell you the truth, ma’am, I don’t really know where he is.”
Cloe’s eyes widened. “Not here! But it’s all arranged. The paper made an appointment with him for eleven o’clock this morning. I’ve just driven across town to be here, and I’ve got a deadline at seven o’clock tonight. What am I supposed to do?”
The big guy shrugged. “I don’t know about all that, ma’am. I only run the gym. That’s all. I don’t cater to Sonny McCain’s social calendar if you know what I mean. Ha ha ha!” He let out a barking laugh so loud the guys behind Cloe whowent back to what they were doing when she first walked in stopped one more time to stare.
Cloe pursed her lips. “Well, I’m not leaving until I get my interview. You call him up or do whatever you have to do. I’m staying here until he keeps his promise to talk to me.”
The guy bobbed his head and swayed back and forth. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I can’t do that, ma’am. He doesn’t have a phone. He often disappears after a big fight—doesn’t come back for days. You know how these guys are.”
“No, I don’t know how these guys are,” she shot back. “That’s what I’m here for, and I don’t believe you about him not having a phone. Are you telling me he doesn’t even have a landline at his house? Call him up. He’s your most successful boxer, and he just won what’s probably the biggest fight of his career. Call him up and get his butt down here pronto.”
The big guy danced back and forth from one foot to the other. “I can’t do that, ma’am. I don’t know where he is, and even if I did, I could get in big trouble for disturbing him without his permission. I’m really sorry. You’ll just have to write something for your deadline.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Listen, Mister….what did you say your name was?”
He gave her a big sloppy grin. “I’m Carl. Carl Schmidt.”
“Very nice to make your acquaintance, Carl, but I’m not going to make something up for my interview. I have to interview him. That’s all there is to it.”
He spread his palms up and closed his eyes. “I would help you if I could. Maybe you can check back again tomorrow.”
Cloe started to say she would have missed her deadline by then, but she shut her mouth with a click. What was the point of arguing with this dim-witted numbskull? She spun around on her heel and stormed out of the place. She shoved the door open, and the sun blinded her. She cast one backward glance into the gym. Carl was gone, and none of the other guys noticed her at all. She already disappeared out of their lives.
Dammit! Why did she let these punch-drunk muscleheads beat her down? She hated excuses, and she wasn’t about to show up at the paper tomorrow having missed her deadline. No way! She never missed deadlines— never.
She let go of the doorknob and barged back inside. She barreled past the padded boxers sparring in the ring. She passed guys skipping rope and punching heavy bags. She walked all the way to the office with a slew of fresh demands all ready to hammer Carl Schmidt into the carpet when she stopped in her tracks.
Male voices drifted from behind the office door. One of them belonged to Carl, but he didn’t sound dim-witted now. “I hope you’re satisfied. She looked like a real nice girl, and now you’ve gone and spoiled her whole day with this foolishness. I should never have agreed to cover for you. If you want to be an idiot about this, you can face her yourself next time.”
Another voice answered him. This voice rattled lower. It sounded like a truck’s tires crunching over gravel, “There won’t ever be a next time. That was my last fight, and I guess I have as much right to retire in peace as the next guy. I’m not giving any fucking interview. They saw the fight. If that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what will. The rest of the world can just leave me alone. Is that too much to ask?”
Cloe’s blood boiled. That Sonofabitch! She would show him what she was made of. She burst into the office and leveled an accusing finger across the desk. “You’ve been here all along! You put him up to tell me you weren’t around when you were here all along!”
A man sat behind the desk, but he didn’t jump in surprise at her entrance. He only frowned. Lines of care and experience scored his forehead, but she couldn’t see much else of his features. Bruises, fat lips, black eyes, and dried blood disfigured his face.
His buzz-cut greying hair hugged his scalp. Chiseled muscle strained his T- shirt, but he wasn’t as big as Carl. He studied her with the same sweeping examination she gave him. His eyes widened surveying her buxom chest and her full hips and ass under her tight jeans. This guy knew what he was looking at.
Cloe stiffened under his gaze.
He didn’t give an inch.
Carl threw himself down on the couch with a sigh. “Well, there you go.”
Cloe shifted her clutch bag to her other hand and took the chair in front of the desk. She took out her phone. “You’re here, so we can do the interview.”
Sonny launched himself out of the chair. “I’m not doing any god dammed interview. He told you that.”
Cloe sat where she was. “He didn’t tell me that. He said you weren’t here. You agreed to give an interview, and that’s what you’re going to do.”
“I didn’t agree to anything,” he shot back. “It was that dip-shit manager who agreed. I never knew anything about it.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Sit down and start answering my questions if you know what’s good for you.”
He scooted around the desk pretty fast for a guy his age. Then again, the sports circulars all waxed poetic about Sonny McCain’s fancy footwork. All the reviewers claimed his footwork won him last night’s epic fight against an opponent half his age and bordering on a heavyweight.
Sonny headed for the door without stopping. “I’m not giving any interview, and that’s final.”
Cloe didn’t come all the way down here to take this claptrap. She saw her quarry getting away and jumped out of her seat to give chase. She caught up with him between the sparring rings. “You can’t run out on me, Mr. McCain. You gave your word. Isn’t that worth anything to you?”
He snapped over his shoulder. “I told you. I never gave my word on anything. That
manager of mine promised without checking with me first. This was supposed to be the last big fight of my career. I’m retired now. That means no more interviews. I just want to disappear and forget all about interviews and girls like you hounding me around the country. Isn’t that enough?”
She hit the voice recorder button on her phone and eased it toward him. She held it behind his head where he wouldn’t see it. “Why are you retiring? You can still throw the punches with the best of ‘em. That purse you won last night must be a pretty strong temptation to keep going with it.”
He spun around so fast he knocked the phone out of her hand. He jabbed his bashed up visage in her face. “Are you blind, lady? Do I look like I’m pretty tempted to keep doing this to myself at my age? Don’t you think I would rather run my lawn mower around my yard on a Sunday afternoon than put up with blinding headaches after getting hit by a Mack truck?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He set off again.
A couple of the younger fighters in the gym stopped their workouts to watch him pass.
He didn’t give them the time of day, but a wave of awe and respect followed him to the outer door. Everyone present knew who and what he was. They all knew what he’d done the night before to earn those warrior marks.
Cloe scrambled across the floor to retrieve her phone. She raced to the door just as it banged shut. She yanked it open and dashed outside to see Sonny heading across the parking lot. She had to catch him. She had to stop him. She had to get this interview on record before the end of the day. Her professional self-esteem depended on it.
She slowed to a fast walk to match his long strides. He looked a lot smaller in person. The cameras broadcasting the fight made him look tall and imposing. He barely stood taller than Cloe herself. If you ignored the carnage on his face, he looked like any ordinary guy.
“I didn’t know you got headaches. Does your manager know about that?”
“Who cares?” he grumbled.
“I care. When did they start? Do you only get them after fights? Have you seen a doctor about them? Have you ever been hospitalized for head injuries? That must be pretty common among boxers who’ve been on the circuit as long as you have.”
He rounded on her one more time.
She stopped in her tracks when she saw his knuckles balling into fists. Would he ever use those fists on someone outside the ring? She heard all the stories about fighters who couldn’t stop punching even when they took the gloves off. They put their wives and wayward journalists in intensive care without being able to stop themselves.
“Don’t you ever quit, lady?” Sonny demanded. “Can’t you people ever just leave a guy in peace?” His battered face looked so pathetic when he talked like that and his voice cracked from the strain.
She let out a shaky breath. “Look, Sonny. I don’t mean to bother you. It’s just I’ve got a job to do. I can’t go back to the paper without this interview, and my boss doesn’t understand about the manager promising without your permission. Can’t you see your way to at least talking to me? I swear I won’t print anything you don’t want me to.”
He tried to compress his lips, but they didn’t exactly meet the way they should. One side of his lower lip pouted out of place. “Don’t tell me you’ll lose your job if you don’t interview me.”
“I won’t exactly lose my job, but I’ll lose standing. I won’t get the good assignments if I don’t meet my deadlines. If I walk away right now, I won’t complete the job at all. That’s ten times worse than missing a deadline.”
His shoulders slumped. “All right. I guess I have no choice. Why don’t you come to the coffee shop on the corner where we can talk.” He spun away on his heel and strode off down the sidewalk.
Cloe hurried after him. She did it! She got him to agree to the interview. She was halfway home. She kept up a brisk pace all the way down the block.
He pushed his way into the coffee shop and found a booth near the back.
Cloe slid into the bench opposite and set her phone on the table.
Chapter 2
Cloe didn’t say anything until the waitress set a steaming cup of coffee in front of Sonny. He tried to take a sip and winced when the cup touched his lip. Cloe examined him. “That looks like it hurts.”
“It’s like this every time,” he growled. “Who in their right mind would want to put themselves through this? That’s what I want to know. I try to tell the kids at Carl’s not to do this to themselves, but they won’t listen. They look at my record and they don’t see anything else. You asked about the headaches. I’ve seen five doctors about it. Four of them were top specialists in their field, and they all say the same thing. I’ve had so many concussions in the ring, so many broken noses and facial fractures, I’ll keep having headaches for the rest of my life even if I quit fighting now. It’s not worth it, I tell you. Not all the purses in the world are worth this.” He lowered his flashing eyes from her face to the table.
What could she say to that? Earning the name and fame he got in his career couldn’t be worth ending your life in torment. No wonder he quit. He should have quit a long time ago. “So why have you kept it going? Why didn’t you buy yourself a little farm in the country and become a family man like ‘The Natural’?”
He started to smile, but his lip split open again and blood emerged from it. He grabbed a paper napkin off the table and pressed it against the cut. “I’m terrible with money. I don’t have anything to show for all my years in the ring. I got into gambling and lost most of the purses I ever won. Some of them I lost before I ever signed to do the fight. I drank and drugged myself into oblivion. I only got clean about ten years ago. I’ve been fighting to get out of debt and squirrel away a little nest egg. Now I’ve done that, and I’m out.”
Cloe took another look at him.
Wrinkles scored his face, but from the neck down, no one would guess how old he was. He was just as fit, strong and sturdy as any twenty year old in Carl’s gym.
“So what are you going to do with yourself, now that you’re retired?” she asked.
He didn’t look up. “I’m gonna buy a campervan and take a road trip around the country. I’m gonna fish, relax and sleep a lot. That’s the only thing that makes my head feel better.”
“You won’t start drinking again?” she asked. “You won’t try to drug your pain away?”
He gazed out the window at cars whipping in and out of the parking lot. “No, I won’t do that. Those days are over for me.”
Cloe frowned. Something in his manner shocked her, something unspoken below the surface. “Mr. McCain? Are you all right?”
He took a swallow of his coffee. “You don’t have to call me that. Just call me Sonny.”
A grin burst out on her face. “Thanks, Sonny. I’m Cloe. Cloe Fallon.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He never took his eyes off the parking lot.
She couldn’t escape the sinking suspicion he wasn’t telling her everything. “Do you have any family left? Maybe you could visit them in your campervan.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have any family. Never had children. That’s just as well. I’ll live the rest of my life in solitude, in quiet contemplation, as it were.”
“Sounds nice.”
He pursed his lips again. “Whatever.”
A dozen questions nagged to get out, but none of them seemed right. Cloe put out her hand and touched her phone to turn off the voice recorder. “Sonny?”
He raised his eyes to her face.
“You don’t seem too happy about spending the rest of your life in quiet contemplation. Maybe you think you won’t have to do it for very long.”
He looked away and didn’t answer. The dreadful truth hit her like a ton of bricks. She stared at him with her mouth open. She couldn’t form the words. “You—you’re...”
He glanced down at the phone. “It’s turned off, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Don’t tell anybody, okay? Don’t put it
in your newspaper. If you care at all about me, don’t say anything to anyone.”
She leaned across the table. “How long have you known? Did the doctors tell you?”
He lowered his eyes and nodded. “They all say the same thing. I have a tangle of blood vessels in my brain, right over my brain stem. The headaches come from my heart trying to force blood through this tangle into the rest of my brain. One of these days, it won’t be able to get through, and the whole thing will blow. I’ll be dead in a matter of seconds. Until that happens, the headaches will get worse and worse, and there’s not a single thing anybody can do about it. If they tried to operate, I would be toast.”
Cloe’s eyes refused to blink. Sonny’s face wobbled in front of her. In the middle of this explanation, the puffy tissue surrounding his cheekbones and eyebrows flashed out of view. She found herself looking at the Sonny McCain she saw in press release photos. His high angular features stood out crisp, clear and sharp, with no pockets of bloody bruising to disfigure him.
Just for an instant, she considered scooping the sports world with this priceless tidbit. She’d be on top of her paper staff after blowing the lid off this one. Her editor would go into spasms, and her colleagues would turn green with envy.
The next minute, she knew she couldn’t do that. Beyond the simple integrity of giving him her word she wouldn’t tell, she didn’t want to. How could she destroy the last few months or years of a man’s life by revealing his secret to an adoring fan base? They would never leave him alone. They would flock around him to receive his last dying pearls of wisdom. They would hound him around the country in his campervan. He would never get a moment’s quiet contemplation— ever.
He flexed his fingers open and shut. “So now you know. Do you want to turn your recorder on again?”
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