KAGE (KAGE Trilogy #1)

by Maris Black

  “That’s different.” He traced a figure eight into my palm over and over, staring at it all the while.

  “Why don’t you want me to see you fight, Kage? I don’t understand. Are you afraid you’ll lose?”

  He huffed out a breath. “I’m never afraid of losing a fight.”

  Apparently, I was going to have to drag whatever this was out of him, because he wasn’t going to give it up easily.

  “What is it that you don’t want me to see?”

  “I guess I just don’t want you to see me differently.” He didn’t look me in the eye as he spoke, just kept watching his finger tracing that figure eight, which seemed to have literally become an infinity sign. “You don’t know how brutal it can get in there, Jamie. How brutal I can get. I kinda like the way you look at me now.”

  “Like I want to eat you alive? You like how I’ve got the cannibal thing going on, huh?”

  He laughed quietly. “Yeah, I like that.”

  “So what makes you think that will change?”

  “Fighting is different when it’s someone you know.” He finally met my eyes, and there was a haunted look in his. “You want to see me get punched in the face so hard my knees buckle? Or kicked in the kidney so hard I can’t stand up straight?”

  I stared at him, my eyes wide, imagining the things he was describing. He was right. I wasn’t sure if I could I sit on the other side of a chain link fence and watch Kage get hurt.

  “What, no comment?” he asked.

  There was a change in his voice, and in his demeanor. That little light his eyes had when he looked at me— the one that made me believe he might see something special— was gone. Snuffed out and replaced by a cold darkness. Then the barest hint of a sneer tipped one corner of his lips, and I pulled away.

  “Think you can handle watching me bend a gown man’s arm backward, hearing the bone snap before he has a chance to tap out? How about punching a man in the face until there’s blood spewing everywhere and he’s lying there limp like a rag doll, head flopping as I bash his fucking head into the mat? Have you ever seen a guy kicked in the face so hard you think his neck snapped? How about seeing me choke a man unconscious and wondering for the next sixty seconds if he’s ever going to wake up again?”

  “Kage—”

  “That’s what I do, Jamie. I hurt people. Do you know what they call me in there?” He gave me a smile that was one part sarcastic, two parts cruel. “They call me the Machine. Do you think you can have feelings for a machine?”

  Feelings? Did he want me to have feelings for him? Because I was pretty sure I already did.

  “Michael…” I don’t know why I called him by his first name. It just came out, and in the moment it felt right. “You’re not a machine, okay? You’re human. And on top of that, I believe you’re a good person.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. What if I’m not?” It sounded more like a threat than a question. “What if I’m a bad person, and you just haven’t gotten to know the real me yet?”

  “Why are you trying to scare me?” I asked, leaning toward him and looking into his eyes. Searching for that spark, silently begging for it.

  Then he blinked and gave me a weak smile, and there it was again. The old Kage. The one I’d spent the last weeks trying to get to know.

  He shrugged. “Not trying to scare you. I just need you to know.”

  “Know what?” I pressed.

  “Can we get out of here?” he asked, avoiding the question. “Let’s go to my apartment.”

  Kage threw down a tip for our server, and we made our way to the elevators across from the front desk. While we waited, Steve called out. “Hey, guys, something I forgot to mention.”

  We walked over to the desk again, and Steve looked around before speaking. “You know Aldo said he was on babysitting duty when he brought Jamie in. I didn’t think anything about it then, but…”

  “Yeah?” Kage narrowed his eyes. “You think he’s still babysitting?”

  Steve shrugged. “Yeah, I do. I’ve seen watching a lot.”

  “How often?”

  Steve looked over his shoulder, then back at us. “Enough to make me wonder. In fact, I actually entertained the notion that Aldo had switched teams and was crushing on our Jamie. I mean, everyone around here is. But it’s not that, of course.”

  Kage ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “Alright. Thanks, Steve.” He took me by the elbow and guided me back to the elevators. “Just text me when you’re ready for me to hook you up with that other thing,” he called over his shoulder.

  “I will,” Steve said. “Bye, Jamie.”

  “Bye,” I called, stumbling over my own feet as Kage pulled me roughly into the closing elevator. “So what the hell was that all about?”

  “Steve wants me to hook him up with some of that stuff we had the other night.”

  “No, I mean the other. About the babysitting.”

  “Oh. My uncle’s goons. Apparently you’re part of their job description now.”

  “Really?” That little tidbit of information threw me for a loop. “What, are they following me?”

  “Probably. I didn’t mean to get you mixed up in all of this. I just wanted… Hang on.” Kage slipped his key card into the penthouse slot, and the elevator climbed all the way to the top of the building. The door slid open, revealing the long hallway with a large door on either end— one for Kage’s apartment, the other for his uncle’s. He stuck his key card into the lock on his door and didn’t speak again until we were safely inside his apartment.

  “You just wanted what?” I prompted.

  “I just wanted you. My uncle thought I needed a publicist, and he was interviewing a couple of guys with big name clients: pro ball players, Olympic gold medalists, stuff like that.”

  “And you wanted me?” I sat down on the sofa and stared at him. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It was like fate, right? What are the chances that I’d be at that show to see some dude I trained with a couple of times, and then here comes this hot little college guy making up shit like he’s some kind of expert publicist? It was unreal, man. Blew my mind.”

  “So you hired me because you thought it was fate?”

  He climbed onto the sofa, but not beside me. He got right on my lap, straddling me with his big thighs, and leaned in to kiss me. His mouth engulfed mine, sucking hungrily at my lips before pushing his tongue inside. I met him with a hunger of my own, and we licked and tasted and sucked until I couldn’t breathe. Finally, he pulled back, even as I was moving in for another kiss.

  “I hired you because you were the best man for the job,” he said. “Because you were fearless.”

  “Fearless? I was scared shitless.”

  He laughed. “Everybody’s scared, Jamie. Even me.”

  “Yeah, right. Earlier you said you weren’t scared.”

  “I said I wasn’t afraid of losing a fight.”

  I groaned. “There you go with the riddles again. One of these days, I’m gonna get a decoder ring so that I can carry on a conversation with you.”

  He took my face in his hands. “Look, all you need to know is that I hired you because you were a sexy little liar, and you were willing to say whatever it took to get my attention. What better qualifications should a publicist have?”

  “I was not trying to get your attention.”

  He laughed. “Yes, you were. You were trying to get in my pants.”

  “Oh. My. God. I was not.” My face turned fourteen shades of crimson.

  Kage slid his tongue between my lips and pulled away again. “You would have gotten on your knees right there in the backstage area of Phillips Arena. You would have bent over that buffet table and let me take your ass right there in front of those reporters. They couldn’t stand you, by the way.”

  “I know very well how much they hated me. However, I think you must be confusing me with someone else who would have let you bend them over. That was definitely not me.”
r />   “Yes, it was. You may not want to admit it, but even then you were looking at me like you wanted to eat me. You would have swallowed my cock right then and begged for seconds.”

  And then reality hit me right in the face. “You hired me because you wanted to fuck me.”

  One of those sexy cat grins stretched across his handsome face. “It may have crossed my mind.”

  “I feel so used. So cheap.” I was only teasing. I think he knew that, but maybe he didn’t.

  “Tell you what,” he said, hopping off my lap and leaving me with an unsatisfied boner I’d hoped he would help me take care of. “I don’t want you to feel like I hired you for sex, because I assure you that is far from the truth. So I’m gonna let you do your job during working hours, and then you can choose whether or not you want to spend personal time with me during off hours. Okay?”

  I groaned and made an obvious adjustment to my pants. “Damn, I need to learn to think before I speak. I really don’t think that’s necessary, do you? I mean, we’re both big boys. We can handle it.”

  Kage smiled indulgently. “I want to, believe me. But I think you need to at least go to your apartment and sleep on it. I’m the one with something to lose here, so…”

  His weighted words hit home, and suddenly I thought I understood. Kage was in a precarious position where a potential sexual relationship with me was concerned. For one thing, he was paying me. And for another, he was on his way to becoming a celebrity. If things went sour, or if I changed my mind because I felt pressured, it was his reputation on the line. He wanted me, but he was being careful, and I had to respect that.

  On my way out the door, something occurred to me, and I looked back over my shoulder. “Hey, I thought your uncle was supposed to be some hard-ass businessman. How did you talk him into hiring an intern with no experience?”

  He grinned. “I told him I wouldn’t fight anymore.”

  17

  IT WAS nearly impossible to get settled into my room that night. For one thing, I was a little bit angry. What was this business Kage had come up with about sleeping on it? I was also still shaken by the way he’d acted in the restaurant.

  For a few minutes, it was as if he’d flipped into a different personality. His alter-ego. His Bizarro self.

  I tried to busy myself with uploading the pictures I’d take of him over the last several days. I put them on his website, then shared them on his social profiles. While I was messing around with his online presence, I noticed there were messages for him on a couple of sites.

  Crap. I hadn’t thought of that. Who was going to answer his messages? Me?

  I downloaded the corresponding apps to my phone so that I could receive notifications when he got private messages. That was at least a start. But that got me thinking about the scope of the job I was carving out for myself, in essence creating from scratch. It was becoming much larger than I’d anticipated, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to be possible to cleanly extract myself from it at the end of the summer.

  Then of course that made me think of leaving Kage. Fuck. How had this all gotten so complicated so fast? And why was Kage waffling when it came to our personal relationship? I mean, he’d basically seduced me then sent me away to second-guess things. Or maybe he was the one who was second-guessing.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

  Yeah, I understood that he had to be careful, but he had been the one pawing all over me at the front desk, kissing me at yet another front desk, and discussing my penis size with a very talkative Alcazar employee. He was contradicting himself.

  But there was really nothing I could do about it, so I did what I normally did when I felt helpless. I called my mom.

  “It’s good to hear from you, sweetheart.” Her voice was tired like she’d been asleep. Or maybe she was ill. It was only nine-thirty in her time zone.

  “Yeah, I was just hanging around here in my room with nothing to do, so I thought I’d call.”

  She laughed. “Oh, you have to be bored these days to call your mother.”

  “I’ve been really busy, Mom. I’m a working man now.”

  She coughed, and I couldn’t help wondering if it had anything to do with the cancer. Funny how a diagnosis could make even a common cold or a sleepy voice sound terrifying.

  “Oh, I know. I talked to your boss. Such a sweet guy. Is he really letting you fly down for my surgery?”

  “Actually, uh… I think he’s coming with me.”

  “Wow. I thought that’s what he said, but then when I told your father, he said I must have misunderstood. He didn’t think an employer would be that hands-on, he said. But I told him that you were doing a different kind of job, and that you and this man had become friends. Is that right?”

  I laid back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, feeling a tiny tug in my heart, then closed my eyes. “Yeah, that’s right. Did Kage tell you about what I do for him? About who he is and all that?”

  “Not exactly. But he did tell me that the secrecy contract you signed did not extend to mothers, and that you could tell me anything you wanted about him.”

  My eyes flew open at that. “Really? Were those his actual words? That I could tell you anything?”

  “Yes, honey. I wouldn’t make that up. He said anything.”

  “He’s an MMA fighter,” I blurted. “Supposed to be really good, but I haven’t seen him fight yet. You can check him out on MichaelKage.com. I made that website myself, Mom. I’ve been taking pictures of him, building his website, establishing a social media presence, and I got him an appearance at a gym over the weekend. He’s rich, or his uncle is, and we live in this really fancy hotel.”

  She laughed. “Slow down, honey,” she said. “Sounds like you’re doing a fantastic job, but... He’s a fighter? He didn’t sound like a fighter. He sounded like a very nice person, and well-spoken.”

  That made me laugh. “Fighters aren’t mean and illiterate, Mom. I mean, they could be, I suppose. But I think for the most part they’re just normal guys who happen to beat each other up for a living. For our entertainment.”

  “Hmmm. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Maybe it says more about us than them, that they do it for our entertainment.”

  “Maybe…” I wondered if Kage had ever thought of it that way.

  “You seem different, son. What’s going on?”

  “Different?” My voice squeaked. That was the second time someone had accused me of seeming different in one day. Of course, the first had only concerned my skin color. This one was real. This was my mom, who knew me better than anyone on the entire planet and could always guess my mood or tell when something was bothering me. What made me think I could hide from her?

  “I guess I’m growing up,” I told her, which was partially true. “This working for a living thing really makes you look at things in a different way. Plus, all this stuff about you having… surgery.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word cancer to her. Not while she still had it in her body.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Everything is going to be fine. I’m doing the right thing to get rid of it for good.”

  “I know. I just don’t like thinking about it.”

  She gasped on the other end of the phone. “Is this him, Jamie? Michael “The Machine” Kage, it says. I’m on his website. My goodness, he’s… Well, he’s something else. Look at this, Jennifer. This is the man— er, boy— your brother is working for. Somehow, I thought he’d be older, being your boss and all.”

  “Oh my God,” I heard Jennifer squeal in the background. “Is he single?” Then she snatched the phone from Mom and asked me directly, “Is he single?”

  “Nooo,” I lied, jealousy prickling all along the back of my neck. “And neither are you. Aren’t you supposed to be getting married soon?”

  But she was gone, replaced by my mom again. “Let me put this thing on speaker phone. There we go.” Her voice took on a tinny, distant quality. “Son, did you say you took the
se pictures yourself?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Kage bought me a really nice digital camera. It cost thousands of dollars, Mom. They look pretty professional, huh? I’m thinking about advertising my services when I get back to school, to make some extra money. Don’t you think they look professional?”

  “Well, yes, but some of them are sort of racy, aren’t they? Is this what fighters are doing these days? Posing with their behinds sticking out of their pants? I can see his crack, for heaven’s sake.” She whispered the word crack.

  “Oh.” I had forgotten about the sexy shots I’d taken over the weekend. What the hell was I showing my mother? I thought of what had happened right after that photo had been snapped, and my face went hot.

  “Can I volunteer to be your photography assistant?” Jennifer yelled. “Oh my God, Mom, look at that one.”

  A knock at the door startled me, and I sat upright in bed. “Hang on, Mom. Let me see who that is at my door.”

  When I peered through the peep hole, Kage was looking back at me. My heart sped up, and I opened the door.

  Before I could even say anything, he grabbed my head and leaned in, stealing a quick kiss. “Have you thought about things long enough? I can’t wait anymore.” He kicked the door shut behind him. “Get on the bed, Jamie. I need you naked. I am so fucking hard right now.”

  I swallowed and held up the phone, feeling the color draining from my face. When his eyes stretched wide, I mouthed “It’s my mom!”

  “Oh. Fuck.” He covered his mouth with his hand.

  I brought the phone back to my ear. “Mom? Are you still there?”

  “Yes, baby. Who is it? Is that the fighter?”

  I let out the loudest, most obvious sigh of relief. “Yeah, Mom. It’s the fighter. He’s having a hard time with something, and he needs my help.”

  I could have sworn I heard my sister laughing in the background.

  “Oh, well tell him I said hello, honey,” my mom said.

  I put her on speaker phone.

  “Kage, my mom said hello. She and my sister are on your website looking at your crack right now.”