Fearless: An Enemies to Lovers Romance

by Ellie Bradshaw

  She’s got me there, but I can’t say it. She might start thinking that she’s won something. Still, I feel a bit rocked back on my heels. I hate that feeling, and it makes my decision easy.

  She’ll pay for it.

  “What do you want?”

  Her eyes fall to the table, and she looks for a moment as if she is deliberating hard on what to say. Her fingers drum much the way mine do: pinkie, ring, fuck-you, accusation. Her fingers are long and slim, pale. The skin looks soft, but they have that strong look that pianist’s fingers have. I start to imagine what they’d look like wrapped around my—

  “An interview,” she says, pulling me from my barely-begun fantasy. It’s a shame. Could have been a good fantasy. I blink. She’s pouring me another shot, and one into a shot glass of her own. Where did that come from?

  “I—”

  “It’s not polite to not drink a drink that’s poured for you.” She levels her gaze at my eyes, pointing to the glass.

  Anger floods through me as if it’s riding on my blood, singing through my veins. My lips draw back from my teeth and I stare deep into her eyes, daring them to flinch away.

  Theresa doesn’t give an inch.

  I down the shot, never taking my eyes off hers.

  For all the softness and goddamn undeniable beauty of the woman, underneath she’s made of flint. I have to admit I respect that.

  And find it attractive. Fuck “attractive.” Sexy as hell.

  She smiles. As if she’s reading me. As if she knows me. I feel a rush of blood to my cock and my jeans get tight. The room is suddenly very warm.

  “An interview?” I say. “Or are you just hoping for some sound bites followed by a night of wild passion?” I feel myself grinning.

  Theresa

  Bill Thompson drives a Ferrari.

  Bill Thompson is a late-middle-aged man working on his fourth in a series of wives who always seem to stay the same age.

  Bill Thompson is the editor-in-chief of Sports Now Magazine, the leading print and online source for all your—you guessed it—sports news.

  He is my boss, and he is a complete prick.

  His voice is tinny in my ear. I know what he’s going to say and I think I should just let the phone dangle by my leg until he’s through, but I don’t. I’m not sure why, but I always feel compelled to listen until his tirades are over.

  “The simple fact, Terry—”

  “Theresa,” I interject.

  “Is that you are a major pain in my ass. I get complaints about you quite literally every day. About your inappropriate behavior. Your pushiness. Did you know the word ‘unladylike’ has actually been thrown in your direction once or a fucking hundred times?”

  “Bill, I can’t function in sports if I act like a goddamn prissy—”

  He raises his voice to let me know that he is still talking and that he will continue until he is finished. God I hate sports and the men involved with them.

  “And do you know why I keep you around, Terry?” He lets that dangle for a minute. The cabbie turns to look at me, his eyebrows raised. I hold up a finger for him to wait. He points at the ticking meter. I nod. “I keep you around because sometimes—sometimes—all your poking around gets us a decent story. And you’re a good writer. Those two things. Take away either one of those things, and I got no reason to keep you and about seventy thousand to tell you to kick rocks.” Seventy thousand. My salary at SNM.

  “I’ve got—”

  “You got turned down for the interview you promised me. Sports Now spent over fifteen thou on your little detective vacation to Ireland. And you got me nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What, the dead brother story? Cry me a fucking river, that’s not a story.” I can picture Bill making a jack-off motion under his desk. “You owe me an interview. Get me a fuckin’ interview, or look for some other editor willing to put up with your prima donna nonsense.”

  That gets my back up. I am not a prima donna. I stick my neck out for this stupid magazine every day and I won’t be talked to like I’m trying to be a fucking diva. I open my mouth to tell Bill Thompson where he can shove that particular remark.

  But the line is dead.

  Damn it.

  The cabbie taps on the glass. There are people waiting outside to get in, and he wants to collect a new fare.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I swipe my card, tip him, and get out on the curb.

  “It’s about time,” says a woman in a dark pants suit, trying to barge her way past before I even move away from the door.

  I’ve had about enough for one day. A thought passes through my mind, and on its heels a wave of red anger.

  How would Sean Kelly handle this?

  I take a step toward the woman, thinking about how ridiculous this is. In my low-cut red dress and four inch heels just how intimidating can I be?

  But one thing I’ve learned from hours of watching footage of Sean: it’s all in the eyes. And pants suit takes one look at mine and steps back away from the cab. A young couple uses the opportunity to brush past us both and pile in. The door bangs closed and tires chirp as the cab jumps into traffic.

  Pants-suit puts her hands up as if to ward off a blow. Silly.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, backing away.

  “I don’t give a fuck.” I’m certain if I look in a mirror I’ll see a flat, dead expression on my face.

  But inside I’m laughing.

  Is this how it feels to be Sean Kelly?

  I’m about to find out.

  A maroon-liveried doorman pulls the door open and I waltz into the York Hotel. I don’t have to ask directions to the bar. I know where it is.

  I know everything.

  My heels making hollow sounds on the marble floor, I consider my options. Frankly, I’m sick of Sports Now and the macho bullshit attitude that goes along with it. It felt like a golden moment when Bill hired me six years ago, but every moment since then has tasted like a shit sandwich. The only reason I’ve stayed is because I love—I love—digging up dirt on some of these assholes. It provides me enough gratification to keep going, to keep putting up with Bill Thompson and the team managers and the scathing looks from players’ wives.

  But it might be time to go somewhere else. Surely there’s another magazine or newspaper looking for someone with my doggedness and determination. I just can’t think of any off the top of my head. There certainly haven’t been any headhunters beating down my door to recruit me to go to work for some other publication.

  Maybe I could try blogging?

  The thought makes my stomach sink.

  I walk into the bar, my heels knocking now against dark hardwood flooring. Toward the back of the bar I see a bottle of Jack Daniels and a shot glass sitting next to a half-finished beer. The booth is empty. The bartender asks, “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  I ask for a shot glass and he gives me one, a quizzical look on his face.

  “Special guest,” I say conspiratorially, and press a finger to my lips.

  That’s me, the special guest. Here to poke around in a very private man’s very private life and then show the world whatever I find there.

  As I sit down opposite where Sean would sit, the memory of his face when I asked about his brother comes clear into my mind. The look of someone wounded more deeply than he ever could be in a fight.

  When I had been in Ireland, searching for the secret history of Sean Kelly, looking for something deep and dark, at first it was all a big adventure. Talking to all these local people, folks who knew him. Folks who, I was certain, would eventually reveal the terrible truth about Sean Kelly. That he used to be an enforcer for the Irish mob, maybe. Or that he sold drugs until he found out fighting paid better. Or tortured pets when he was a kid.

  Anything.

  But I found nothing.

  Well, not exactly nothing.

  What I found out about Sean Kelly was that everyone in Eyrecourt, County Galway, loved him. That he was a good kid, and he grew
up to be a good young man. That he hasn’t been home in fifteen years, but he still sends money to his mother and grandmother every month. Paid for a library to be built. A public swimming pool.

  When I asked about the Sean I knew, whose answer was, “I don’t give a fuck,” one old lady told me, “No, that’s not our boy.” She smiled at me with all four of her teeth. “That’s the American version of Sean. Irish Sean is all heart.”

  I asked her why that was, and she told me. About the brother, and the sea. The great tragedy that shaped Sean Kelly’s adult life.

  ***

  “You don’t know me,” Sean says.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you ruin things when you talk?” I say without thinking. I pour him a drink, and then another. He’s silent for a few minutes. The tension in his shoulders tells me he’s angry; the ice in his eyes tells me he’s curious. About what, though? Sean Kelly tries to stare me down, the intensity in his gaze willing me to look away.

  I’ve seen this moment at a dozen weigh-ins and press conferences, with a dozen fighters. All of them look away, withering under that gaze. And he knocks all of them out. I can’t look away. I won’t. I hold his gaze, looking deep into his blue eyes. We are both motionless, locked in the moment of challenge. His presence, the force of his personality, is almost overwhelming; a sense of excitement, of anticipation, surges through me. Something is going to happen. I can feel it. I just don’t know what it is. But there is a tingling in my belly that goes beyond my journalistic ambitions. Just like at the press conference, I imagine our eyes locked together, but his are above me, his body between my legs. My fingers dig into his wide back. The hot weight of his hips press me down into the bed…

  He blinks. Something shifts behind his eyes. I realize there is something so alive in there, so vibrant, that it must take an unimaginable strength to hide it from everyone.

  Suddenly I hate my job. Hate the digging that I’ve done into this man’s life. I hate that I was the person that asked him a question I had no business asking, for the sole purpose of dredging up drama for a magazine I don’t even like working for.

  I hate the closed-off look his eyes got when I asked it, and I’m relieved it’s not there now. He’s guarded, definitely, but not walled up. Probably because of the whiskey.

  “An interview?” he says. “Or are you just hoping for some sound bites followed by a night of wild passion?”

  One corner of his mouth turns up in a cocked smile and I can see where one of his incisors is chipped. Sean Kelly has dimples and very blue, blue eyes, and I wonder if the two shots of liquor in me are making me tipsy. But no, that’s not it.

  It’s just simply that I want to sleep with him.

  Nothing to say but to say it. "I have a problem."

  Chapter 3

  Sean

  She says, “If I don’t get an interview with you, Sports Now is going to fire me. And nobody else will hire me after that. My career will be over.” As she says it, her voice remains even, level. As if she’s telling me about ticker prices for stocks she doesn’t own. Most people in her position would be speaking quickly. Their voice would shake. Maybe go up an octave when they announced the impending doom to their career.

  But not Theresa Vaughan. Stone cold, this one. Totally composed.

  Without thinking I say, “You’re like the reporter version of me.”

  She blinks, her dark eyes shining in the low light. “What?”

  I allow myself a small smile. She apparently knows how rare this is, because her eyebrows go up just a bit. But she doesn’t say anything.

  Another point to her.

  “Nothing. Carry on.” I take a sip of my beer.

  Her eyebrows come together and her voice goes very low. “I might be better off without this job, anyway. It…makes me into someone I don’t like being.”

  Ordinarily I’m suspicious of someone who lapses into vulnerability like this. It’s almost always calculated, laced with ulterior motive. But if I’m good at anything, it’s reading people. I know when someone’s leading with a jab or a takedown attempt. If they feel confident or if they’re terrified. And I know when they’re trying to manipulate me.

  And Theresa is not trying to manipulate me. She’s just being straight up, stating matter-of-factly that the way of life she has worked so hard for might be taken from her, and might, in the end, not have been worth it after all.

  I might be Sean Kelly, and I might, in general, not give much of a fuck about much of anything, but I find something in my heart opening up to this woman and what she’s going through.

  “Life’s too short to do what you don’t love or be whom you don’t like,” I said.

  A funny look crosses her face and she purses her lips. “Are you sure you’re a fighter?” she says, half laughing. “You certainly don’t talk like one.”

  A laugh tumbles out of my mouth before I can hold it back. “Why, how dare you try to paint a stereotype of me for my work,” I say, mock-offended. “Next you’re tell me the Irish are drinkers.” And finished off my beer with a single, huge swallow.

  I put the mug down on the table, and the world seems to drop into slow motion. Like someone flipped a light switch. Or turned the thermostat way, way up. Theresa reaches across the four inches of table that separate our hands. When I fight, I see punches coming this way. My opponents always seem to be moving slow, their blows crawling in on the backs of turtles, giving me ample time to move out of the way, to counterstrike. But as Theresa’s long, slim hand moves toward mine, I cannot move at all. I’m not paralyzed, I just…don’t want to get out of the way. Her skin is cool and smooth as it brushes across the hard knots of knuckle on the back of my hand, but it’s as if white-hot electricity surges up my arm.

  Doesn’t burn. Doesn’t hurt.

  But it touches something in me, something I buried a long time ago. That electric jolt finds a home deep in the center of my being and spreads through me. It lights me up like a Christmas tree.

  Her lips move, and time goes back to its normal speed as she says, “I’m sorry I said what I said at the press conference.”

  When she mentions it, the lights in me go dim, but only a little. I can see the pulse in her smooth throat. The gleam of her teeth through slightly parted lips. Blood surges through me, and all my senses are on high alert. I could count the freckles on her face. The Christmas tree lights have faded, but they have been replaced by a low, determined smolder as I come to a sudden decision.

  Theresa Vaughan tempted the fates when she chose to approach me, and she’s going to find out what that means.

  I am going to make her mine. She’ll moan. She’ll beg. And in the end I’ll give her everything she wants, and more, and she’s going to love every minute of it.

  Somehow, even after an eternity and all that electricity, neither of us has moved our hands. Surely she had to have felt that.

  “When I knock a man out in the cage, or choke him until he goes to sleep, or crank on his arm until he submits, I don’t go to him later and apologize.” I lean toward her. The skin of our hands rubs together slightly and my body is suffused with a tingling sensation. How is this not affecting her? “Because it’s my job to do it. When we get in the cage, he knows that’s what I’m there for. No big surprise when I knock him down.” I smile, and I can tell it’s a big, wide one. “Although I have to admit that you surprised me. That doesn’t happen often.” And how I want to make you pay for that. Over and over.

  Theresa has the decency to look chagrined. Only on her face, “chagrined” becomes something more like “humble but beautiful.” Her lids lower and her lips purse out in thought. “So,” she says, her voice not much more than a murmur, “did I knock you down?”

  Of their own accord, my fingers close over the back of her hand. She doesn’t pull away, but her eyes narrow in a welcoming smile that doesn’t quite make it to her lips. My thumb traces along her wrist, feeling her pulse strong beneath the skin.

  “I don’t get knocked
down,” I say, even as I fall toward her dark eyes. Under my thumb, her pulse speeds up.

  Theresa

  The whole world constricts, for a moment, to his hand on mine. The flesh is hot and alive, and even with his gentle touch I can feel the incredible strength that reside in these fingers.

  These hands have pinned down much stronger people than I.

  I feel almost dizzy at the thought.

  He says, “If you’ve done your homework, you know I have a room in this hotel.”

  “So do I.”

  Sean pulls out his wallet, and his shirt presses against his narrow waist as he twists. My breath catches in my throat. He throws a couple of bills on the table and then we both slide out of the booth. We are face to face, and I can feel the heat of him burning through the scant air between us. I’ve never stood this close to him. He towers over me, and I have to crane my head to look up at him. He looks down at me, his face very serious. “Elevators,” he says. Is his voice ever so slightly strained?

  “Elevators,” I repeat, exhilarated by my own breathlessness.

  By silent, mutual agreement we don’t touch as we walk through the lobby. Don’t want to show anything untoward. But by my estimation we cross the marble floor to the elevator banks in record time, our shoes rattling across the tiles like a machine gun. We’re almost running by the time I press the “up” button.

  Somehow, we’ve managed to get an elevator all to ourselves. Sean stands to the side, facing me, while I gaze out the still-open doors. He is obviously less concerned about appearances than I am. He, after all, doesn’t give a fuck.

  As soon as the doors slide closed, he takes my arm and pulls me to him. I manage to gasp in one breath as he lowers his lips to mine. I swing out a hand, touch a button to take us to my floor.

  And then I am lost. The soft heat of his mouth presses against my lips. His are full, strong, and they first brush across mine, a light graze that raises my body temperature about fifteen degrees. Then he claims them, pressing his lips to mine. My mouth opens slightly and his tongue darts just inside, touching the tip of mine. Hot. Slick. I sigh, but the air catches somewhere in my throat and the sigh comes out as a wanton moan.