Free Hawke: A Bad Boy Fighter Romance (With bonus book Sons of Flame MC) by Ashley Rhodes Page A

to fuck her—anyone would, unless he was blind—but I realized that a girl like her doesn’t settle for that. They got attached. She’d get attached, and she might as well get attached to a burning building, or a fuckin’ rabid bear. It’d end the same.
    She just watched me. I wanted her to say something. Get angry, like she had before. I wanted her to spit in my face, tell me I was trash, and walk out; sign me over to somebody else. Go, good girl, before you get burned.
    She didn’t go, though. She stood up, and put her hand on my shoulder. Different than before. Softer. It was warm, and made all the skin around it hot. “I care,” she said, “because no one who was a complete monster would say something like that.”
    She took her hand away, and gathered her clip board to leave. It was that time. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Jack. Think about it, okay?”
    After she was gone, I tried to put it all out of my mind. Go back to the cage, in my mind, and imagine my next fight; the unofficial kind, once I’d dragged Valentino’s ass in there with me, to show him how it’s really done.
    But I couldn’t. The scene kept changing, and I kept imagining, just for a few seconds at a time, a different life.
     

Chapter 7
     
    Jack
     
     
    Naomi came back to me the next day, like clockwork as usual. In the hour leading up to it, I realized I was looking forward to seeing her again. Which is why I kept a straight face when she came in.
    It had started to occur to me after she left the day before that I might have not read her quite right. Now, my battin’ average for reading women is pretty damn near perfect, and I thought I had at least one part of her down right—Naomi wanted me. That part was normal, almost a given, though. I mean, look at me.
    But there was something else. She’d gotten softer with me, and at first I’d thought it was just her gettin’ used to my shit. That’s just Jack; he’s a sexy asshole, har har. But no. I’d seen her that first day, and read her right—she hated this job. She was tired of it, tired of life.
    I don’t know shit about stuff like love and touchy-feely bullshit like that but I know enough about people to know that there are a few things in life that make the parts that are tiring feel not-so-bad. One of them is gettin’ the wrong idea about someone. Or the right idea, I guess; but it was never the right idea in my case.
    So when she came in again, I’d made my decision. Hands off. Don’t give the poor girl the wrong idea. She was already invested, and it would just make things worse when I went back to my world and left her here in this one, where she could survive.
    Don’t look at me like that. I’m an asshole, not a monster. Not really.
    She noticed right away. “Two days in a row, and you’re quieter than before,” she said as she worked my shoulders. “Don’t tell me this is going to be a pattern. You’ll restore my faith in humanity.”
    “Well, I’d hate to do that,” I said. “How about I screw it out of you after we’re done here?”
    She choked, and I glanced up at her to see her eyes wide, her mouth open. She sighed, rolled her eyes at me. But… she was trying not to smile, again.
    “You’re not gonna read me the riot act?” I asked.
    “Would it do any good?”
    I grunted, and held my breath for just the second it took me to remember I wasn’t supposed to as she dug her fingers into the muscles between my ribs and stretched my arm up. “Probably not. I’m an irredeemable manslut, after all.”
    Naomi lowered my arm. And shook her head while she made notes on her chart.
    “So,” I asked her, “am I fixed yet?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not really my job to fix you; more like, it’s my job to make sure you don’t break down right away when you walk out the door. Your range of motion has improved, though. You’re healing up, at least.”
    “Cause for celebration,” I muttered. “You gonna get me a cake or