Free Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance by Roxy Sinclaire, Natasha Tanner Page B

at us when they didn’t think we were looking, more fodder for the gossip mill. The kind of shit my Aunt Jo would have eaten up. There really wasn’t any such thing as an impartial jury, the town was small.
    The jury only deliberated for a handful of hours before they came back out, and said my mom had cracked from the years of abuse and was defending herself. They took her plea, what she thought was protecting her, and it got her tossed into a mental facility.
    Everyone knows what they say about nut houses. The patients get abused and neglected. You can’t go a few years without hearing a new scandal from a facility that was supposed to care for its patients taking advantage of them instead.
    I didn’t feel bad; she wanted to leave without me.
    I couldn’t help but be a little comforted at the thought
    I never answered the phone when she called, I never wrote back. I wasn’t sure what to say to her? How do you tell a woman that almost threw you under the bus that was your own father, that you even came close to forgiving her? She married that man! She married him and dragged me into their life, and almost left me there to rot!
    So no, I didn’t care. I was glad they played television in her center, and I was glad she got to see me live the life she had groomed me for—the one she wanted. I couldn’t help but hope that when my movie was released they would play it on loop for her.
    A couple times, I considered sending her pictures of my condo, and of Jelly Bean since my parents had never let me have pets. I considered calling her and acting like I didn’t know who she was and asking her to stop calling me.
    I wasn’t worried about being implicated, God no, she was too proud to admit she’d lied. I had to wonder about Adam though. He stayed on my mind a lot; like ink in water he colored every inch of my life. I didn’t know much about him and I regretted that so much.
    Did he know my father was dead?
    Did he know that I let my mother take the blame for him?
    That I didn’t tell him he killed a man?
    I didn’t know much about him, I wasn’t sure if he’d come forward and admit it if he found out what he’d done, but I knew that he hadn’t yet.
    He hadn’t told anyone yet, and that was all I could ask for. If he’d been the one rotting away in some loony bin or prison I wouldn’t have forgiven myself. He was kind and gentle, and he saved my life in so many ways. If he hadn’t done what he had, I wouldn’t have been living in that condo in the sky.
    I had feelings for him I couldn’t completely explain.
    It’s not that while he was out of my life I didn’t date, because I did find many men that fit my tastes, but he was always there with me. I always imagined him appearing at my premiers, running across to me at a location shoot, or sending me a letter to my fan mail accounts.
    I wanted him to reach out to me, to tell me he noticed and was watching out for me again. I needed him. I was sure that he didn’t need me anymore though.
    I was just some strange mean girl from his school that paid him off so he wouldn’t go back to our home town. I was just a rich girl who had everyone else do things for me. He wasn’t completely wrong, but I wanted to change his view on me if that was it.
    I wanted to form a proper view of him.
    The premier of my movie came and went without me seeing his face or receiving any mail from him. I tried not to think about it too much.
    I found myself turning to alcohol.
    I know that’s stupid, I know that it’s even worse because I had to work to get to it because I wasn’t of age yet. It drowned out the sounds of my dad’s skull being cracked and it flushed away the images of that night I relived every single time I tried to sleep.
    It was the poison that got my family into the situation it was in, but it was also my elixir to a freed conscience. One that didn’t have to think about my mom rotting away, or the boy who saved my life never getting to talk to me again.
    It was