SWOLLEN: A Secret Baby Sports Romance Read online

  SWOLLEN

  A Secret Baby Sports Romance

  Stephanie Brother

  © 2016 Stephanie Brother

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author's imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.

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  “Sure the fight was fixed. I fixed it with a right hand.”

  - George Foreman

  Table of contents:

  SWOLLEN: A Secret Baby Sports Romance

  About This Book

  One.

  Liam

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Jasmine

  Two.

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Jasmine

  Three.

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Four.

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Liam

  Jasmine

  Five.

  Liam

  Six.

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Epilogue.

  Jasmine

  Liam

  Donkey: A Stepbrother Sports Romance

  About This Book

  Prologue.

  Tilly

  Landon

  One.

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Tilly

  Two.

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Three.

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Four.

  Tilly

  Landon

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Five.

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Six.

  Tilly

  Landon

  Tilly

  Landon

  Seven.

  Tilly

  Epilogue.

  Landon

  Tilly

  About Stephanie Brother

  ***

  SWOLLEN

  A Secret Baby Sports Romance

  Stephanie Brother

  © 2016 Stephanie Brother

  About This Book:

  Something Worth Fighting For.

  Jasmine

  I’m not the kind of girl that usually goes home with strange men, but Liam Dougherty isn’t the kind of man you can easily refuse, either.

  Not only that, he saves me from something even more dangerous, and then gives me a night of passion that easily makes up for it.

  A night that has consequences neither of us can ever imagine.

  When I see him again, almost an entire year later, just the thought of that night enough to catch my breath in my throat, our daughter Maggie is already two months old.

  I’m not the only one with a secret, however, when Liam reveals his past and proves just how dangerous he can really be.

  An illegal, bare-fist boxer with a debt to pay, Liam’s life makes mine look like a walk in the park.

  I know I should do everything I can to stay away from him, but something about him makes me keep coming back.

  Secret or not, when Liam sets his eyes on me again, he makes it clear that nothing is going to get in his way of making sure I’m his.

  Above everything else, he knows how to win, and right now he has something worth fighting for.

  Liam

  There’s not much good I’ve done in this world, but when I see Jasmine getting hassled by three men in a neighborhood she shouldn’t be walking home alone in, I figure it’s my opportunity to set things right.

  If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s fight for my own survival, so when Jasmine gets mixed up in my world by chance, I have to make sure I protect her too.

  It’s been almost a year since I tried to keep her away from me the first time, and now she’s back, I want her more than ever.

  I’ll do anything to win her over, because I’ve never met anyone that gives me a better reason to fight.

  Jasmine and I have a connection, and I can’t ignore it anymore.

  I’m dangerous, but she knows it.

  I’m bad for her, but I can’t stay away.

  She says she has a secret, but whatever it is, it won't be enough to stop me.

  Finally, after everything else I’ve gone through, after running and hiding, and just plain surviving, finally I feel like I’ve got something worth fighting for.

  **This is a standalone, bad boy sports romance with a secret baby, absolutely no cheating, and a happy ever after. It’s heavy on the steam, and has just enough sports action to be enjoyed by fans of both genres.**

  One.

  Liam

  It smells like piss and chalk down here. There are stains on the floor where old blood has seeped into the concrete the shadows can’t even hide, a thousand memories of previous brutal encounters now as much a part of the fabric of the place as the building materials themselves.

  Bare fist fighting doesn’t get any more real than this. A crowd of half-crazed men to push you back towards each other when the ring breaks, salivating like dogs under a hot summer sun, me, him and a thousand dollars to the winner.

  There is nothing like it. Getting hit by an ungloved hand hurts like hell, as does hitting the floor at a hundred miles an hour, but the rush of adrenaline makes the risk of that happening worth it.

  It’s primeval and neanderthal, it’s animalistic and depraved, it’s dangerous and fucking stupid, but I love it. I feel free when I’m doing this, and the only other thing that makes me feel freedom, in the same way, is fucking.

  I’m good at this too. I’m a big guy, I’m quick, I’m smart, I’m young and athletic, I have good hand-eye coordination and I know how to fight both clean and dirty. Down here, in the pit, in the belly of an abandoned building in Crown Heights, I’m known as Cobra, up there, in the real world, my life is completely different.

  My opponent is a monster of a man, but he looks slow and clumsy. I watch him casually warm up - a jerk of the head from side to side, a few air punches, a shake of one leg followed by the other, the confidence of a man expecting to win easily.

  I’ve never seen him before, but that’s not unusual. There are about a dozen of these places in Brooklyn alone, several more out across the other boroughs, a network as big as a franchised restaurant chain across the country as a whole.

  I like to change things up and swap venue every fight, get to know the nuances of each pit like the back of my hand, not get too familiar in any one of them. I’ve had a decent record, and if you carry that arou
nd like a badge, people get to know you. I don’t want people to get to know me. I want to stay anonymous, do what I need to do to win, and then get out of there as quick as possible and on to the next.

  The referee calls us both towards him. It’s a bare fist fight without any rules, but we still have a referee, largely to decide the outright winner if no-one wants to give up, or stop the fight if there is a danger of someone dying - which happens every other fight. Apart from that detail, there is nothing about this that is official.

  Toe to toe, the Butcher, which is what my opponent calls himself and has tattooed across his chest in latin script, stands almost a foot taller than me, which means he must be almost seven foot tall. He grimaces down at me with teeth gritted and muscles tense.

  The referee is a wiry man with a face that looks like it’s been chewed up and spat back out.

  “Touch”, he says.

  We knock fists together and then head back to our respective corners to wait for the bell.

  I’m only twenty-six, but I’ve been doing this for long enough to know exactly how to win. I didn’t start fighting in the ring either, I started way before that, when I had to learn how to defend myself at all costs.

  When I was nine my dad took me to a boxing club, and after two years there, I started training other martial arts too. I’d still be competing if I could, although the energy here beats an organized fight hands down. This is raw fighting with nowhere to hide. Boxing in a ring is fun, but it’s way too clean for my liking. Boxing here, in the poorly lit chamber of a forgotten building, is as close to purity as you can get.

  The crowd is so close they can touch me. The walls and the floor form part of the game. The smell of stale sweat is so potent, you couldn’t be anywhere is. All of my emotions are heightened in here, which is something I don’t experience even in an MMA cage.

  That kind of fighting compared to this is like a tickle contest compared to a full on brawl.

  I can feel it rising inside me. I can feel the crowd baying for blood. The Butcher bangs his fist into his open hand and gets ready to tear me apart.

  It won’t take long for me to put him out of his misery. The bigger they are, the harder they fall and the harder they fall the longer they stay down.

  I breathe through my nose, steady myself and see everything go into slow motion as the bell rings.

  I’m in front of him before the Butcher has had time to blink and after a volley of well-placed punches across his gut and chest, the crowd bends to gather his falling body.

  I don’t stop there. When he comes back to me, I drive a heel into the pit of his stomach, a left hook across his cranium and a hammer blow to the back of his head while he’s still falling.

  Those that have seen me fight before cheer ecstatically. Those that haven’t look at each other in silent awe.

  Less than a minute has passed and The Butcher is unconscious. I thought he’d be able to resist a little bit more, to be honest. There is nothing a crowd at these things like less than a short fight.

  Someone tips a bucket of water over him and he jerks awake violently. After a shake of his head he’s back on his feet, and now I’ve made the measure of him I decide to give the crowd a bit of what they want.

  I dance around him, never in danger of getting hit, and The Butcher swipes at me like a drunk trying to knock planes out of the sky. It’s embarrassing for him, but that’s not my problem. I’m here to stay out of the line of his haymakers and pick up my well-deserved paycheck.

  The crowd whoop, the crowd cheer, the crowd hiss at the mess I’ve made of him and they bay for me to finish him.

  He manages to last for three and a bit rounds before he’s unable to get up halfway through the fourth. He’s landed about three punches on me, all of which I took to the body to make it look like there might have been some kind of comeback.

  He’s a mess of blood and swollen tissue, and hardly able to stand up at the end of the fight to walk away in shame.

  I knew it was going to be easy, but I didn’t think it would be that easy, considering the size of the guy. I guess they call him the Butcher because he makes a meal of his fights.

  While The Butcher is carted off, I drink water and cool down. I’d only usually fight once or twice in one night, but because that was so easy, I might be tempted to carry on. A thousand bucks a win when I’m struggling to find work is pretty important.

  In any one given night, there are usually half a dozen pre-organized fights and then half a dozen more impromptu ones either with members of the crowd who suddenly think they can beat you, or random people like me that swing by on the off chance to try and make some cash.

  I usually don’t fight anyone I haven’t seen fight before, even members of the crowd, because you just don’t know who they are. My fight with the Butcher was pre-organized and I knew what to expect from him. Any random guy that walks in off the street could be even better than I am, however unlikely, and I’m just not solvent enough at the moment to risk it.

  I take a break while the schedule for the night continues, find the promoter and put my name down again as a possible contender. If someone steps up and I think I can take them, or I’ve even fought them before and they want another go, I might be tempted.

  Other than that, I’ll just let the shadows of the crowd swallow me up, so I can watch the rest of these amateurs fight. Even if I don’t go again tonight, a thousand dollars for ten minutes work isn’t a bad day at the office.

  Jasmine

  So, I’m not sure which is worse. The table of three guys perving on me every time I walk past, the family that has spent all evening complaining about everything from the level of music to the lack of light to the small portions we offer here, or the man who smells of death and has a thousand dollars in his wallet.

  Honestly, I’ve never hated people so much in my life before, and I used to love people. I thought getting a job waiting tables would be fun, I thought this would be a great way to pay off my student debt while I look for writing jobs, a neat way to meet people, and learn about business, but no. None of those things is true. It’s a great way to go crazy very quickly, to fuck up your sleeping pattern, to work super hard without any kind of reward and to hate people. All kinds of people.

  If I didn’t need the money I would have quit this job weeks ago, but here I am still, the tail end of an economic crisis that hit just as I came out of college, a country where unemployment has always been rife in the arts sector and now even more so than anywhere else, and a city where rent has gone through the roof. I have a degree in English and business, and I’ve had my work showcased in a number of highly regarded newspapers and magazines, but can I get a job anywhere but a hipster restaurant that puts emphasis on looking good over common sense? Can I fuck.

  I take dessert to the three guys and smile while I do so, because smiling, apparently, is a sure-fire way of getting a good tip.

  Obviously, my attempts at good nature are misinterpreted, though, and because quite a large amount of alcohol has been consumed, there doesn’t seem to be a filter on what they say to me.

  “Doing anything later?” one of them asks me.

  “Going home”, I respond.

  “You know, we don’t live far from here, why don’t you come home with us?”

  I laugh off the comment.

  “Seriously”, one of the other guys says, his eyes all over my tits. “You look like the kind of girl who likes that kind of thing.”

  This is the kind of thing I have to put up with on a daily basis. I don’t mind direct men, what I can’t tolerate are men that are disrespectful. The first time someone said something disrespectful to me, I threw a glass of water in his face and got a warning from my manager. Now, I’m so desensitized to it all, I just let it slide.

  I laugh it off. “Anything else I can get for you guys?”

  “Not unless you want to show us your tits.”

  I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. You’d think this kind of stuff stopped
happening to women years ago, and it wouldn’t be something that would normally take place here, in a posh, modern restaurant, but sadly it happens way more than I’ll like to admit.

  It’s embarrassing and upsetting and all I can do is walk away while I know they’ll be watching my ass wiggle in this ridiculously short skirt as I do so.

  We are made to wear uniforms that show off our best assets, as our sleazy manager puts it, which is frankly fucking ridiculous.

  I know that looking presentable is important, but there is a huge difference between presentable and fuckable, and I have respect for myself and my body. That doesn’t mean I’m not the kind of person who enjoys sex, and sexy situations, quite the opposite actually, it just means I don’t like being exploited, and here in the restaurant, in my place of work, I feel exactly that. Like I’m on fucking display.

  The three guys are the last in the restaurant before close, and their attempts to woo me get so intimidating at one point, I have to take a break, tell the manager and get them warned, which he’s reluctant to do. Finally, they leave, drunk, chastised in the lightest way possible, and one hundred percent without me.

  With the doors closed the manager gives me a talking to about how to best treat our customers in order to keep them coming back, and I nearly quit then and there. I’m a strong person but even I’m getting worn down by this shit day in day out.

  Two o’clock in the fucking morning and I’m back in here for early shift. I haven’t written a thing in what feels like months, and that expose article I’ve been planning on this city’s underground fighting rings is still nothing more than a handful of half-written sentences and stuff that might not even be true.

  I’m weary and I hate it. I also feel more alone here that I have done in a long time. I’ve been single for what feels like ages, and even though I keep getting propositions like the ones from those three douche-balls in the restaurant, it feels like such a long time since I’ve met a decent, real man. I’m not ancient, but I’m not getting any younger either. I’m thinking about kids of my own one day, and I’d like to find the man who has the balls enough to provide that for me, not boys who think that telling you you’ve got a great ass is the only way they are going to conquer you.