Below the Belt (10 page)

After a brief exchange of words, he started to write down dates and figures.

“I’ll need to get back to you on a few details,” he said.

Brian Hoyland was a small-time promoter and one of the first calls he’d made.

“Sure. Get back to me. It’s a good offer.”

“It’s damned fast, that’s for sure.”

“I had a cancellation, you know how it is,” Brian said.

Cooper ended the call and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He hadn’t expected things to move this quickly. Hadn’t wanted them to.

He left the office. Jamie was doing stretches on one of the mats, her body glowing with a fine sheen of perspiration.

She looked up at him as he approached.

“Before you ask, I’ve done all my sit-ups,” she said.

“You’ve been offered a fight.”

Her face lit with anticipation. “Really? That’s great.”

No, it’s not. You’re going to get hurt. And I am beginning to realize that you are the last person in the world I want to see hurt.

“Yeah.”

He was her trainer. He would train her. Do his job.

Not matter how hard that was shaping up to be.

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
,
Cooper stepped out of the shower cubicle in his motel room and reached for the towel. Thin and scratchy, like the motel itself, it had seen better days. But it was clean, as were his sheets and the bathroom.

It wasn’t as if they’d had a world of choice in a rural town the size of Dubbo. Situated about five hours’ drive west of Sydney, it was a city of forty thousand souls and no five-star hotels. It was also the city where Jamie would be taking on her next opponent, a Melbourne fighter named Liana Nelson.

The fight was tomorrow night, the venue the city’s biggest sporting auditorium. Jamie and Liana were the first fight on the bill, with a number of male boxers rounding out the night.

Liana was huge, taller than Jamie, built. She was pushing the weight limit for the middleweight class and he’d heard that she’d barely squeaked by at this afternoon’s weigh-in. She was an experienced fighter, with fifteen wins to her name and only one loss. Like Jamie, it had come early in her career. She’d made a habit of winning ever since.

Cooper was still a little surprised that the other woman had been willing to take on a newcomer like Jamie. It wasn’t as though Liana needed wins. She was at the stage in her career where she was looking for title shots, not runs on the board. But no matter what her motivation, it was a good fight for Jamie.

They’d only been able to source a grainy amateur tape of Liana’s most recent bout in the weeks since the fight had been scheduled. It had shown a ferocious fighter who came out hard and aimed to put her opponents away as early as possible. Cooper and Jamie had studied it over and over, noting Liana’s habits, talking about her weak spots.

There weren’t many. She sometimes dropped her guard hand before lashing out with her killer uppercut. And she tended to come out fighting when she got hurt, thrashing around with little skill or strategy. If Jamie could antagonize her, they could use that temper against her. But Jamie had to withstand the other woman’s onslaught first.

He sat on the edge of the bed and ran both hands through his hair. This was a lot harder than he’d imagined it would be.

In nearly eighteen years of competitive boxing, he’d never felt this nervous before a fight. It had taken every bit of self control he possessed to stop himself from conveying his fears to Jamie when they did a light training session this afternoon. She’d been quiet and inwardly focused. He hadn’t tried to draw her out. The last thing she needed was the knowledge of just how distracted and screwed-up her trainer was.

He let his towel drop and crossed to his suitcase to find underwear. A knock at the door had him reaching for the towel again. He held it securely in one fist at his hip as he opened the door.

Jamie stood there, her face pale.

“I need to talk,” she said.

Her eyes slid down his body. His heart kicked into gear, slamming against his ribs. One look—he was so hooked on her it wasn’t funny.

“Give me a moment,” he said, shutting the door.

Jamie and near nudity were not a good mix. Already he was half-hard simply because she’d been within arm’s reach. By the time this was all over, he figured he’d have definitely earned himself that sainthood.

He dressed quickly in jeans and a T-shirt then let her in.

“Okay, what’s up?” he asked as she brushed past him and sank onto one of the twin beds.

“I can’t stop thinking about that uppercut. What if I don’t see it coming? I’m worried I won’t be able to take it,” Jamie said. She rested her elbows on her knees, leaning forward. Her face was tight with worry.

“Yep, and you won’t know if you can or not until it lands.”

He sat opposite her. She scowled.

“Thanks for the words of reassurance.”

“It’s the truth. There’s a bunch of stuff she might throw at you in the ring that you might not be able to take. You won’t know until you’re there and that leather hits you and hurts you. Nothing I say is going make any difference to that.
Nothing.
”

He held her eye. She let out a big gust of air.

“Okay. Okay,” she said, flopping back onto the bed.

She was wearing a pair of hip-hugging, skin-tight jeans. Because he wasn’t a saint just yet, his gaze traveled up her long, lithe legs before tracing up her belly and over her breasts. She was focused on the ceiling, and he decided it was good that she couldn’t see the way he was looking at her, remembering what it had been like to be inside her, remembering all the times he’d fantasized about being with her again over the past few months. She’d ruined him for any other woman and lately he’d been reduced to the teenage remedy of his own hand on too many occasions to count.

“Was Ray like this before his fight last week?” she asked.

They’d both gone to watch Ray fight. Even from Ray’s corner he’d heard Jamie hollering her support from the front row. Ray’s hard-fought win on points had been the first big-ticket coup of Cooper’s training career—but it would be nothing compared to Jamie winning tomorrow night. Winning in the first round, on the first punch, before the other fighter even had a chance to breathe near her. That would be his absolute ideal.

Fat chance.

“Ray knew what he had to do. So do you,” Cooper said. At least he could sound like a trainer even if he didn’t feel like one.

“I just want to stop thinking. I was tired after the drive here and our training session, and I thought I could sack out early, get a good night’s sleep…. Hell, Grandpa is out like a light. Fell asleep watching some cable news show. But my brain won’t let up on me,” Jamie said, eyes still on the ceiling.

Half the battle in the ring was psychological. A night spent second-guessing herself was not going to leave Jamie fresh and ready to fight tomorrow. She needed to be rested and alert.

Whenever he’d gotten like this before a fight, his trainer had called in a massage therapist to work the kinks out of his muscles. Hardly an option in the middle of rural Australia.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. It was late and they were on a highway with nothing much in the way of scenery in either direction, but at least it would be a distraction.

“Tried that,” she said. “Didn’t work.”

Sitting up, she rotated her neck.

“Maybe I’ll try another shower, or some hot milk. I guess my brain has to stop sometime, right?”

Or it could keep circling for hours, exhausting her and leaving her full of doubt.

Against his better judgment, he gestured toward the bed.

“Lie down. I’ll give you a shoulder rub.”

She stilled and gave him a look.

“I don’t know whether that’s really going to relax me a whole hell of a lot,” she said. Her gaze ran up and down his body again.

“Then we go for a walk.” He shrugged.

She hesitated, thinking over the two options. Then she slid backward on the bed and arranged herself facedown, toeing off her flip-flop sandals.

“Pretend I’m someone else,” he said.

“Fine. Don’t talk, don’t breathe and go scrub off your aftershave and I’ll have a fighting chance,” she said.

He smiled tightly. It was like that for him, too. The huskiness of her voice. The way she laughed. The scent of her body. There were a million things about her that drove him wild. If she’d been moments away from straddling his back and laying hands on him, he knew he’d be hard as a rock and drilling a hole in the bed.

He frowned, one knee on the mattress. Given all of the above, what the hell was he doing, offering her a massage in the first place?

“Stringing it out isn’t helping, by the way,” she said.

Screw it. It was a back rub at the end of the day. He’d survived nearly five weeks of watching her move, laughing with her, running with her, spotting her while she trained.

There had been moments of intense temptation every day—the time when it had been only the two of them in the gym late at night, and he’d known she was naked in the shower in the women’s change room and that he could go in there and have her against the lockers in seconds. The time when they’d been watching fight tape in his office early one morning and the scent of her newly washed hair had kept him on edge all day. The time when he’d driven her home after training and they’d sat tensely outside her apartment building for a long, long time, neither of them saying a word, before she finally got out of the car and went inside.

He could handle a back rub.

Straddling her hips, he leaned forward and placed his hands on her shoulders. Digging his thumbs in, he started to work. She let out a groan of appreciation.

“Oh, that’s good,” she said.

That quickly, he was hard. Gritting his teeth, he concentrated on working on each of her muscle groups, mentally naming each body part as he worked his way down her back—the long flat planes of her trapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles, the rounded deltoid muscles on her shoulders, the long serratus muscles along her spine.

If only she didn’t feel so warm and firm and alive beneath him, it might have worked. As it was, he was sweating and tense by the time he was rubbing the muscles around the small of her back.

“Okay. This is
so
not working,” she said suddenly, her head snapping up. “It’s been five weeks, Cooper. Five long, lonely weeks. I’ve been thinking about you touching me every day. And this is not how I imagined you doing it.”

His hands stilled. He stared at the dark curtain of hair spilling over her shoulders and across the bed. His hard-on throbbed as he allowed himself to imagine how good it would be to roll her over, strip off her jeans and bury himself inside her again.

Good. Damned good.

But she had a fight tomorrow. A tough fight, from what they’d seen of her opponent. Jamie was relying on him to help her prepare for it, mentally and physically.

He couldn’t sleep with her.

But maybe he could offer
her
something.

Relaxation. Release. Satisfaction.

“Roll over,” he said. Before he could think twice.

Not that he was doing a hell of a lot of thinking with his upstairs brain right now. About five seconds after he’d flashed to an image of Jamie spread wild and wanton before him, his rational brain had gone off-line.

He’d been holding out for five weeks. And he wasn’t a saint. Not even close.

J
AMIE FROZE AS SHE
heard Cooper’s low, intense words. Then a rush of molten heat raced through her. She was already enormously turned on from having his hands on her for the past twenty minutes. Even through her T-shirt, Cooper’s touch was incredible. Then there were the past five weeks of foreplay that they’d both endured.

Seeing him every day. Looking into his deep blue eyes. Watching his white, straight teeth flash into a smile or a laugh. Trying not to stare when he worked on the long bag or did push-ups or sit-ups. It had been torture, pure torture. And now he was offering to end it. At least, she hoped he was.

Tomorrow night’s fight floated to the top of her mind as she wriggled around until she was on her back, his big thighs straddling her thighs. She should stay focused, keep her relationship with Cooper pure and professional. She knew that it was the rational, sensible, right thing to do. But she wanted him so badly. She
ached
for him—a wet, hot ache that had been driving her crazy every night. No matter what she did, how she touched herself, it wasn’t a substitute for him.

Maybe if she had him again, some of this needy, insane lust would ease. At the very least it would stop her from thinking about the fight, about Liana Nelson’s big, square shoulders and fast hands.

“Just relax,” Cooper said, reaching for the stud on her jeans.

She sucked in her breath as she felt his touch against her belly. His fingers found the tab on her fly and he slid it down purposefully. Her eyelids dropped to half-mast as he peeled her jeans off. She lifted her hips to help him as he tugged the denim down and over her ankles. His hot blue gaze devoured her, gliding up her legs, seeking the juncture between her thighs, making her even hotter than she already was.

She could still remember how big he’d been, how he’d stretched her, how complete and satisfied she’d felt when he was inside her.

She smiled as she anticipated experiencing all that again.

He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her black satin panties and pulled them off. This time when he looked at her, she could see the naked hunger in his face.

“Spread your legs,” he ordered, his hands resting on her knees.

She did so willingly, her heart pounding hard. His expression was intent as he mapped her with his eyes. She kept her curls waxed into a neat strip on her mound, but she liked it bare between her legs. She could tell by the way his fingers tightened around her knees that he was enjoying the view.

“I’ve been wondering for a long time what you’d taste like,” he said.

Moving down the bed, he settled himself. His breath was warm against her inner thighs. All her muscles tightened as he lowered his head toward her.

Oh boy.

She closed her eyes and let her head drop back as he traced a wet, delicate path along the seam of her sex, working his way up toward her mound. Reaching his goal, he repeated the action again and again, each time exerting a little more pressure, delving a little more deeply between her folds until at last he’d penetrated all her secrets and had teased out the already hard nub of her clitoris. She shuddered and spread her thighs wider as he began to taste her in earnest, his tongue circling, flicking, pressing flat against her, rasping against her sensitive flesh.

Need pooled in her belly and she circled her hips as he began to use his hands, one to spread her wide so he could devour her with openmouthed kisses, the other to begin teasing at her inner lips, a single finger slicking around and around her entrance but never quite penetrating.

She was on fire. She pushed her fingers into his hair and rode the crest of a wave of desire, her body trembling.