“And challenging our champion tonight, we all know his name! We are all waiting to see if he’s gonna bring it to this ring tonight. So . . . is he? Get rrrready to welcome the one and only Remingtooooooon Tate, yourrr Riiiiiptide!!”
It’s impossible to quell the lightning bolt that runs through me on hearing his name. It had been noisy when Scorpion came out. But the way people start yelling for Remington makes my throat close with emotion and my heart jerk inside my chest.
“Rem-ing-ton! Rem-ing-ton!”
The chant tears through the crowd. The color red takes over the entire arena. Then I see the one spot of red that I’m dying to see as his shouted name surrounds me as completely as his color does. “Remyyyyy, kill him, Remyyyy!” “Go, Rrrrrriptide!”
My body functions heighten in every way. My lungs, my heart, my adrenals, my eyes, every part of me strains for him. The instant he comes trotting into the arena, I’m spun in a whirlwind of nervousness, fear, and excitement. I’m torn between the urge to usher him to safety and the want to cheer him on like the rest of his fans do, to let him know that I know if anyone owns that ring, it’s him.
With one easy leap, he takes the ring and immediately lets Riley pull his robe from his shoulders. I swear I hear a collective sigh from the women close to me.
“Remyyyyyyy! Kill him, Remy!!” one shouts.
And then, the amazing happens.
He starts with his signature cocky turn. All his muscles are glorious, tan, and hard, and I hear a woman scream nearby that his body should be immortalized, it is so masculine and perfect. Then he looks at me. Blue eyes shining. The bluest of the blue. His dimples flash, and I realize with a shuddering in my heart that this is what Coach meant about his blue coming back. His eyes are blue. Clear, beautiful, brilliant blue. Those eyes and dimples talk directly to the butterflies in my stomach, and I explode with them.
A frenzy of emotion shoots through me, and suddenly I know, with every fiber in my being, he’s got this. He does. He is Remington Tate. He’s a man who falls and gets up again and again. He pushes, plows, plunders, goes on. He’s. Got. This. I remember who he is. Where his drive comes from, some unnamable source that nobody in this world possesses. He is unconquerable and unbeatable—and he is going to crush Scorpion, just like he’s wanted to.
The bell rings, and my guy doesn’t waste time. He goes straight out to center ring, and while Scorpion seems to think they will jump around a bit, Remington jabs him three times, quickly enough to make the ugly animal stumble back.
Bubbles of excitement pop inside me. I cup my mouth and my screams instantly join the others. “Remy!!”
“Brooke?” Pete forces me down to my seat, but I’m so excited, I can’t stay down long. I feel him, Remington, in the weight in my belly; I feel him alive inside me and his energy within me.
The fight begins full force.
Remy slams his knuckles into Scorpion’s jaw, the punch jolting him. My chest can barely contain all the emotions inside me as my lungs labor for air. God, I’ve been waiting to see this happen for what feels like a thousand years, and I can barely stand it. The crowd has been waiting just as long to see this, and they’re yelling at the tops of their lungs. And so am I!
“Go, REMY!!!”
“Kill him, Remy!”
“Remington, I fucking love you! Ohmigod, I love you!” I scream.
“Brooke!” Pete says direly, and signals to my stomach. “All that jumping can’t be good.”
“It’s good, Pete. It’s so good!” The baby is shifting, and I’m getting some tolerable contractions, but I’ve felt them occasionally—I read the body starts practicing up to three months before delivery. I think baby feels my adrenaline. Or he knows Daddy is fighting. He squirms every time after a contraction, and I think there’s just too much action for him to relax now. How can we relax watching this? Ohmigod!
“I don’t know what it is about Remington and that ring,” Pete says. “But he just gets in it and whatever he’s living, he performs. Riley says it’s muscle memory, but I’m not too sure.”
“It’s Remy, Pete,” I tell him excitedly, and I grab and hug him.
Remington slams perfectly again, guarding, bouncing, and hitting, while Scorpion hasn’t landed a single punch. Not a single one. A chant spreads through the crowd: “Kill him, RIP! Kill him, RIP! Kill him, RIP!”
Pete told me that all the coaching in the world can’t turn a fighter into a strong hitter; you’re either a fierce puncher or you aren’t. He’d said that speed, you might work on, but not on making your hand heavy, and now I can see the difference in punching power.
Now I can see why Scorpion had to cheat to win the championship last season.
Between rounds, Remy bounces with energy, while Scorpion sits on his stool with his head lowered to the ground, his team working on smearing Vaseline or something on his cuts.
The bell dings again.
Remington comes off the ropes and jabs, but this time Scorpion jabs back, fast and accurately, disrupting his rhythm.
They go into a clinch. Remington jerks free and hooks with his right. Scorpion covers and comes back with a powerful punch that lands square in Remington’s rib cage.
The breath is knocked out of him, but Remy isn’t rocked. No. My tree isn’t rocked. Instead he starts punching those punches in bunches, his face concentrated and fierce, and Scorpion’s head starts swinging, blood pouring out of both his nostrils and from a cut near one of his eyes.
Scorpion hits back, his fist connecting with Remington’s jaw, causing blood to spill out of his mouth. Another contraction seizes me, and this time I’m having trouble remembering to breathe. The fight is intense, both thrilling and excruciatingly painful to watch.
The whirlwind of punching continues. Bouncing, chasing, they keep hitting each other. The difference in punching power is apparent. Remington is faster and stronger, and Scorpion seems to be the punching bag of choice today. He’s rocked, and he’s almost flattened out, but he won’t fall and keeps swinging out and landing punches right back at Remy. He grabs Remington by the neck and tries to throw him to the ground, and when he can’t, he lifts his knee and jams it into his stomach.
“Whaaat! That’s not fair!” I cry.
“Remington is a boxer; he never uses his legs except to stand, but anything goes here, Brooke. If Scorpion wants to bite . . .”
Fear peeks back inside me, and another contraction grips me, hard enough to make me bite back a moan of pain and sit down for a moment.
With an angry growl, Remington shoves Scorpion back and starts bulldozing him. Punch after punch. Wham! Wham! Wham!
I’ve seen him kill his speed bag, and his heavy bag, but I have never, ever seen him kill another man like this. Scorpion covers his head and ducks, and Remington charges, ramming into his gut, one, two, three times. Scorpion bounces back on the ropes and falls to his knees.
He spits on the ground and gets up with an effort, while Remington eases back as he catches his breath, his eyebrows low over his eyes, his eyes glimmering like a predator’s.
Scorpion charges forward and gets a lucky straight punch to Remy’s jaw, then he lands another hard punch to his right rib cage. Remy rocks backward.
I see the yellow grin on Scorpion’s face when he aims a third punch straight into Remy’s temple and Remington bounces back on the ropes with a sound that is so distressing to hear, I jerk in my seat with a raw cry of pain.
He straightens with a shuddering breath that expands his broad chest, and my heart feels butchered. The pain I feel every time he takes a punch makes my contractions feel breezy! I inwardly wince as he approaches Scorpion again, now bleeding as freely as his opponent.
They go back at it once more, and I hear all those noises of their punches, pow pow pow!
My nerves abrade on the inside as the rounds drag on. One after the other. Neither submits. Neither falls. Squirming anxiously in my seat, I feel a pop, and then a slick sound reaches me—and I look down in horror to see that there’s water trickling under my skirt, down my bare legs. “No,” I say.
Feeling myself go white in sheer panic, I glance up at Remington and then at Pete, and he’s so engrossed in the fight, I mentally close my eyes and tell baby—please, please, not until your dad is ready.
I’m only six and a half months. Seven, at most. I can’t go into labor now!
Remington charges with one fist flying out, his arm swinging repeatedly. He’s so fast, I can barely see his movements, can mostly only hear the sounds of repeated bone crushing bone.
There’s no question. My labor has started. Contractions. Everything I read in the book is happening. My water just broke. Thank god it’s not flooding, but it’s trickling down my leg, leaking out of me. I drag in a deep breath as the pain takes hold. The contractions before my water broke were nothing compared to the pain I feel now as my abdomen seizes and squeezes. But Remington is fighting up there, and I’m not going anywhere until he’s ready to leave.
Ohmigod, I hadn’t even had time to be scared of the labor until now!
I’m so busy trying to remember how to take the slow, relaxing breaths that I read about that I don’t notice Nora has left her seat and has charged over to me.
“Are you all right, Brooke?” she asks worriedly.
Shit. She noticed. “Fine,” I gasp, as my contraction eases.
“Brooke, Benny won’t submit. He’d rather die,” she adds in a shaky voice, tears shining in her eyes. “You don’t want Remy to kill him, Brooke—the things it will do to his mind! And Benny is not all monster, he’s not.”
“Nora.” Pete reaches out for her hand and draws her over to him. “It’s taken care of, Nora. Scorpion won’t be hurting you again.” Looking into her eyes, he lifts his hand and touches her face, and Nora’s breath catches at the touch. A palpable sizzle stretches between them, and Pete gentles his voice as he continues, “We’ve negotiated. We’re getting it.”
“What?” I ask in puzzlement. “What’s going on?”
Pete stands to give Nora his seat and then takes the empty seat to my other side. “Pete, what’s going on?” I demand.
“Pete!” Nora cries. She shakes her head wildly, and Pete hesitates.
“PETE!” I demand furiously. “I swear I can’t take this bullshit right now!”
Pete pulls on his tie for a moment then ducks his head to my ear and rushes out, “Scorpion is out for Remington’s blood. He doesn’t think Remington can make him submit or that he has it in him to kill him—he made Remington agree that any championship match would be by submission. If our guy wins, he gets the championship but, most important to him, the . . . video of Nora.”
Nora makes a pained little noise and buries her face in her hands, and I’m just so stunned, my brain almost squeals as it tries to process. Nora was being blackmailed with a video of her? And Remy . . . agreed to this?
“He wanted to do it,” Pete tells me immediately.
“God, Nora,” I say. The thought of that madman using my sister to make Remington have to make the soul-killing choice to, what, kill the Scorpion made me fear for us all. If the bastard couldn’t beat Remy, he was determined to turn him into a killer?
