Submission Moves: An MMA Romance (7 page)

She’d counselled countless of women who stayed in toxic and even abusive relationships because they felt they didn’t have a choice. They craved their bad boyfriends just as surely as junkies craved their next hit. Rose wasn’t a junkie exactly, but her body had found its drug of choice four years ago. Anything else, it rejected like a bad black market organ transplant.

It wasn’t like she was holding a torch for a long-ago hook-up. Nothing
that
psychotic. But there were certain things that a woman needed that she hadn’t been able to get from any of her past relationships.
 

She’d had a taste of it once, and she wasn’t quite ready to give up on the idea that she might find it again with another man.  

And frankly, she’d rather be single than faking it. That was just too much work.

Speaking of work…
 

Rose could always count on one crisis or another at work to distract her from her personal life. She, Anna, and a couple of their sorority sisters had founded a women’s center right after graduation. The blueprint for the organization had been Rose’s college thesis. After pooling all the cash gifts they’d gotten, they went ahead and set it up. They’ve had a pretty good run of it, so far. But like most non-profits, they were always short on resources.
 

The instructors of the karate classes the center offered for free hiked up their rates. With the school year coming to a close, they said, they were locked in to earn a killing from summer programs and Rose would have to match it if she wanted their arrangement to continue. She tried to negotiate with them, but they were real hard-asses. Never mind that during the lean winter months, it was their business that kept the crappy martial arts school afloat.  

She fished her phone from her purse to check her messages and voice mail.

“Hi honey, it’s Mother…”
 

She groaned at the sound of her mom’s uncharacteristically chipper voice. When it came to her only daughter’s dismal love life, Diane Connelly had the instincts of a bloodhound.

“I heard you finally came to your senses and broke it off with that boy. When were you gonna tell me? Anyway, I’m calling to remind you about the Lake County Country Club Ball. It’s two weeks from now, in case you’ve forgotten. If you’re worried about not having a date, I’m sure Rob would love to escort you. I’ll ask him to give you a call. Talk to you soon. Love you!”

For crying out loud! She’d been officially single all of two hours and already her mother was back on her case with Rob, her best friend’s douchebag son.
No, just no. Not ever.   

Rose dabbed her eyes dry one last time and checked her reflection in the rear view mirror of her car. What right did she have crying in the parking lot over a break-up she brought upon herself? She should just suck it up and go inside where her brother Chris was waiting for her. Yup, that’s what she should do.
 

When she walked into Bar None ten minutes later, Chris welcomed her with a hug and made no mention of her tardiness. The well-appointed, traditional Irish pub-inspired interiors comforted her. She practically grew up in Bar None; it was an extension of her childhood home. No matter where she was in the country, there was almost always a Bar None she could run to that would welcome her with open arms and a pint of cold beer.

Bar None was a sports bar and restaurant that had branches across all the states. Some liked to describe it as a classier version of Hooters, but Rose would beg to differ. Bar None was not
just
more high-end, it was also more women-friendly. The waitresses wore cheerleading-inspired uniforms that were cute yet non-exploitative, she was proud to note.

It started as a small, family-owned joint that her stepfather grew into a multi-million dollar business with nothing but street smarts and balls of steel. Patrick Connelly was an Irish-American high school drop-out who made it big and was now living “the fucking American Dream,” as he loved telling people.

When Rose was two years old, Pat, a divorced father of five, married Rose’s mom. Rose had known no other father. She adored him and her five older stepbrothers to pieces.

She and Chris occupied the stools at the far end of the bar, away from the other patrons. He slid a mug of beer in her direction and gave her a sympathetic smile. “How are you holding up?” He’d known about her break-up plan days before she’d mustered up the resolve to do it. “You wanna talk about it?”
 

She shrugged limply in response. She was over it. God, what a cold-hearted bitch she was!
 

Chris was the youngest of her stepbrothers, only a year older than her, and they were extremely close. He shared the strapping built, dark copper hair, and the near-fanatical love for sports of the other Connelly men but was the only one who wasn’t involved in running Bar None. They liked to rib him about being the black sheep but had no qualms about taking advantage of the perks of Chris’ job as a sports journalist and commentator for the local news.

“Hey, ouch!” he said when Rose play-punched him on the shoulder.

“Did you tell Mom about my break-up?”

He gave her a sheepish grin. “I might have mentioned it to Dad and I’m guessing he told her. Wow, news travels fast, huh?”

“Yeah, you make sure of it, don’t you?” She sighed in resignation. Her parents would not let up until they got a grandchild, and naturally, the brunt of the pressure to produce one fell not on her brothers, who were socially expected to sow their wild oats, but on her, the one with the biological clock and the shorter shelf life for eligibility. Never mind that at 25, Rose was nowhere near ready to start birthing babies.

“Hey, you kids,” Luke, one of the bartenders, said, walking up to them. “Aren’t you two big fans of that bloody fighting on TV?” For someone who worked at a sports bar, Luke wasn’t very well-versed in sports.

“You mean MMA?” Chris asked after taking a swig of his beer.

“Yeah, sure. MMA. Your dad over there is meeting with some professional fighter, inking out a sponsorship deal.” He gestured to the opposite side of the room where a group of men sat huddled in one of the booths. “I thought you might want to know, in case you wanna get your pictures taken with him.”

“Which fighter?” Rose asked in an anxious, high-pitched voice she did not recognize.

“Niccolo Rossi?”

“Oh my God!” Rose and Chris exclaimed in unison, though for very different reasons.

“He’s a big deal. Very big,” Chris said for Luke’s benefit. “He just left his old training camp in California and started his own. He also just opened his own MMA gym not far from here, Rossi Combat Sports. It’s a kind of homecoming for the champion. I’d just started working on a story about him. That guy is being hailed as
the
one who will finally take the sport mainstream. He has endorsement deals with all the major brands and he’s dating a supermodel. If that doesn’t make him a bonafide sports star, I dunno what does.” He chugged his beer like a man dying of thirst. “C’mon, Rose, let’s go over there. I wanna meet him!”

Rose clutched the edge of the bar and shook her head vehemently. She wasn’t stalking Nick Rossi. Not exactly. She’d grown to be a genuine fan of the sport. It just so happened that Nick figured prominently in MMA, being the long-reigning and
still
undefeated middleweight champion and all.

Besides, nowadays you’d have to go out of your way to not know who he was. Rose had read about him moving back to Chicago and putting up his own gym and training camp. She knew the day might come when they’d run into each other. But why did it have to be today?

She took a mental inventory of herself. White button-down top. Charcoal pencil skirt. Black pumps. Her end-of-the-day hair was a little limp and her make-up was long gone. Not too gross, all in all, although she suspected that even if she’d just stepped out of a salon and magically dropped ten pounds, she still wouldn’t feel ready to face the man.

 
Pat Connelly’s booming laugh rang from across the room. He and the men had gotten up from their seats. “Why don’t we go to the bar, I’ll introduce you to my son Chris.”

They were weaving through the other patrons, heading straight at them. Rose squeaked in distress and ducked behind Chris’ broad back while she looked for an escape route.

“What the heck’s gotten into you?” Chris said with a bemused laugh as he looked at her over his shoulder.

They were getting closer.

Rose briefly debated jumping behind the bar or making a run for it. Those precious seconds of indecision were her undoing. Next thing she knew, they were right there and it was too late to do anything about it.
 

Shit.

“Chris, this is Nick Rossi. I trust you know who he is. This is Angelo, his brother, who’s also the team chef and nutritionist. Guys, this is my son Christopher and behind him is—”

Chris angled his body so as not to block Rose from their view.

“That’s Ro—”

“Rose?”

Nick’s mouth fell open. It was an
of all the gin joints in the world
kind of moment, and he was stunned stupid.

“Rose!” Angelo repeated. “It
is
you! Hey, Nick, it’s Rose! Remember her?”

Fucking idiot. Of course he remembered her. His brain took a split second longer to do so, but his body, it was like his body never really forgot. It buzzed into alertness at the sight of her and his muscles coiled, the way they did in the octagon before a fight.

“Oh my God! You’ve lost weight,” Angelo continued. “You used to be chunkier!” He blew his cheeks up for emphasis.

Rose’s face looked as if she’d just been slapped, and Nick elbowed his brother hard on the ribs. Shamefaced, Angelo muttered an apology as he rubbed his side.

“You know my daughter?” Pat asked, looking at them quizzically.

Daughter?
“You told me your name was Rose Shannon,” Nick said, unable to keep the accusing tone from his voice.

“That
is
my name” she replied defensively.

That low, sexy, cultured voice. Hearing it again after all those years knocked the wind out of him.

“She’s uh, my stepdaughter,” Pat explained.

“Oh,” Nick said, mollified. He wouldn’t have been happy to discover she’d lied to him about something as basic as her freaking name. Apparently, this was
her
family’s gin joint and he was the unexpected interloper.
 

He’d met with Pat several times before, usually with their respective lawyers and his manager in attendance. The sponsorship was pretty much a done deal, he’d been told. All that was left to do was for Pat to sign on the dotted line and soon he and the other fighters in the Grayson-Rossi Training Camp would have Bar None’s logo on their shorts. He’d been introduced to Pat’s other sons during those earlier meetings and now that Nick thought about it, they had mentioned a sister in passing. When Pat invited him and Angelo to Bar None that night, he said he was going to introduce them to his son, who was a sportscaster, and to his daughter, who was an MMA fan. He never expected the daughter would be Rose Shannon. That was one face he had never expected to ever see again.

Chris gave Rose a puzzled frown. “Rose, you never mentioned you knew Niccolo Rossi.”

“I guess I forgot.”

“You
forgot
?” He sounded unconvinced. “So how do you guys even know each other?”

Before either of them could answer, Angelo let out an incriminating snicker. No one else said anything for a long awkward while, and Nick suspected they were all putting two and two together and drawing the correct conclusions.

Rose suspected the same, judging from the defensiveness that sharpened her voice once again. “That was four years ago.”

It had been four years. Four years since that first professional win that changed his and his family’s life. Four years since she’d walked out on him after a night of mind-blowing sex. Now, that didn’t happen to Niccolo Rossi very often, a woman walking away from him. He usually did the walking away—in any sort of relationship. After all, he wouldn’t want to deprive a woman of one last glimpse of his fine ass.

Rosie was an odd one. For weeks after that night in Vegas, he kept thinking about how it could’ve gone differently. One time he even got drunk enough to bitch and moan about it with his brothers. They said she left because he was probably bad in the sack, those fuckers. But he bore the marks of their frantic coupling for days, half-moon nail marks on his back and arms and a bite mark on his shoulder. No doubt he’d left her with marks of his own. It wasn’t the sex that spooked her. They couldn’t get enough of each other on that tiny twin bed. Very vivid memories of Rose clutching him and moaning his name popped into his head.