MMA Fighter's Obsession Read online

  Finally, I turn to look at New York City, the buildings seeming small beneath us, tiny pinpricks that might be the suburbs in the far distance.

  I can really see the shape of the land formation from up here, making it look as primal as our love, something from a long bygone era, something real and reliable.

  I shake my head.

  “What?” Liam asks.

  “Oh, I was just thinking silly, pretentious thoughts.”

  He gives my thigh a hot squeeze. “I’ll bet they were brilliant, not silly and pretentious,” he says. “Tell me.”

  I try not to cringe as I attempt to explain what I was just thinking and feeling, my thoughts about the island and our love. But when I finish, Liam’s smirk is wide and his eyes are glinting with more than sunlight.

  “You’re amazing, Lola. I’m the luckiest man alive.”

  I feel myself glowing.

  “So is there a destination?” I ask. “Or are we just taking in the sights?”

  “Oh, there’s a destination,” Liam says, his words suddenly lofty and weighted with significance.

  I wonder if I’m projecting, if I want him to be filling his sentence with importance.

  Love, love, love.

  It ricochets around my head.

  “Hold onto your belly,” he says. “We’re about to drop.”

  I laugh wildly when the helicopter surges back toward the earth, but then it heads toward a skyscraper, a helipad set up on a metal scaffolding with a giant set of metallic stairs off to one side. It lands deftly and then we wait as the blades thunk-thunk-thunk to silence.

  With a whir, they stop, and when I take off the headset I’m stunned by how quiet it is up here, the rest of the world seeming so insignificant down below.

  “My writer’s mind is going a little crazy here,” I joke as he helps me down from the chopper. “This isn’t some twisted plan, right?”

  “It’s a plan,” he says, with a deep throated chuckle. “I don’t know about twisted, though.”

  He grips onto my hand and leads me down the stairs, onto a wide open concrete area with a few air conditioning unit outlets sticking up like moles from their dens. And then around the corner of a brick construct that must be the entrance to the building.

  I gasp when I see it.

  The outdoor garden is bordered on all sides by an interlaced wooden fence, bright flowers poking through the holes and six foot potted palm trees bordering the scene, the sight of the leaves throwing me back to the Caribbean, to when we met.

  It seems like a lifetime ago now.

  So much has changed.

  The idea that it’s been less than a week seems impossible.

  Liam looks at me, reading me.

  “When you know,” he begins.

  “You know,” I jump in, and then jump toward him, confident that he’ll catch me.

  He does, gripping me close to him, and then bringing his lips to mine and crushing me with intensity. I let out a muffled cry as I close my eyes and loop my arms around his shoulders, giggling through the kiss as he lifts me off my feet and spins me around.

  “Come on,” he says. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  He leads me into the center of this secret garden, where a sleek table and two chairs sit. On the side, alcohol-free champagne cools on ice in a silver bucket and on the table sits two silver platters covered with lids.

  “Wait for what?” I ask. “The food? Are you hungry, my greedy caveman?”

  “In a way,” he murmurs, turning to me with both my hands in his. “I’m hungry for the life we’re going to live. I’m hungry to wake up every day next to you, to whisper in your ear every morning …”

  He leans in, his warm breath tickling me.

  “I love you, Lola. I loved you the moment I saw you in the interview room. I love you more than I could ever explain. You’re the wordsmith, not me. But I love you and I’ll never stop.”

  I lean back in his embrace, gazing at his face, with his clean shaved jawline and his simmering, penetrating eyes.

  “I love you, too,” I whisper. “Fricking hell, Liam, I love you so much.”

  He smirks and reaches into his jacket pocket, taking out a ring box and then gliding to one knee in a fluid, fighter’s movement.

  I feel tears beading in my eyes as he opens the ring box, the glisten of the diamond ring blinding me with reflected sunlight for a moment, and then my eyes focus and I see the diamond itself, elegant and gorgeous, set within a silver band that sparkles just the same.

  “Lola Young,” Liam says, a catch of emotion in his throat. He swallows and goes on. “I love you and I knew from the moment I saw you that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to have children together, to fill our home with laughter and happiness. I want to support you in your career and evolve and flourish as a couple. I never want you to have to be self-conscious or nervous. I want to be your rock. Will you marry me?”

  He pauses, and quickly adds, “Oh, and I’ve already got Seb’s permission. I’m a man of honor, remember?”

  I giggle through a breaking sob and then throw myself down at him.

  Luckily, the garden floor is covered in faux-grass, our landing soft as we roll over and over and he ends on top, his lips touching my cheeks, my neck, and then finally he stares with baking intensity into my eyes.

  “Is that a yes?” he smirks.

  “Of course it’s a yes,” I breathe, gulping sobs making the words shimmer. “I … love … you …”

  He rolls to the side and grabs the ring, sliding it onto my finger, and then brings my hand to his lips and kisses it softly.

  And for a moment we just lie there, in the palm-shaded sun, the New York sky quiet from so high up, basking in the glow of the best thing that ever happened to us.

  EPILOGUE

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Liam

  The interviewer – who also happens to be my mother-in-law, Anna – leans forward on the webcam with a glowing smile on her face.

  I grin myself when I think about all the banter Seb officially being my father-in-law has afforded him over the last year, good-natured barbs never far away when we meet for dinners and barbecues. When Lola accepted my proposal, it was like my best friend finally saw the light and realized just how monumental this relationship was.

  “So, Liam, how’s the life of a retiree treating you?”

  I lean back in my office chair, the window open to let in the late afternoon sounds of the suburbs, children playing in the distance and a dog yapping happily a few houses down.

  “If anything, I’ve been busier than when I was fighting,” I smile. “The sportswear business takes up a lot of my time, of course. And then there are the two gyms my couch, Caesar Dempsey, and I have opened in the last year. And, of course, there are the twins to take care of, Grandma.”

  Anna rolls her eyes with a laugh. “For the viewers at home who may not know, Liam is referring to the fact that he’s married to my daughter and they’ve recently had two gorgeous, heavenly, just scrumptious children who are going to get very, very spoiled by their grandparents…”

  The rest of the interview passes in a breeze, and I pay special attention to mentioning Lola’s bestselling novel, The Caribbean Echo, which morphed from a thriller into a fantasy after about ten drafts.

  I remember the pride that whelmed in my chest when I watched her attack her work with a vengeance, and then the second wave of unstoppable love I felt when she got it published under a pen name, never once mentioning the fact that she was my wife.

  Now, I push away from the desk and roll my shoulders, still aching from my last workout last. If I ever thought retired life would mean slacking in terms of training, not that I did, I was wrong.

  I walk through the hallway of our five-bedroom home, the walls hung with photographs of little Sebastian and Ella. I can’t help but smile warmly when I remember my friend’s face, the day we told him we were naming our child after him.

  He clapped me on th
e back, the smoke of the barbecue rising in the late spring air.

  “I can’t believe I ever doubted the two of you,” he grinned. “You’re a match made in heaven, old friend, and I’m so glad Lola found you.”

  I walk to the rear of the house, to the door dotted with our babies’ handprints, and lean forward and rest my ear against the surface.

  Lola’s soft singing greets me and something warm tugs in my chest.

  “I can hear you out there,” Lola giggles, keeping her voice quiet for the children. “Stop lurking.”

  I chuckle, just as quietly, and inch the door open.

  She stands under the mobile next to the side-by-side cribs, gazing down at Sebastian and then Ella in turn.

  My breath catches when my eyes roam over her, wearing her baggy writer’s T-shirt over some sweatpants, the billowing material doing nothing to hide the voluptuous curves of her body beneath.

  She sees me looking, my beautiful wife, and her blue-green eyes skim over me and read me immediately.

  “Are you kidding?” she whispers, walking over to me and standing on her tiptoes, looping her arms around my neck and squeezing on tightly. “You can’t honestly be looking at me like that, Mr. Caveman. I don’t just look like I just rolled out of the office after a six-hour writing session, I smell like it, too.”

  I pull her closer to me, feeling every twitching note of desire in her body, still curvy and full after the pregnancy.

  When she talked about shedding the pregnancy pounds, I just kissed her, touched her, letting her know that she was even more beautiful with the evidence of our union reshaping her body.

  “I can, and I am,” I growl, grazing my lips across hers, just a taste of what’s to come once the twins are fully settled. “How are the little sporty rascals sleeping?”

  “Ha, ha,” she giggles sarcastically, nudging me. “I’ll have you know I’ve been whispering to them in their sleep, telling them how important it is to Mommy that they grow up to be the biggest nerds in the universe.”

  I smooth my hand through her unruly, knotted auburn hair, wild like a forest, all the more appealing for not being sculpted and self-conscious.

  “I love you,” I whisper, struck by sudden love like I often am with Lola. “Even if I’ve said it a million times…”

  “A million more won’t hurt,” she whispers, finishing the second half of my vows, which we wrote ourselves. “Can you believe this is our life, Liam? All of this? All this love? All this happiness? I mean, jeez, I’m a bestselling author. Who saw that coming?”

  “Me,” I say firmly, kissing her cheek, tasting her tangy, gorgeous sweat. “Now let me say goodnight to the little ones and then get your ass in the bedroom.”

  “Let me shower first—”

  “Don’t you dare,” I growl softly, with a smile. “I want you how you are.”

  I give her thigh a meaningful squeeze and then stroll over to the cribs, gazing down at my children, their tiny eyes closed and their chests moving gently.

  “I’m the luckiest man alive, kids,” I tell them. “And I’ve got your mother to thank for it.”

  “Hey,” she says quietly, moving up next to me, hugging close so that it’s like we could melt lovingly into each other at any moment. “We’ve got each other to thank for it.”

  “I love you,” we whisper at the same time, talking both to each other and the kids.

  We leave the room quietly, walking down to the hallway toward our bedroom, our hands already making urgent patterns over each other’s bodies.

  EXTENDED EPILOGUE

  YEARS LATER

  Lola

  “Mommy, can my story be about aliens?” Sebby asks, sitting cross-legged in the corner with a notebook open in his lap, a pencil in his hand. “No, no, I know. Can it be about alien dogs?”

  I smile as I sit at my desk, the sun drifting in through the window behind us. Sebby is by far the most writerly of our children, with Ella loving to dance and sometimes paint, and the two terrors, Caesar and little Liam, running a circuit in the yard with their father right now, their voices ringing out rambunctiously.

  “It can be about anything you want,” I tell him, turning to fully take in the sight of him.

  Motherhood is always breathtaking.

  Every time I look at my children I think, We made them. We made those fricking miracles.

  Sebby has my brown hair but his father’s brown eyes, giving him a serious look that belies his eight years and short stature.

  “Okay,” he grins. “What about dogs who invade an aliens’ planet but then—but then there’s not enough treats so they have to leave?” He taps his pencil against his chin, giving me a preview of what he’ll look like when he grows up. “But what about the characters?”

  My heart flutters when he says that, his little voice imitating mine as I bash out another bestseller. It’s been thirteen books in nine years, each of them outdoing the last, with Liam’s sportswear business and his gym franchise exploding at the same time.

  I glance up and look at the framed front cover we did for Time Magazine, with the headline: ‘What Does it Take to be a Power Couple?’

  But when I’m sitting in our home with the sounds of our children all around us, eight-year old Ella blaring pop music and stamping around her room happily, I don’t feel like a power couple.

  I feel like a mother and a wife, and it’s the best feeling in the whole fricking world.

  I know I should tell Ella to turn the music down, but our home is fully detached and the summer day is bright and airy, with music coming from the adjacent houses behind the fence that encloses our property.

  Can’t a mother indulge, just a little, sometimes?

  I look again at the Time cover, the photo taken earlier in the year, Liam’s hair solid steel and his suit hugging his hulking form. He looks fit and lean and firm, and next to him, in my stylish blood-red glasses and my flowing dress, I think I look pretty, sort of artistic. The fact that I can even admit that shows what Liam has done for me, to me.

  With a smile on my face I wander to the window and peer out at Liam as he runs shirtless around the yard, Cesar and Liam Junior chasing him with their water pistols. Liam’s muscles gleam wetly in the sun and then he stops, catching sight of me.

  He lifts his hand to wave and that’s when they take their shot, dousing him with all the water their guns hold.

  “Got you, Daddy!” Caesar yells, leaping up and down in excitement.

  “Nah uh,” Liam Junior laughs. “I got him.”

  “You both got me, boys,” Liam laughs, a smile lighting up his face.

  I was going to wait until tonight to tell him, when Mom and Dad come over to babysit the children, but there’s something so bright and shiny about this moment, all of our children happy, everybody smiling and content.

  I go to the desk and take out the little stick wrapped in tissue paper, and then turn and smile at Sebby.

  “I’m just going to talk to Daddy for a sec, kay?”

  “Kay kay, Mommy,” he says, still scribbling in his notebook. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” I whisper, blinking away tears.

  Get a hold of yourself, girl.

  I walk down the photo lined hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen, and then throw open the glass back door and walk into the garden.

  Liam turns, a smile making his face open and full and excited, and I wish I could take photographs with my mind and capture this moment.

  “Lola?” he says, sensing something in me.

  I pull the pregnancy test from the tissue, letting it flutter like autumn leaves into my hand.

  “You look like you’re catching autumn leaves falling from a tree above you.”

  He said that to me, once, back in the Caribbean. I feel fresh tears prick my eyes.

  Liam’s eyes widen and he surges forward, holding my hand that’s clutching onto the test.

  “You don’t mean?” he gasps.

  “It’s positive,” I yell
, giving into the tears of pure happiness.

  “What is, Mommy? What is?” the toddlers cry.

  “You’re going to have a little brother or sister,” Liam smiles, and then says it again, louder.

  He brings me into his arms and I collapse against his wet, bare chest, making it wetter with my warm tears.

  “I love you, I love you,” he says, over and over.

  “I love you,” I gasp. “I love you all so much. I love our family and our life. I’m so glad we listened to our hearts, Liam.”

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  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

  Book 1: Baby Lust

  Book 2: Veteran

  Book 3: Built

  Book 4: Bambino

  Book 5: Rescued

  Book 6: Leader

  Book 7: Professor

  Book 8: Burned

  Book 9: Worldly

  Book 10: Pistol

  Book 11: Policed

  Book 12: Driven

  Book 13: Lucky 13

  Book 14: Lumberjacked

  Book 15: Protector

  Book 16: Carpenter

  Book 17: Italian Stallion

  Book 18: Gardener

  Book 19: Budapest Billionaire’s Virgin

  Book 20: Billionaire’s Babysitter

  Book 21: Cocky CFO

  Book 22: Fireman’s Filthy 4th

  Book 23: Mechanic

  Book 24: SEAL’s Secret

  Book 25: Police, Pooch, and Smooch

  Book 26: Fireman’s Fake Fiancée

  Book 27: Billionaire’s Virgin Ballerina

  Book 28: Bitcoin Billionaire’s Babysitter

  Book 29: Veterans Day Daddy

  Book 30: Cowboy’s Christmas Carol

  Book 31: Police Officer’s Princess

  Book 32: Statham

  Book 33: Bodyguard

  Book 34: Greek God

  Book 35: Billionaire Single Dad's Babysitter

  Book 36: Mountain Man

  Book 37: SEAL’s Justice