Extreme Love

chapter Nine


“What do you think?” Cait turned uncertainly, viewing every angle in the mirror. The light jeans skirt hit her mid-thigh while the black halter-top showed way too much of her upper body. She felt virtually naked, and she didn’t like it at all.

She threw up her hands. “I’m not ready to wear something like this!”

Groaning, Paul shook his head and shifted on her bed. “Sure you are. You’re gorgeous.”

“I shouldn’t have allowed you to pick my outfit.”

“Why? Scared you’ll get laid tonight?”

Cait whirled. “I most certainly will not get laid tonight.”

She refused to consider the possibility. So many different emotions tore at her at the mere idea of sleeping with Dante. Fear. Horror. Excitement. Want. She couldn’t even think about the last two until she eliminated the first two. Hopefully, tonight would help.

“Whatever you say, Cait. My guess is Muscle Man will be itching to get into your pants the minute he sees you.” He waved toward her. “Therefore, the skirt. It’ll help him reach his goal more easily.”

“Is that seriously why you have me in a skirt?”

“What can I say, it’s been a long time and a good fu—”

“Don’t you even say it!”

She didn’t want to think about the word, let alone the actual physical act.

But it was too late. Images she had no business picturing slammed at her mind. Dante behind her. Dante between her legs. Dante inside her. Lust pooled low in her stomach and sent tingles racing into her lower anatomy. Oh, she was doomed.

“You’re thinking about it!”

Paul’s accusation snapped her out of her fantasies. “Shut up.” She undid the button on her skirt. “I’m not wearing this.”

“Oh, yes you are.”

“You can’t make me.”

“You wanna bet? Don’t wear it, and I’m parking my ass on your couch until lover boy gets here. Then I’ll let him make the decision.”

“Come on, Paul. Let me wear jeans.”

“I thought you were trying to change.”

“I am! But that doesn’t mean I have to flaunt my butt in ‘A come and get it’ skirt. I’m not ready to encourage that. Just the other night I wore baggy sweats and shirt to discourage him. Now I’m wearing this. Talk about sending mixed signals.”

“Trust me. He’s going to like this signal. A lot.”

A lot. Dante had said the same thing. She glanced at the mirror and recalled the desire she’d glimpsed in his eyes as he took in her night attire. More skin was visible then than what she showed now. So Paul was probably right. He’d like this, too.

“Hey, Cait—” Amy rushed into Cait’s room and stopped dead. “Oh my God, you’re gorgeous.”

Well, that clinched it. Cait faced her friend. “You think?”

“Jeez, Dante won’t be able to keep his hands off you.”

“Told you,” Paul said with a smirk.

Cait bit her lip. Her attraction to Dante was fierce, but what if her insecurities won out when things got heated tonight? And she didn’t doubt things would get heated. Was it fair to him to wear a tempting outfit, then beg off when the passion got too hot? Would he think her nothing but a tease?

The fates decided for her. The doorbell rang. Her gaze flew to the radio clock on her nightstand.

6:58.

Oh, God. Dante. She fumbled with the button on her skirt.

“Oh no, you don’t.” Paul jumped to his feet at the same time Amy rushed to her. The two grabbed her arms and dragged her from her room. Paul slammed the door behind them and braced his body against it.

“Come on. Please.”

“Not on your life. You’re wearing the damned skirt.”

The doorbell rang again. A heavy sensation squeezed her chest and made it difficult to draw a breath.

Paul rolled his eyes. “For God sakes, Cait, it’s just a skirt, not the end of the world.”

The doorbell rang with more persistence, as if Dante were holding down the buzzer.

“He’s going to leave, thinking you ditched him,” Amy said, crossing her arms. “You want that? ’Cause I don’t think you do.”

No, damn it, she didn’t.

“Fine.” Cait pushed past her friends and walked to the door. She would pretend their date was no big deal. That she was cool as a freaking cucumber and nothing fazed her. As she reached for the doorknob, she closed her eyes and inhaled. The piercing sound of the bell jerked her into action, and she opened the blasted door.

”Hey—” All thoughts of feigning nonchalance died on her lips. A bouquet of beautiful daisies greeted her.

Don’t you cry.

Dante stepped over the threshold. Confidence oozed from his relaxed posture. Damn him.

“My gut told me you would prefer these over roses.” He held out the flowers.

His gut was right. She hated roses. They were fancy and frivolous, but daisies, flowers that could be picked in a field of wildflowers, were something different. Something special. His ability to pick up such a detail about her, after only a short acquaintance, unnerved her.

She took the flowers. “Thank you. I’ll get a vase.”

Cait turned and spied her friends standing in the hallway, their arms crossed, happy smiles on their faces. Amy mouthed, “Have fun.” Then she and Paul disappeared into Amy’s room.

Dante followed her into the kitchen and leaned against the door frame. “You’re breathtaking, Caitlyn.”

Desire flared in his eyes. He meant it. This wasn’t a comment to calm her frazzled nerves, but an earnest statement of truth. She fought a smile. “Thank you.”

He pushed off the door frame and came to stand in front of her. The combed cotton fabric of his black shirt molded to his chest, clearly defining his broad shoulders and narrow waist. His biceps bulged beneath the straining fabric of his short sleeves. So big. So overwhelming. Cait swallowed.

Dante caressed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Heat fired her skin, and she couldn’t help but rub against his hand. “God, Caitlyn. You’re making it very hard for me to be gentlemanly.”

His words startled her. She stepped away from him, confused at her easy surrender to his touch. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not complaining. I just don’t want to push you for more than you’re ready to give.”

That comforted her. “Let’s see where the night takes us. No promises, no commitments. Just get to know each other.”

A slow grin spread over his lips. “I’d like that.”

“So where are you taking me?”

Once in a blue moon, Cait went on the traditional boring date that an average Joe took a girl on. Restaurant. Movie. Maybe a peck on the lips at the door.

Why she’d expected the same from Dante, she’d never know. Dante was anything but average or traditional.

Cait squealed as a man picked up his opponent and dropped him on the canvas with a booming thud. Squeezing her eyes closed, she blocked out the awful sight. She hated this.

“You okay?” Dante asked.

“No.”

He cupped the back of her neck and rubbed the muscles. The sudden touch made her tense even more. He paused in his motion, then pulled his hand away.

“No, don’t stop.” She sent him a shy smile. “I liked it.”

His pupils dilated as a crooked grin curved his lips. “Yeah? Well, I like touching you.”

Wow. A stuttered breath shot past her lips as her heart thumped. When he replaced his hand, she closed her eyes and relaxed into his palm, enjoying the feel of his fingers kneading her nape. Sighing in pleasure, she craned her neck to the side, allowing him better access.

She heard a harsh breath from Dante. “Jesus, woman.”

Her eyes popped open. His face was dark with a fierce expression she couldn’t decipher. “What?”

Dante shook his head. “You really have no clue, do you?”

“About what?”

He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “How f*cking hot you make me.”

Her nipples immediately puckered, and an ache pulsed to life between her legs. No one had ever said anything like that to her. And it was thrilling.

Dante straightened and returned his attention to the fight as he continued rubbing her neck.

“Remember, these guys love to fight,” he said.

How could he think about the fight after what he’d just said? Her attention was still focused on his whispered confession and the memory of his warm breath heating her ear. Girl, focus. She forced her gaze back to the cage. “But why? It has to be painful.”

As if to prove her point, the fighter in red shorts twisted the leg of the guy in black shorts into some kind of pretzel-looking move. At any moment, Cait was sure his leg would rip right off. Talk about a mood killer. She slapped her hands over her eyes, then peeked through spread fingers. “See!”

Dante chuckled and pulled her hands from her face. “These guys love every second of what they’re doing. Trust me. They want to be in that cage.”

Cage. So that was what they called the fence surrounding the octagon-shaped ring. Fitting.

“Watch them,” Dante insisted. “Tell me what you see.”

Both fighters were on their feet exchanging punches to any open body part. Disgusted, she winced. “Two men beating the bloody crap out of each other.”

A slight smile tilted his lips. “You know what I see?”

“What?”

“A fighter challenging himself against another highly trained opponent, just like any other sport.”

“Why not play baseball, then?” A sport that didn’t involve so much blood.

Dante laughed. “I can’t hit a ball to save my life, but I can throw a punch.”

“But it’s so violent.”

“To you it looks brutal and bloody. It’s not for the fighter. What you see as violent, I see as heart. The will to survive. The sport we play challenges a man in the most extreme way.”

Cait stared at the octagon. That made no sense. Maybe she wasn’t meant to understand. She was a woman. And, heaven help her, he was all man. Two very different mind frames.

The red-shorts fighter jabbed and caught the other on the chin. His head snapped back and he stumbled before catching his balance. Good God. She winced. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Well, yeah. Depending on the fight, I can be pretty beat up afterward.”

The black-shorts fighter retaliated by landing a kick to the other’s head, which knocked the red-shorts guy to the canvas. Cait’s stomach knotted at the brutality and the way the crowd cheered them on. “Why do people want to watch this?”

Dante quirked a brow, amusement dancing in his eyes. “I can explain that. You’re at a football game and a fight breaks out in the stands.”

When he paused, Cait lifted her own brow. “Okay.”

His grin turned mischievous. “Which are you going to watch?”

All right, she got his point. “The fight.”

“Correct.”

Put that way, the huge fan base for MMA made sense. Not that she intended to join the ranks—she couldn’t even watch the men circle each other without flinching. Just the anticipation of witnessing a bone snap was too much to handle.

Cait pointed to the cage. “How do you feel when you’re in there?”

“Alive.”

And she sensed he did by the way he gazed longingly at the ring. Was he thinking about his upcoming fight?

“Are you ready for your match?”

His gaze swung to meet hers. “I still have some work to do with my ground game—”

“Ground game?”

“What they’re doing right now.” He jerked his head toward the spectacle in front of them.

Black shorts was sprawled across the upper chest of red shorts, who held his barely gloved hands up to protect his head from the blows his opponent was delivering to his temple.

“That’s called a half guard.”

Dante’s breath brushed her cheek. She brought her gaze back to his. He’d snaked his arm along the back of her stadium seat, leaning forward, their faces inches apart. Oh, man. Her breath caught. Dante crowding her definitely made her aware of him, especially when his eyes dropped to her mouth. Her tongue slipped out to wet her lips. A growl came from Dante.

Damn, but she loved that sound.

Clearing his throat, he glanced forward again. “That right there is called a guillotine choke.”

Cait followed his gaze and recoiled, shattering the moment. Red shorts had turned the tables and was sitting on his butt with black shorts’ head caught in a tight headlock. “He’s going to break his neck.”

“Nah, just cut off his oxygen. He’s either going to tap or pass out.”

“Are you serious?”

Dante chuckled. “Yeah.”

Sure enough, not five seconds after Dante’s prediction, the man whose head was caught in a vise slapped his opponent’s bicep with his hand. The referee intervened and quickly separated the two.

That must have been a tap.

The poor half-suffocated guy lay back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Even from their seats, Cait saw him struggle to catch his breath. And Dante did this for a living?

The man was crazy.

He rubbed one of her bare shoulders with his warm palm. “You look a little shell-shocked.”

“It’s hard to believe you do this and you don’t even wear gloves.”

“We wear gloves.”

Her brows rose. “You call that measly padding around your knuckles gloves?”

He shrugged. “We’re not traditional boxers. There’s more to MMA than seeing who can throw the strongest punch. You have so many different types of martial arts your hands have to be available. Heavier gloves would interfere.”

Dante spent the next hour explaining his world to her. By the time the fights were over and they were back in his truck, her mind was in a whirlwind. There were so many different terms for the torture these men inflicted on each other—the Kimura, the knee bar, and the triangle choke, just as a start. The list went on and on, and Dante enjoyed every minute of it.

A few times he’d been on his feet screaming with the fans. Phrases like “choke him out” and “crank the twist tighter” came out of his mouth as easily as “Oh my God, I can’t watch this” came out of hers. This lifestyle was a part of Dante, and she didn’t like it one bit. Was everything about him centered on fighting, or was there more to him?

She guessed it didn’t matter. Dante was a temporary fixture in her life, so the fighting would be, too. She couldn’t imagine doing this day in and day out like he did.

“Penny for your thoughts. You’re awfully quiet over there.”

She looked away from the passing buildings to him. Was his life how she pictured it? “Is fighting and training all you do?”

He shot her a glance. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t mentioned a career, and you spend a majority of your time at the training facility—training. It’s a little excessive, don’t you think?”

“Would you ask the same question to a surgeon who spends all his time at the hospital or an archeologist who spends months or even years at a dig?”

“That’s not the same.”

“Why? Because you say it isn’t?”

He hadn’t asked the question harshly; he’d used a calm I’d-like-to-hear-your-opinion tone, but she got the feeling she had ventured onto a touchy subject by the way his hands tightened on the steering wheel. She bit her lip. “It’s not exactly a traditional lifestyle.”

“Neither is a surgeon who works thirty-some hour shifts, or an archeologist who jets off to Egypt and is gone for a year at a time. Just because it’s not a career you’d spend your life doing doesn’t make it any less a career. I train hard. I’ve busted my ass to get where I am, like every other person aiming to make something of themselves in the field of their choice. The only difference is I do mine with gloves on my fists and not a scalpel or shovel in my hand.”

Yep, definitely a sensitive topic. Better to steer things in a different direction. “Does the training interfere with hobbies?”

He relaxed against the car seat. “Right now? Yes. With working with a new coach and my fight only being a few weeks away, my free time is limited, but once it’s over, things will calm down until I have another match scheduled.”

“How long do you have between fights?”

“About five months. Intense training usually picks back up about two months before a fight. By then, I know who I’m scheduled to go up against, and I spend the time forming a game plan and working to strengthen my weaknesses. Each fighter is different, has different techniques, so that makes each fight unique.”

So this was like a full-time job. “What do you do when you’re not training like you are right now?”

“If I don’t have a scheduled fight but one of the guys in the training facility does, I become his sparring partner to help with his stand-up. I also volunteer a few nights a week at my local rec center. I’ve coached everything from T-ball to basketball.”

She blinked. “You work with kids?”

“I love kids. If the rec center is struggling to fill a coaching slot, and I have the time available, I always offer.”

“That’s really nice of you.”

He shrugged. “Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my local rec center. It was like a second home for me. I want it to feel like that for another kid.”

She guessed there was more to Dante Jones than just fighting. “Where were your parents?”

“Dad’s a surgeon and Mom’s an archeologist.” He sent her a half-smile. “The reason for the little rant earlier. Sorry about that.”

“I take it they don’t approve of what you do?”

“To say the least. I’m the polar opposite of both of them. If I weren’t the spitting image of my father, I’d question my parentage.” He chuckled. “The man hates sports, especially MMA.”

“How in the world did you get into the sports industry, then?”

“Easy. Rick Pruitt.”

“Who?”

“The kid who lived next door to me growing up. The two of us were inseparable until he moved away when I was eleven. When Rick turned six, his dad signed him up for football at the rec center. I begged my father to let me sign up, too. Of course, he said no, but he eventually caved when I reminded him I hadn’t seen Mom in months and he was always at the hospital. I needed something to do other than being stuck at home with the nanny. After that, he pretty much let me get into any sport I wanted. I wasn’t above using their guilt for being too busy to spend time with me.”

“Oh. Dante, how awful. My mom and dad were always there. I can’t even imagine growing up like that.”

“It really wasn’t that bad. Yeah, it would’ve been nice if my parents had come to a game or a school play, but if my childhood had been any different, I might never have started playing football, which led to wrestling—which I still suck at, by the way—which led to basketball, which finally led me to Frank’s Gym when I was sixteen.”

“I assume Frank’s was your introduction into MMA?”

“Nope, that came two years later. I learned to box at Frank’s. There is a reason I am the knockout champion, you know.” He smiled again. “Frank was a retired professional boxer. He actually fought against Sugar Ray Leonard back in the 1970s. For some reason he took a liking to me and even gave me a part-time job. I spent every afternoon after school there. Those were some of the happiest days of my life.”

The wistful tone he used made her heart catch. “What happened to him?”

“He died from cancer a few years ago. Right before I made it into the professional MMA circuit. Man, I wished he’d gotten to see me get there. I could still hear him barking orders from the side of the ring. But I know he’s looking down at me, proud as hell.”

She reached over and squeezed his arm. “I’m sure he is. I’m glad you had someone who supported you.”

“He didn’t just support me, he believed in me. He’d tell everyone who came into the gym that I’d win a division belt someday. That I was the next Mike Tyson—of course, he’d said that before ol’ Mike started biting ears off.”

Cait chuckled. “He meant a lot to you.”

“I had a father who gave me everything I needed except attention. Frank was my dad. He was the one at my high school graduation. He was the one I called if I did some stupid teen stunt that landed me in hot water and who’d set me straight afterward. My life could have turned out a lot differently if I hadn’t met him. I had no supervision at home. Even if my father grounded me, he wasn’t there to enforce it. Frank was.” Dante laughed. “And boy, did he.”

“How did he punish you?”

“Once he made me scrub the locker room. That doesn’t sound too bad, but I don’t think that room had been cleaned in months. It was rancid. Took me all day to clean it. I must have taken three showers afterward to wash the smell off. To say the least, I kept my nose out of trouble for a good while after that.”

“He sounded like a great guy, Dante.”

“He was.” He inhaled. “Damn, I haven’t talked about him in years. Feels good to speak about him again.”

“Thank you for sharing it with me. It means a lot.”

The warmth in his eyes made her insides flutter. He reached across the seat and took her hand, entwining their fingers together. “It means a lot to me that you were willing to listen. I don’t talk about Frank much. There’s a part of me that still can’t believe he’s gone. I miss him.”

She rubbed the top of his hand. “But like you said, I’m sure he’s looking down on you, proud as hell.”

“Whew.” He let out a breath, and shook his head. “Enough heavy stuff. You ready for some fun?”

She took his cue to change topics. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“I thought we’d stop by the after-party for a while. One of the fighters we watched is a good friend of mine and part of Mike’s crew. Tommy’s win was huge tonight. I wanted to show my support.”

“A-after party?” Her stomach dropped to her feet.

Good Lord, the man was taking her straight into Barbie hell.