Dirty Brawler: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (with bonus novel!) (2 page)

Someone seriously had it out for me and I was sick of letting it happen. It had to stop.
Somebody
had to stop it.

I speed-dialed my manager, Nigel Ross. He answered on the first ring. “Shauny. How are you this fine morning?” His tone was even and neutral. I had no way to read it, especially over the phone.

I rubbed my face. If Nigel hadn’t seen the article yet, maybe there was still a chance to save face on this one. “I just woke up. Look, there’s something I wanted to tell you…”

“I already saw the article, if that’s what you’re about to say. I thought you said this stuff was over?”

I huffed. “I didn’t even touch the guy. It was hardly a brawl. At most, it was nothing more than conversation that got a little heated.”

“That’s not what this article says,” Nigel continued. “Jesus, Shaun, the look on your face says ‘I want to fucking kill this guy.’ It’s the same one we all see in the ring every time you fight. Plus, he has half a dozen witnesses corroborating his story. I’m not going to lie. This looks bad. Very bad.”

I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it in shock. It took a full ten seconds before I could put it back to my ear. Nigel was still talking.

“…hope there isn’t a suit filed. That would be a damn shame given all the hard work you’ve been doing to clean up your act.”

“A suit for what? I never touched the guy!” My voice raised several decibels. “You’re supposed to be my business manager, my agent. I’m telling you what happened. The article’s bullshit. You have to get them to correct the story, retract it… whatever.”

“It would be your word against his, Shaun, and given the last round of articles, it’s only going to make you look worse. People think you have an anger management problem, in addition to… other things.” I wanted to hit something hard. He was talking about Tulsa, again. Those ‘other things’ were reported rumors I’d roofied a woman’s drink and coerced her back to my hotel room to have sex. None of it was true. Smoke and fucking mirrors to sell papers.

We’d had one drink. She’d been all over me. I had given in mostly because it had been a couple of months since I’d gotten laid. I wasn’t feeling it, the whole thing was over in less than fifteen minutes, and then she’d left. I should have known something was up when she didn’t ask for my number, or try to give me hers.

“It’s like the press is twisting everything around to make me look bad. For Christ’s sake, I don’t even feel like I can leave my apartment these days.” I got out of bed and began to pace the room.

On the other nightstand, there was a card sitting next to the lamp. I had considered throwing it away at least half a dozen times, but now I picked it up and stared at it.

It read
Kommen and Russell Management
with a phone number. That was it.

Nigel sighed, always ready with a solution, a calming word. “Look, I’ll manage the sponsors. It’ll be okay. At the end of the day, your name is still out there. People still care about you. We’ll get it turned around. Go to the gym. Knock some bags around. You’ll feel better.”

I wasn’t so sure. “I think it’s time I took matters into my own hands, Nigel.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I am going to go the gym, but I have some other things to do first. I’ll talk to you later.” I tapped the screen to hang up. Screw Nigel. As the adage goes, if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself. It was time for me to take back control.

I picked up my cell and tapped in the number on the card.

Tori

I looked at my watch and grimaced. If the driver didn’t figure out a way to get around rush-hour traffic soon, I was going to be late for my first meeting with my newest client, Olympic gold medalist, boxer Shaun Nichols.

I took his file out scanned it again for what seemed like the hundredth time. The details were sparse, but the general gist was that Nichols had a PR problem and he needed help to fix it. Of course, that was typical reason superstars retained the services of Kommen and Russell.

“Guy needed help six months ago,” I mumbled, letting my finger drift down the page listing all of the recent headlines tied to Shaun. When a client engaged with Kommen and Russell on this type of service, the first thing we did was track down all of the viral social media content. In Nichols’s case, the list would have been impressive if it wasn’t almost wholly negative.

So, he was fairly high profile. That was
good
. But his name was getting dragged through the mud on a regular basis. That was
bad
. When the balance was that out of whack, it almost always required an expert to turn things around, and that was what I did best.

A glossy 8x10 slid out of the file and into my lap. I had deliberately kept that at the back because regardless of how professional I was, Shaun Nichols’ deep blue eyes were magnetic in a way that caused all sorts of strange, heated sensations to swirl through my body.

It was stupid to not look a picture, but every time I did, I felt as if he was staring directly into my soul. I picked the picture up and held it up in front of me.

“So you’re a good-looking SOB. So what? You’re not the first handsome sportsman I’ve met in my career.”

If the articles were to be believed, Shaun was one big asshole in addition to being a major manwhore. So, no matter what ‘come hither’ messages I felt like I could read in his eyes, the guy was bad news—literally. “Brawling
and
broads? Could you have tried to be more original?” I sighed as I crammed the picture back into the file.

Most Olympians don’t make a lot of cash, but Shaun had accumulated quite a handsome bank balance from his fights prior, not that money means anything… least of all happiness.

It seemed like every pro athlete who contracted with Kommen and Russell had the same story. They thought they were getting unfair treatment by the press. Like making a shitload of cash and being forced to live out their lives in the public eye entitled them to different privileges than the rest of us. That was how I saw the core of their complaints. They thought their fame meant they didn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Then they’d get caught, usually with their pants around their ankles, with a mistress, another man’s wife, a hooker, or a nubile, underage fan. In Shaun’s case, the rumor was he drugged the women he zeroed in on to get them into bed. Given his reputation and mouth-watering physique, that seemed illogical, but who knew what got a guy’s rocks off. I had run into some pretty weird shit in my day.

But the story of before didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was how we spun the story from here on out. Because now he was a client of Kommen and Russell and it was my mission to ensure we turned the tide and made America, and the rest of the world, swoon for Shaun all over again. It happened once. It could happen again.

My forehead creased as I frowned at the file in my lap again. I brushed my fingers across the wrinkles as a mental reminder I wasn’t getting any younger. I was only twenty-eight, but I didn’t need to speed the aging process with my serious, usually dour facial expressions. Unfortunately, the majority of my time in this job was spent either deep in thought trying to get threads of the story to line up, or having a stern talking to clients because they had fucked up again and made my job ten times harder.

Shaun’s ‘story’ was that he was being set-up to look bad. It was one I’d heard a million times. In the end, it didn’t matter one way or another if it was true. I was getting paid to make him look good again, whether he was a true blue Boy Scout or not. It was my job to understand the nuances of perspective and how to play that to my advantage.

I glanced at my watch again and leaned forward to tap on the glass separating me from the driver. The window slid down, the driver looking at me in the rearview.

“Yes, Ms. Ellis?”

“How much longer?” I asked, tapping my foot on the floorboard. I hated being late.

“It’s only another two blocks, but it’s bumper-to-bumper.”

“It’s fine. I’ll walk. Meet me at the front door of the address in thirty minutes. I want to be back in the office before the afternoon traffic starts.” It seemed impossible looking at the sea of cars in front of us, but it would get worse as the afternoon wore on. Once Shaun had agreed to my plans, I needed to get started as soon as possible.

The driver didn’t bother arguing. He’d learned long ago there was no point. I pushed open the door and slid out into the bright light of the afternoon sun. It was warm, and I felt a momentary flash of regret, leaving the cool air-conditioned interior of the car. Despite wearing a designer suit and Louboutin heels, I was tomboy at heart. My daddy hadn’t raised a girl who was afraid of walking a couple of blocks on a summer afternoon. Besides, I had someplace to be.

I absently waved at the driver and made my way toward the address I pulled up on my phone. Although I felt a little wilted ten minutes later, walking up to the impressive high-rise condo building, I gave the doorman a cool nod as if I had just emerged from the backseat of a limo.

Once inside, I checked the condo’s number and hit the button for the tenth floor. I looked around the lobby as I waited. It was clean, neat, a bit bare perhaps. The building was in a part of the city undergoing what officials called a ‘cultural transformation.’ Read: Cleaning up the neighborhood’s image. I couldn’t help but smirk. It seemed a fitting location to find my newest client.

The elevator took me to the tenth floor. I stepped out into a small hallway. There were only two doors, one to my right and one to my left. I turned toward the one on the left and straightened my collar before sliding my damp palms down my skirt. I told myself it was the heat of the afternoon that had my heart racing, but I knew I was lying to myself.

I was about to meet the one and only Shaun Nichols. My dad had been an amateur boxer back in his day. He stopped fighting in the circuit shortly after I was born when my mother threatened to leave him. Her biggest fear was that he would suffer one too many hits to the head and wind up a vegetable. But he never stopped loving the sport.

It was a ritual in our house to always watch the big fights together on pay-per-view. The summer Olympics were like a holiday that lasted a glorious sixteen days. My dad would take off work just to be sure that he could watch all the boxing matches no matter what time of day they were televised. He was obsessed.

Last year, during the games in Rio de Janeiro, the fights had been broadcast during primetime, and it all had to do with a promising young boxer from the Midwest. He had the whole country glued to their screens. I watched every single one I could with Dad.

A bead of sweat broke out across my forehead. I quickly pulled a tissue from my purse and brushed it away. Watching Shaun in the ring was like watching lightning strike. I abhorred animal analogies, but it was true: he moved like a cobra and pounced like a lion. Every jab, every cross, every time his fist connected with his opponent’s body, I could feel it. He captured the attention of a global audience. He had the world in the palm of his glove.

The last fight, though, something went awry moments before the bell. Shaun had gotten caught the night before getting into it with his opponent in the middle of the Olympic Village. There were many who said he should have been disqualified, but the conduct committee ultimately let him fight.

Shaun emerged the victor and took home the gold, but there were still occasional whispers it had all been rigged. It was a black, sooty mark that tarnished what had otherwise been the meteoric rise of a gifted athlete.

My dad said he deserved the medal, that he earned it. He said emotions ran high around every fight, and the pressure of having it play out on a world stage would have been intensified beyond anyone’s ability to cope. Shaun had an incident that was a little heated. It wasn’t a big deal.

Everything I knew about boxing and the mindset of athletes, I’d learned from my father, so if he said Shaun wasn’t to blame for what happened before the last big fight, then I believed him. But it didn’t take a genius to see the ‘rageaholic’ label that appeared after that day. It was a stigma that followed him ever since.

Realizing I couldn’t stall the meeting any longer, I rang the doorbell. The door opened less than thirty seconds later. My brain short-circuited. He stood there in front of me, in person, and damn it if he was physically even more impressive than he had looked on TV. No photo did him justice, either. He wore a hoodie and gym shorts—articles that would knock a couple of points off most men, but he made them work.

Dark hair, broad shoulders, a physique cut from long hours in the gym, trim hips and those eyes. His nose was a little crooked, the side effect of having been broken half-a-dozen times. His jaw line was hard, square. But nothing could pull me from those eyes. So blue I wondered if they could swallow me whole. His eyebrow rose, and I realized I had been standing there like a mute staring at him for far longer than appropriate. I swallowed hard to regain my composure and stuck out my hand.

“Mr. Nichols, I’m Victoria Ellis, from Kommen and Russell.”

He stared at my hand. For a moment I thought that he wasn’t going to take it. Then his hand engulfed mine for a spilt second, sending shockwaves straight to my pussy. Goddamn, the man was gorgeous, and my body was reacting to it in spectacular fashion, throwing me off kilter.

“So I don’t get Kommen or Russell” he finally said in response, his voice gravely and deep. I felt the vibration of it ripple through me.

I realized he was being a smartass and stood up straighter. “Mr. Kommen and Mr. Russell are both retired. But rest assured, you’re in good hands, Mr. Nichols. May I come in?”

He frowned at me. I thought for a moment he was going to refuse. I straightened my spine even further. With my heels I was almost 5’10”, but he still dwarfed me by a good five or six inches. It had been a long time since someone had looked at me as if they didn’t believe I was qualified to do my job. A flash of annoyance flared.
Just who do you think you are?

“My client roster is exclusively pro athletes,” I continued. “At the firm, it’s my area of specialty.” My mouth was moving, words were coming out, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t have to justify my expertise to this man.

It seemed as if a full minute passed before he turned to his side and motioned for me to enter the condo. As I brushed past him, I caught a hint of his cologne. He smelled musky with a spicy undertone I knew wasn’t the cologne but his unique scent. It took everything I had not to turn my face toward him to breathe it in more deeply.

Jesus, Tori. Get a fucking grip
, I told myself sternly.

I kept walking straight down the hallway following the bright light. I found myself a moment later in a huge space that held the kitchen, dining room, and living space. It all opened onto a magnificent view of the river, floor-to-ceiling windows opening up the room.

“Great view,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied. He moved around me and stood on the other side of the butcher block counter eyeing me warily. He didn’t say anything else.

I wasn’t sure what was going on. He had called us, so he wanted me there. At least, he wanted Kommen and Russell there. I cleared my throat, put my briefcase on the counter, and looked expectantly at him.

“You don’t look like what I thought a PR agent would look like,” he said.

“What, because I’m not a man?” I asked with a short laugh as I pulled my tablet out of the briefcase. “May I?” I asked, pointing at the stool.

Shaun shrugged. So far, this was going well. I set up my tablet so I could take notes as we talked. It was a welcome distraction. “Why don’t you tell me what’s been happening, Mr. Nichols? What do you need Kommen and Russell’s assistance with?”

His facial expression darkened. “It’s Shaun, not Mr. Nichols. Last time I checked, my father doesn’t live here, so you don’t need to call me that, and surely you’ve read all the publicity about me lately.”

“I’d prefer to hear it from you,” I said as I settled on to the stool. “That’s why you called us, isn’t it? You said those stories are wrong, so why don’t you tell me what’s been happening from your perspective?”

“I don’t have anger-management issues.” I watched as his fists clenched resting on the counter, but then he splayed his fingers wide and put his palms down flat. “It’s all these little things that get blown up into big things, and most of them are downright lies.”

I was already starting to type. “If these people are saying things that aren’t true about you, why haven’t you come forward and given a statement to that effect?”

He huffed. “Nigel, my business manager, said people wouldn’t believe me. Not after… well, not after Rio. He said if I ignored it, it would go away.”

My fingers paused on the keyboard. I looked up at him. “When the paparazzi smells blood, they never go away. They only get closer and more persistent until they kill their prey. If they can’t find the story, they’ll make one up to suit their purposes. And you, unfortunately, seem to have a target right between your eyes these days.”