Brawler's Baby: An MMA Mob Romance (Mob City Book 1) by Holly Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

smile dancing on her face.
    "You have." I said. It was a statement.
    My tone of voice was perhaps more accusatory than I might otherwise have chosen, but hell – it was true, wasn't it? I didn't even know this girl's name. Could she just walk in and expect everything to be the same? How was that fair?
    I'd searched for her for years, traveled a continent and half a world away from home – and yet it didn't feel as though I'd found salvation, nor the answer, just more questions. But how the hell was I supposed to ask them? How do you ask someone why they just upped and left without so much as a word of farewell, or whether you ever meant anything to them in the first place?
    And more than that, it had been so long since I'd accessed a range of emotions beyond simple anger, I barely remembered how. To be honest, if I looked back on my life the only time I'd ever been truly been in touch with anything more than the most heartless, brutish side of myself was during the brief few months I'd first spent with Rachel, or Maya or whoever the hell she was, back home in Dublin.
    The years on either side were… emotionally stunted.
    Her head dropped, and she didn't even have a sense of what kind of mental gymnastics my mind had just spun through. "That's fair," she said, her face dropping. "I just thought – I dunno – you might have stayed in a nicer place than this."
    I spoke before thinking. At least that was nothing new. Even if I had thought it through, I probably wouldn't have said anything differently anyway. "And I thought you might have said something before you left, so I guess we're both idiots, aren't we."
    She looked back up at me, her eyes filling with hurt tears. "I guess I deserved that." She said, a tremor in her voice. "I didn't mean –."
    "I'm sorry," I muttered, feeling ashamed of the way I was treating her. It wasn't a conscious decision, I just felt like my brain wasn't prepared to let its guard down.
    Fuck! This wasn't the way I had pictured things going. You'd think after two years of playing this scene out in my head every night before bed, and another two of practicing and polishing when Rachel, Maya inevitably drifted into my head as she always did, I'd have come up with something a bit more refined.
    I hadn't counted on my tongue freezing up, nor my brain turning into mush.
    "Don't be. You shouldn't be, it's true." She sobbed.
    I bit down on my lip. This wasn't the way things were supposed to go. There was a reason I'd made the decision to stop chasing her, to stop thinking about her, to give up on that dream. It hurt too goddamn much. I'd done fine without emotions for two years, so why start now?
    Don't lie to yourself, Conor. You haven't done without emotions, you've just hidden them from yourself .
    "What are you doing here, Rachel?"

7
    M aya
    I looked at him, stunned silent by the callousness in Conor's voice.
    Why did you bother inviting me here in the first place if all you wanted to do was hurt me?
    I looked more closely into his eyes, refusing to flinch in the face of his cold stare. I wasn't willing to accept that he'd changed that much. He was hurting. I could tell that just by looking into those once-effervescent emerald globes – and it wasn't a great stretch to figure that that hurt had everything to do with me. It had been a long time since I'd stood so close to him, and we hadn't parted on good terms. We hadn't parted on terms at all – I'd just disappeared. Was it any wonder that he was still hurting?
    No .
    "I'm not really called Rachel." I murmured. If I'd thought that telling the truth would feel like a weight falling off my shoulders, I was wrong.
    "I guessed as much." Conor replied dryly, crossing his arms. It was a defensive comment that reflected his closed off posture.
    He doesn't want to listen to my excuses .
    I let my head bow forward as I searched for the words that would make everything right again. Why was I here? What the hell was I hoping to achieve? The best case