Spike: (#3.5 The Beat and the Pulse) by Amity Cross Read Free Book Online

and stepped into the bedroom. My heart skipped a couple of beats when I found our bed empty, and my skin began crawl. No Spitfire in my bed had to mean she was pissed big time.
    I found her in one of the spare bedrooms, tucked underneath the covers.
    I hovered at the door, my hand curled tightly around the jamb. “Ren?”
    “I’m tired,” she murmured, and that was that.
    I was in the doghouse, and it burned like hell.

Eight
    Ren

    I slipped out the next morning before Ash woke.
    Maybe he’d changed his mind and was trying to ease out of it gently to spare my feelings. Or maybe he just had a feather up his ass about something. Either way, he wasn’t telling, and that was the thing that hurt the most.
    After all the shit we’d been through to get to where we were, knowing that he was keeping something from me stung. It didn’t matter if it was big or small because, when it came down to it, the intent was there.
    Beat was quiet tonight. Everyone had gone home, and there was no class scheduled, so Caleb had made good on his offer to teach me some of the ins and outs of boxing. I was glad to have something to take my mind off the whole marriage thing.
    Glancing over to the ring where Caleb was busy setting up something he wanted to show me, I began to wonder what Ash was doing right now. As usual, the hulking specimen that was my nearest and dearest was closest in my thoughts when we weren’t together. When I didn’t come home tonight, he’d work himself up into a ball of anxiety.
    Snorting, I shook my head. He had to learn to live without me being there once in a while. Co-dependency wasn’t healthy for a guy with the abandonment issues he had. Hell, we both had them, but I’d learned to deal pretty fast when my mum finally lost her battle with cancer. Ash never really had.
    Flexing my fingers, I tested my wraps and found them tight. I cast a look at my gym bag, which I’d set under the bench, and wondered if I should at least text to say where I was, but then I shoved away the thought. If he wanted to keep something from me… What a selfish thing to think .
    “You ready?”
    I glanced up as Caleb appeared out on the mats. Unlike most gym-junkie fighter types I knew, he was wearing a tank top with the Beat logo on the front with his shorts and bare feet. His hands were all wrapped up in black, and he had this whole mean and lean thing going on. Definitely not an MMA kinda guy.
    Standing, I said, “As I’ll ever be.”
    My phone began to ring, and I tried to block out the annoying trill.
    “Do you need to get that?” Caleb asked, nodding at my bag.
    I shook my head. “Nope.”
    It stopped ringing for a second, and then started up again.
    “You sure? They’re pretty persistent.”
    Bending over, I pulled the phone out of the side pocket and saw a couple of missed calls from Ash. I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet, at least not without it turning into a slanging match, so I switched the phone to silent and chucked it back.
    “Sorted,” I declared, squaring off in front of Caleb. “Where do we start?”
    “They have this saying in boxing,” Caleb said, turning on his teacher mode. “Styles make fights.”
    “Styles?” I cocked my head to the side, my beef with Ash falling to the wayside as my natural curiosity was pulled back to the one thing I was good at. Fighting.
    “There are a few different ways you can approach this kind of fighting. There’s the counter puncher who uses their book smarts to keep a safe distance from their opponent.” He tapped his temple with a grin. “Then they pick their spots to attack.”
    “Defensive fighting,” I said.
    “Right. Then there’s the boxer puncher.”
    “Who just belts the shit out of their opponent?”
    He laughed and nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. But it’s more about wearing down the other guy. You’d be good at it, One-Shot. The fighters who have this style nailed down are known for their brutal KO’s.”
    “Sign me up,” I retorted with a