Take Your Time (Boston Love #4)(9)
I tell myself this in the hopes that, if I say it enough, maybe it’ll become true. Maybe I’ll be able to stop wishing I could remember how his phone number wound up on my hand… or wondering why I can’t forget the feeling of those strong arms around me, holding me close. Maybe I won’t care whether that strange sensation of lips brushing lightly against my forehead as I was tucked into my bed like a child was real or a figment of my drunken imagination.
Maybe.
I can’t say for sure.
All I can say with certainty is, the first time I laid eyes on Luca Buchanan, I knew he was trouble — and my opinion hasn’t changed in all the months since. This is at least in part because the man is seriously scary — cut like a Spartan warrior, with insane blue eyes I swear can see straight through you, a short crop of auburn hair, and a fuck-off attitude from years spent kicking ass in fighting circuits all across New England. At six foot four, he usually towers over everyone in the room and glowers at anyone who glances in his direction looking for trouble. He’s not someone you mess with, if you want to walk away with four functioning limbs.
Still, all that wouldn’t be so bad…
If not for the other thing.
The truly troubling, absolutely awful thing.
The thing I have a hard time admitting, even to myself.
Which is the unfortunate fact that… in my twenty-five years of life on planet earth, I’ve never seen anyone as attractive… as unforgettable… as magnetically, electrifyingly, earth-shatteringly hot as “Blaze” Buchanan.
Ever.
And yes, that includes the time I saw Jake Gyllenhaal on a plane at LAX when I was seventeen, and the all-too-brief encounter I had with Danny Amendola at Gillette Stadium last fall, and even the time I bumped into Ian Somerhalder in line for the bathrooms at Bonaroo. One look at Luca was all it took to forget about Jake’s green eyes and Danny’s sexy scruff and Ian’s unparalleled jawline.
It happened just before Christmas.
My fling-of-the-week had told me about an underground fight at a local gym — totally off-the-books, the kind of match they don’t broadcast on pay-per-view, the kind you’d never even know where to find without a tip-off from one of the organizers, since the locations vary for every fight.
Craving a change of pace from our usual cocktail chatter, I dragged Phoebe and the rest of the girls along with me.
Just for fun.
Nothing special.
Certainly nothing life-altering.
I remember the moment so clearly. We were all laughing, placing bets, joking around, making fun of each other, much like any other night of the week… and then he strode into the ring. That’s really the only word I can use, because Luca doesn’t walk, but he doesn’t swagger, either. He strides — not with excessive drama or flair; with determination and an undeniable air of self-assuredness.
He cut through that crowd like fire through paper, and when he jumped up into the ring, his fans roared so loud they drowned out the familiar strains of Shipping Up To Boston by the Dropkick Murphys blaring from the speakers overhead. I didn’t pay any attention to the fangirls pressed up at the front in their too-tight t-shirts, dying for his attention. I barely glanced at my friends as they cooed appreciatively at the sight of him.
The laughter died in my throat.
The thoughts in my head went silent.
The sounds of the crowd fell away completely.
For the next hour, I stood transfixed. All my attention was used up by the man with ruthlessly short red-gold hair, throwing punches and ducking his opponent’s blows like he’d been born to do it. Every ounce of my energy was inexplicably coiled like a live wire beneath the surface of my skin as I watched this stranger, this man with whom I’d never exchanged a single word, dole out a beating with a level of skill I didn’t even know was possible.
I’m sure some people looking at him saw a savage. A monster.
But me? I saw sheer beauty in that ring. In every bead of sweat, every lethal scowl, every drop of blood that oozed from his cracked knuckles by the final round, when his foe lay in a defeated heap of bruised limbs at his bare feet…
He was beautiful.
I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but when he looked up at the crowd, scanning the crush of cheering fans pressing in from all sides… somehow his eyes found mine in the melee. Ice blue, but full of fire, fury, and bloodlust, they scored into me like a sword. A kill strike.
He could’ve looked away… but he didn’t.
I should’ve looked away… but I couldn’t.
For a long, insane moment, through the din, through the sea of a hundred strangers… our gazes locked. And held. And burned.
Those blue eyes raked me from head to toe, seeing more of me in a second than most men saw when I took my clothes off in front of them. There was no apology in his assessment — his was a frank, appreciative examination, so thorough I felt like he knew everything from the color of my underwear to the precise location of the tiny heart-shaped mole just below my right hipbone.
Redhead stereotypes aside, I don’t blush easily… but just the weight of his stare had my cheeks staining red beneath the gym’s fluorescent lights. Barely daring to breathe, I watched as some of that leftover fire in his eyes faded out… as it was replaced by something else. Something that made my toes curl inside my favorite pair of heeled leather boots.