The Aftermath (The Hurricane, #2)(68)
“Look, it’s really nice of you to offer, but I’m married,” I explained, holding up my ring finger. Leaning toward me, her weight on the armrest next to me, she looked down her shirt at her own cleavage, then raised her eyes to me to see if I’d caught the show and whispered, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
I leaned in next to her to give her my reply. “First time you come on to me, you’re misinformed. Second time, you’re disrespecting my wife. So how about you f*ck off back to your seat before I decide to get offended?”
The look on her face told me this had never happened to her before. She flew out of the seat with a mumbled “arsehole,” and I finally got back to my music. I let out a heavy sigh. No way was I traveling without Em again.
*
The warm Las Vegas temperature was a welcome relief from the harsh weather we’d left behind in London. Of course, Danny sucked away all of my appreciation for the climate when he started pointing out that Temple had trained for months in this heat while I’d trained in the cold. Eyeing me up and down as we waited for our luggage like I was twenty stone and not two hundred twenty pounds, he grumbled about the amount of work we had to do. We queued for a taxi after getting through customs and when the driver asked what hotel we were staying at, Danny gave him the name of the gym, and the boys all grumbled.
“This ain’t a feckin’ free holiday!” Danny yelled at them. “You wanna go and lie on a nice beach? Fuck off to Spain. You wanna stay and see how winning is done, you pull your weight. Heath is gonna be busy with promotion, so Kieran, you’re Con’s sparring partner, and Liam and Tommy, you’ll run circuits with him.”
To be fair to Temple’s camp, the gym they’d hooked us up with was small but decent. It wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods, but as I shook hands with a few of the local fighters, I had to admit that Southside Gym had the same vibe to it as Driscoll’s. As far as Danny was concerned, jet lag was just a myth, and, giving us ten minutes to change, we were up and working before we’d even learned everyone’s names.
“Right boys. A lot of shit has gone down in the last week. Tough. This ain’t the time for f*cking distractions. For the next six days, you’re all gonna eat, sleep, and dream boxing. When it’s done—you get a day off.”
That was it. The end of his groundbreaking motivational speech. Kier and I both grinned as we looked at each other. At least until Danny shouted, “That’s it. What the feckin’ hell you still standing around for. Get to work!”
I went with the same basic routine I followed at home. Only this time, some of the local fighters had in on the action. When I would run, Samuel, their head coach, made me run with a tennis ball. I’d squeeze it and then relax my hand, repeating the exercise for a mile and then swapping hands. I also didn’t run alone anymore, mostly because it was easy to get lost and time was something I had precious little of left. I did ten miles in the morning but Danny replaced the afternoon run with sprints.
We shared the gym with Samuel’s two bull mastiffs named Leonard and Dempsey. When the guys sprinted, they did too, adding a little extra competition. My days were filled with skipping, circuits, hitting tires with a sledgehammer, and punching sandbags. Unlike punching bags, the harder you hit sandbags the harder they flew back at you. Unless you wanted a smack in the head, you had to hit and learn to duck or dodge, fast. I wasn’t used to training in the heat and my muscles knew it. By the end of every day, I was exhausted but felt like I could actually do this.
The friends we made at Southside should have been in Temple’s corner. They were American, after all. But poverty and a certain respect for the sport and the old ways unified us, until they felt as much a part of our camp as the rest of the guys.
Samuel’s wonderful wife, Odell, cooked for us all. She owned the diner across the road from the gym and was used to cooking for boxers. There was no give in the special diet I was on, not this close to a fight. She looked after us in a way a hotel never would. Pretty much the only time we even went back there was to sleep and grab fresh clothes.
Kieran continued to spar with me, but after a day, Samuel put me together with Leon. He was the nicest, gentlest guy I ever met, until you climbed into the ring with him. He was six feet eight inches and built like an absolute f*cking tank. What he lacked in technique and footwork, he made up for in sheer blunt force trauma. Nine times out of ten, he couldn’t get near me, and we could only spar for a few rounds before he’d worn himself out. But if he ever caught me, I felt his punch for hours. If ever there was a lesson in staying fast, it was Leon. Soft f*cker was always the first one to stop and help me up when he knocked me down though. Made it kind of hard to hate the guy who hit you when he was so apologetic.
Tommy brought the famous soundtrack with him, and the Southside guys mocked us, but after a couple of days, even they were skipping to the rhythm of the same tunes that kept us pumped. Danny still made me do a criminal number of push-ups and hanging sit-ups. They weren’t as much fun without Em to do the counting but she gave me something to think about as I worked through the pain.
Like most fighters, I led with my right hand. My right hook was famous, and Danny always let me lead with it. But he was learning as much as I was. Between him and Samuel, they decided to tie my right hand behind my back before putting me in the ring with Leon. Talk about a crash course in learning to lead with your left. I moved faster and harder between four ropes than I ever had before. Tying my hand was a risk. It f*cked with my balance, and there was no need to read me. There was no question of which way I’d be punching, only where. In five hard f*cking days, I learned to lead with both arms, and the first time I spared with Kier after that, I was all over him. He’d spent his whole life learning how to read me as a fighter. He knew my form, my technique. Shit, he knew how I’d fight depending on what mood I was in. Now he had no clue where I was coming from, and I knew then why they’d done it.