Fighter's Kiss: An enemies-to-lovers MMA romance (Irish Kiss Book 3) Read online

  ____________

  Fighter’s Kiss:

  An Irish Kiss Novel

  ____________

  Sienna Blake

  Fighter’s Kiss: a novel / by Sienna Blake. – 1st Ed.

  First Edition: October 2019

  Copyright 2019 Sienna Blake

  Cover art copyright 2019 Cosmic Letterz. All Rights Reserved Sienna Blake. Stock images: depositphotos

  Content editing services by Book Detailing.

  Proofreading services by Proof Positive: http://proofpositivepro.com.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Contents

  Your free copy of the Bound duet

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  River

  River

  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  River

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  Declan

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  Declan

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  Declan

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  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  River

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  River

  River

  River

  River

  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  River

  River

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  Declan

  River

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  Declan

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  Declan

  River

  Declan

  River

  River

  River

  Declan

  Epilogue

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  Dear Reader

  Excerpt of The Irish Lottery

  Excerpt of Three Irish Brothers

  Books by Sienna Blake

  Acknowledgements

  About Sienna

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  For “broken” souls.

  Your cracks are how your light shines out.

  You are perfect and wonderful and deserve love just the way you are.

  Declan

  “You’ll never fight again.”

  The doctor’s words were an echo over and over in my brain.

  A terminal prognosis.

  A death sentence.

  I shook my head, trying to agitate those words out. But they were sticky and vicious, clinging to me.

  Danny let out a curse, reminding me that my two best friends were also in my private hospital room. Except the two of them were standing and I was the fucking cripple in the wheelchair.

  You’ll never fight again.

  “But with rehabilitation…” Diarmuid trailed off, the future—my future—hanging in the silence.

  “With rehabilitation, he’ll learn to walk again. To run. To fight. But to compete at that level…” The doctor forced a pathetic excuse for a sympathetic look to his face. “Sorry.”

  Sorry? I’ll fucking show you sorry.

  I gripped the arm of my wheelchair with my left hand, my good hand. My right arm was in a cast, having broken my forearm bones in several places. Apparently, it was crushed when the steering wheel crumpled.

  I glared at the doctor. “I will fight again. I will. And I will win.”

  Pity shone through the doctor’s light blue eyes and baby face. He couldn’t be much older than my twenty-seven years. What the fuck did this child know about anything? Did he even graduate from medical school?

  “I’m just telling you the facts, Mr Gallagher.”

  “Facts?” I spat out, blood heating my face as my control started to snap. “Facts?”

  “Dex—” Diarmuid warned.

  In my periphery, I could see Danny and Diarmuid looking at each other with worry. They’d seen me lose my cool. They knew the warning signs.

  I ignored them and their damn worry. “Here are some fucking facts,” I yelled, “I am Declan Gallagher, world number one MMA champion. I’m number fucking one. You are fucking nobody.”

  The blood drained from the doctor’s face.

  Diarmuid, ever the mammy, was trying to calm me down in that soothing voice of his that he used for his kids, the troubled youths he worked with.

  Danny was silent.

  But I could feel him stewing with anger. Anger with me. Anger for me.

  He knew what this meant.

  If I didn’t compete, I’d lose my title.

  To him.

  Dominic “The Spider” St Pierre. My blood seared at the very thought of his name. That fucking despicable excuse for a human, Dominic. He couldn’t beat me in the ring, so he went for what was mine outside of the ring. And she let him take her.

  The image of him pounding my wife from behind splashed across the backs of my lids like a gruesome murder scene, her low moan in my ears like a swarm of insects.

  I heard a roar. It was coming from me. “Get out. Get the fuck out!”

  Suddenly, this fucking room was too crowded. This whole fucking planet was too crowded. I wanted everyone gone.

  My body was thrashing. I was grabbing onto whatever I could and throwing it. Underneath the surge of adrenaline, I could feel my broken body screaming.

  I felt arms holding me down. Danny and Diarmuid are around the same height as my six two, both of them strong boys having kept up with their training even after we stopped training at the same boxing gym. They weren’t as strong as me, but together and with my ass fucked up right now? They had me. Just.

  I felt a sting of a needle in my arm and I let out a groan, not because it hurt. But because they were putting me down like an animal.

  I no longer felt human.

  I fought against it. I fought because that was what I did. That was who I was. I fought until the very last second. Diarmuid and Danny lowered me onto my hospital bed as alarms went off. I growled at Diarmuid as he whispered everything would be okay. I
flinched as Danny placed a hand on my good arm.

  I fought as my vision closed in, even after I lost touch with my limbs.

  I fought, because if I stop fighting, I died.

  Before the blackness took me, thoughts circled my carcass like a vulture.

  Who am I if I’m not a fighter?

  What am I worth if I’m not number one?

  River

  Nine months later…

  What the hell have I done?

  I leaned my forehead against the cold glass portal window of the plane that was flying across the Atlantic, carrying me away from New York, the States, Miley and everything I’d ever known. Too late now to turn back.

  Miley had kicked up a fuss, of course.

  “I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” Miley had squealed, slamming into me just as I’d dumped my backpack—all I owned in this world—into the trunk of the cab ready to take me to JFK a few hours earlier. The lazy-ass cabbie hadn’t even gotten out to help. He was just sitting there in the driver’s seat scrolling through his phone.

  This did not bode well. My nerves were shot to shit. I hadn’t slept at all the night before.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t go,” I said, staring over her shoulder at the backpack in the trunk.

  Not too late to retract my things and pull the plug on this whole mad idea. I could email the Irish agency that had offered me a position as PA to one of their country’s sports stars and tell them I’d made a mistake in taking the position. I had barely read the offer before I accepted. The job would give me a visa for Ireland. The job would get me out of here. So I took it.

  Only a tiny part of my heart tightened at the thought of having to start over again in a new place.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” Miley said, slamming the trunk shut and shoving me toward the open back door. “Go. Get out of here.”

  I let out a snort. “Love you too, Cyrus.” She hated it when I called her that.

  “Love you more.” Miley grabbed me right before I ducked into the cab and squeezed the living daylights out of me one last time. She might have looked sweet, her blonde hair cut into a short style like a tiny pixie, but she was strong. And had no qualms about punching you in the face if you pissed her off.

  Miley was my neighbour and the closest thing to a best friend I’d ever had. She was a painter by day and waitress at a strip club downtown by night to pay the bills. She’d spotted me walking out of my apartment with my second-hand camera slung around my neck and let out a squeal. We’d argued over SLR versus DSLR and bonded over the colour wheel and Romanticism while exploring the graffitied lanes of New York City. We’d gotten drunk later on Student Night with cheap shots of tequila. We’ve been friends ever since.

  On the way to the airport, I’d felt certain I was doing the right thing. I wasn’t running away. I wasn’t running away, okay? I was running to something. Something better.

  Now on the airplane, stuck against the foggy window in economy, the armrest taken up by a beefy hairy arm, I felt…alone.

  I should be used to this feeling. Before Miley barged into my life and demanded my friendship, I had no one. At least no one I could rely on.

  I shoved those thoughts down where they couldn’t bubble up and cause any more trouble.

  I wasn’t alone, I was free. Free. About to embark on an adventure of my life.

  I didn’t need anyone.

  Declan

  Every night before I fell asleep, I prayed that the stiffness would lessen. I prayed that the pain would go.

  Every day when I woke, I felt like I’d been hit by a car again. I moved slowly at first, reaching automatically for the industrial-strength pain pills that I kept in the bedside drawer.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  I swallowed them with water. I took more than I should because the lower dose had stopped working.

  My physio, Niall, kept telling me I needed to stop. He didn’t understand. If I stopped, I died.

  Only Seamus, my manager and coach, understood.

  I groaned and stretched my arms over my head, waking my limbs, getting the blood flow back into them.

  Worse than the physical pain was remembering how easily I used to move, how strong I used to be, how fit, how fast. My mind kept getting smacked around when it realised that this body couldn’t do what it thought it could.

  Every day, I woke and the clock ticked louder. Every day was another day I couldn’t defend my title. And The Spider got closer to stealing it from me. Bitter hatred flooded my veins like an anesthetic. It was all I felt. I used that rage to get up out of bed. But the relief was only ever temporary.

  My recovery wasn’t moving as fast as I needed it to.

  I almost forgot my new assistant was arriving today. Lucky me, I had my manager to nag me about it.

  “Don’t fecking send this one off, Declan,” whined Seamus as he jogged to keep up with me as I strode through my country home toward the gym.

  I snorted. “If they can’t handle the pressure of the job then they deserve to scamper out of here with their tail between their legs.”

  Seamus sighed. “At least try not to scare him off before your comeback announcement. I have too much shit to do rather than worry about your social media and admin crap.”

  “Relax.”

  “That is the last thing I ever feel like doing around you,” he muttered.

  Fuck you, too, Seamus.

  I didn’t like him, not that I liked a lot of people, but he was good at his job. And he only pissed me off half the time. In his forties, ginger beard covering the lower half of his face, a scowl marring his thick brows over watery blue eyes, he’d been managing fighters for over a decade after retiring from semi-professional fighting. He’d not kept up with his training, an obvious paunch folding over his belt.

  “Are you going to go meet him?” Seamus asked. “He should be arriving here soon.”

  “I have training.” I had training every day. From eight till midday, then again from three till six.

  Seamus let out a disapproving sound. “I had to go outside Europe to hire this time. None of the local agencies will work with you anymore.”

  “Pussies,” I grumbled under my breath. I worked hard. My coaches were tough on me and I was tough on them. I was tougher on myself. If this new assistant couldn’t function as part of an elite team, he could fuck right off.

  “I’ll bring him to meet you when he arrives.”

  “Bring him after.” Nothing interrupted training. Nothing. Not even my own pain. I had to pass out for training to stop.

  “Fine,” he replied.

  I pushed into my home gym, a huge well-equipped space that would rival any top gym in the country. I’d designed it with the help of my coaches, knocked out several walls to create it. A training cage, a weights area, calisthenics and stretching area. Directly above it were treatment rooms: massage, a sauna and spa. I breathed in a deep breath, letting the familiar space soothe me.

  “His name is River, by the way,” Seamus said.

  Was he still following me? I grunted. “That’s not a name, that’s a landmark.”

  “He’s American. They like to be different. For God’s sake, don’t tell him you don’t like his name.”

  I rolled my eyes as I wrapped up my fists with one of the used but dry boxing wraps hanging on a bar. At least with an assistant I’d have someone to clean my wraps again. Maybe River wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he’d last more than three weeks. “Anything else, Ma?”

  Seamus narrowed his eyes at me. “Try to be…not to be so…like you.” He turned on his heel and strode away, the door swinging shut behind him.

  Try not to be like me. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Fuck knows. Fuck cares.

  With my wraps securely on, I turned to the empty gym. My solace. My space.

  This is where the fight was won or lost. Not the cage.

  And I would not lose.

  River

  When the car t
hat picked me up from Shannon Airport on the west of Ireland finally pulled to a stop on a narrow gravel road, I reached for the door handle only to fall forward as it opened on its own.

  “Miss?” the driver, a tall, thin, pale man, held out his long, bony hand.

  I pushed myself up and blinked at the ivy-covered stone mansion in front of me. “Umm, I think there’s been a mistake.” I pointed at the goddamn castle compared to my shoebox apartment in NYC. “Sleeping Beauty must be waiting for you back at Terminal 3.”

  The driver did not laugh. The thin, pale corners of his lips didn’t even twitch.

  “Her fairy godmothers must be worried.”

  Nothing.

  “Better hope Maleficent can’t get that spindle through TSA.”

  Still nothing.

  “I assure you, miss,” he grumbled after a long sigh. “This is the residence of Mr Gallagher.”

  “Oh, is that the name Prince Charming is going by these days?”

  The driver glanced over his shoulder at the imposing stone façade. “Charming isn’t exactly the word I would use to describe him.”

  I climbed out of the backseat of the black sedan without the driver’s aid and stretched from the long journey. “Well, that’s fine.” I grabbed my backpack from the driver’s hand as he pulled it from the trunk. “Because I am certainly no damsel in distress.”

  I slung it over my shoulder and marched toward the arched double doors.

  “Miss, I can help you with that,” the driver called after me.

  “You want to help? Go get Miss Beauty an espresso instead.”

  The irritated grumblings of the driver faded as I approached a scowling brass lion.

  I knew Miley wouldn’t believe this shit, especially considering the “Under Repair” sign covering my doorbell for the past year. I lifted the heavy knocker and heard it reverberate loudly inside.

  “Coming, coming,” a voice shouted.

  The door swung inward and I was greeted by the back of a redheaded man already walking away and this hospitable welcome, “You’re late.”