Surge: (#7 The Beat and The Pulse) Read online

  Surge

  (#7 The Beat and The Pulse)

  Amity Cross

  Contents

  Copyright

  1. Josie

  2. Dean

  3. Josie

  4. Dean

  5. Josie

  6. Dean

  7. Josie

  8. Dean

  9. Josie

  10. Dean

  11. Josie

  12. Dean

  13. Josie

  14. Dean

  15. Josie

  16. Dean

  17. Josie

  18. Dean

  19. Josie

  20. Dean

  21. Josie

  22. Dean

  23. Josie

  24. Dean

  25. Josie

  26. Dean

  27. Josie

  28. Dean

  29. Josie

  30. Josie

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  About the Author

  Other Books by Amity Cross

  Surge (#7 The Beat and The Pulse) by Amity Cross

  Copyright © 2016 by Amity Cross

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All song titles, song lyrics, products, networks and brand names mentioned in this book are the property of the sole copyright owners.

  Cover Design © Amity Cross / Nicole R. Taylor

  1

  Josie

  I stood in the hallway and watched the door slam shut.

  Flinching as it crashed home with a bang, I turned away, feeling awful for what I’d just done. Breaking up with my on-again, off-again fighter boyfriend, Hamish McBride, in the middle of my best friend’s wedding was the lowest thing I’d pulled in a long time.

  Today of all days? You’re real switched on, Josie Cunningham. Real switched on.

  Pivoting on my heel, I shifted my gaze to the patio, and the moment the assembled wedding guests saw I was looking, they all went back to their dancing and drinking, pretending like they hadn’t been listening in.

  What was I thinking about that switch in the on position?

  Hamish was such a good guy, but he wasn’t the one. Our lives were pulled in different directions—mine to Sydney and the AUFC and Hamish to The Underground in Melbourne—and neither of us felt strongly enough about the other to want to change. Breaking up for good was the only way.

  We’d called it quits so many times, but now this was it. I’d told him there was someone else, and there was, but not really.

  “You okay?”

  I turned at the sound of Dean Hayes’s deep, sexy voice and sighed.

  “Smashing,” I drawled, smoothing my dress down. It was a red silk number I’d picked for Hamish because I knew he liked the color against my hair and skin.

  “Was he a jerk to you?”

  I shook my head. “I dumped him. He has every right to be mad.”

  I grimaced as I caught sight of Ren through the glass door. She looked like she was about to pound somebody into the ground, and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch considering she was the female version of her hulking fighter husband, Ash Fuller.

  “Ren isn’t a ball of sunshine right now,” Dean said, glancing back at the patio.

  “Yeah, well, I could’ve picked a better time to drop the bomb on Hamish,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “Her wedding will forever be known as the day ‘that girl’ had a very public break up.”

  “It could’ve been worse.”

  “Yeah, like a hole in the head.”

  I frowned and turned my attention back onto the twin. The same twin I’d used as an excuse to get out of my merry-go-round relationship with Hamish. Partly true since I did harbor a little crush for the guy. Dean Hayes was part bad boy and part nicest guy on the planet. He’d have to be with a brother like Lincoln. Bad boys were my thing.

  The only way I could tell the Twins apart these days was by the full sleeve tattoo Dean had gotten the year before. It snaked up his arm and over his shoulder, ending right at the crook of his neck. It was a tribal design that flowed with the muscles in his arm, but it wasn’t the white trash kind of tribal. It was reminiscent of the designs etched on the skin of Pacific Island warriors—New Zealand, Polynesia, and Tahiti—and for those in the know, it told a story about courage, sacrifice, and status.

  It was all a little deep for a guy like Dean, but he seemed to know a lot about it, picking carefully before he even let a needle close to him. Though the guy was an easy mark, so I tried not to tease. But I did. Mercilessly.

  I was pretty sure the main reason he’d gotten tattooed was so people stopped mistaking him for Lincoln. The Twins were pro MMA fighters and had been lumped together from the beginning even though the sport was very much a solo affair. They trained together and rode the PR train side by side, but when it came time to step into the octagon for a fight, they were their own men. I could understand why Dean wanted to be set apart. The constant comparison would grate after a while.

  And that’s where I came into the equation.

  A few years ago, after becoming friends with Ren Miller, her dad, Coach Andrew Miller, hired me to work PR for the Twins. I was more than happy to leave behind my stuffy admin job in Melbourne for the bright lights of the Australian Ultimate Fighting Championship, or the AUFC as it was known. Hot men and testosterone, TV cameras and media scrums…it was the life I didn’t even know I’d wanted—and damn, I was good at it.

  I just didn’t count on developing a crush on the one guy it was inappropriate to fixate on…considering I took my job extra super serious, and Dean took his womanizing to the extreme. His brother had settled, but Dean? I couldn’t see it happening anytime soon, which was why I pushed my attraction into the crush column.

  Then there was the scene that had just played out with Hamish.

  So many reasons why tangling tongues with fighters wasn’t the greatest plan in the playbook.

  “Do you want a drink?” Dean asked, pulling my attention back. “You might need a little liquid courage.”

  I snorted. “I needed it ten minutes ago.”

  “You haven’t spoken to Ren yet,” he said with a chuckle.

  “And I’ll avoid it for a long as possible.” I grabbed his hand and dragged him through the house back out to the patio.

  “Where are we going in such a hurry?” Dean asked, trying not to laugh.

  “You’re dancing with me.”

  “Me? Dancing?”

  “I’m using you as a human shield.” Half-truth, half lie. I just wanted to dance with the guy and pump up my deflated ego.

  I opened the patio door and delighted in the fact I had Dean Hayes off-kilter. “Don’t sound so panicked. You just sway from side to side. Surely a fighter who knows how to duck and weave can handle a little two-step.”

  I felt eyes beginning to fix on me, but I ignored every single pair as I turned Dean around to face me. A slow song was playing, and couples around us were wound tightly together, including Dean’s brother, Lincoln, and his girl, Violet.

  “Here,” I said, as the twin hesitated.

  Curling my fingers around his wrists, I guided his hands to my waist and his big hands settled in place. All at once, I was aware that
he was touching me like Hamish had only moments before. Dean looked awkward, but I was fairly sure it was because of the dancing part of the equation. He wasn’t trying to get out of it, so I took it to be a good thing. He wanted to touch me.

  A shiver traveled down my spine, and I resisted the urge to close the space between us. That’d be poor form five minutes after Hamish, Ash’s best man, left after I’d smashed his heart.

  Sliding my hands over his shoulders, I smiled as he turned his gaze away.

  “See?” I declared as we began to sway back and forth to the slow beat. “Easy, right?”

  “Nothing about this is easy,” he murmured, turning his green eyes back to my blue.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my heart beginning to swell of its own accord, but his attention had shifted over my shoulder and off into the distance.

  “Is that…” he began, sounding surprised.

  I followed Dean’s gaze back over my shoulder, and instantly, my lip curled.

  Monica Miller stood just inside the house, lingering on the edges of her half-sister’s wedding. The same sister she had sold out to Hammer, the piece of shit who tried to beat and rape Ren. It had been a ploy to get her sister out of the way so the bitch could sink her claws into Ash, but for Hammer, it had been to get the fighter out of the way so he could win the Championship at The Underground. A win in that place netted a fighter a few million dollars. The shit people did for money.

  On that night, Ash had shown up at the gym and found Hammer about to…and all hell had broken loose. I remembered it all like the back of my own hand. I wasn’t at Beat, the fighter gym owned by Ren’s father, when it happened, but she’d turned up on my doorstep right after in tears. Then Ash had gone missing…along with Hammer. Everyone thought Ash had done the unthinkable until Hammer turned up alive and well, but it was months before Ash surfaced again.

  Totally screwed up if you asked me.

  For Monica Miller, the cause of so much pain and heartache, to show her face here after all these years was nothing short of insulting…and at Ren and Ash’s wedding! That bitch had balls.

  Dean’s grip loosened on my waist, and I realized he was about to ditch me to go over and talk to her. There was no way I was letting that happen, not when I knew he used to harbor an epic hard-on for the woman. Talk about misplaced affection.

  “Don’t,” I hissed, trying to shove the jealousy down. “Keep this to yourself, and don’t tell anyone. I’m going to get rid of her.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing,” I snapped. “This is Ren’s wedding. She can’t know Monica is here, do you understand?”

  Dean’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded sharply. He knew the story. They all did.

  My hands slid from his shoulders, and I turned, threading my way across the patio toward Monica. As I approached, her eyes widened. I wasn’t sure if it was fear, but damn right, I hoped she was shitting bricks. Big, painful bricks. If I was ever going to get into a catfight with another woman, I’d throw myself headfirst at her with fingernails bared. Truthfully, I’d let Ren take the first swing because she’d go full fist and knock the bitch flat on her ass. Probably KO her, too.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” I drawled, grabbing Monica’s arm and yanking her through the kitchen, away from the patio and any chance of Ren finding her.

  “Nice to see you too, Josie,” she replied, wrenching her arm away.

  Ugh, she was just as pretty as I remembered her. Tall and willowy with long, wavy chestnut hair, pouty lips, and big, brown eyes. Ugly beautiful. Meaning, she was so good-looking it bordered on hideous. She could star in a porn movie, rising to the top, and men would pay a premium to pretend to jizz all over her boobs in the privacy of their own home.

  “What’s your game, Monica?” I asked, placing my hands on my hips. “It’s too late if you’re wondering. The knot has been tied.”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” she argued.

  “I don’t give a fuck. You don’t get to come here,” I said, itching to slap the bitch and pull her hair from her scalp. “Not today and not ever. Do you understand me?”

  “Who died and made you the bouncer?” she shot back, looking me over with a sneer.

  “Get out,” I snapped, pushing her toward the door with as much force as I could muster. “Take the bloody hint.”

  “Bitch,” she hissed, wobbling on her ginormous stripper heels.

  “Yeah, I’m a big, bad bitch. At least I didn’t sell my sister out to a rapist.”

  Monica’s expression fell, and I didn’t have to shove her this time. She turned and wrenched the front door open, and for the second time that day, it slammed in my face.

  Good riddance to stinky, pathetic trash!

  2

  Dean

  I sat in my car, staring up at the facade of the Fitness First gym in Brighton.

  It hadn’t taken much digging to find out where Monica worked. After Coach kicked his daughter out, she took a job working as a nutritionist at the chain of gyms. She’d been Linc’s and mine at Beat while we were training to qualify for the AUFC, and despite her sour attitude, she’d been good at her job.

  Thinking back over my first few years at Beat, I allowed myself to wallow in the memory while I worked up the courage to get out of the car. Back then, Lincoln and I had been two delinquent teenagers in need of some discipline when we first rocked up to Beat. It was the typical story of fighting at school, acting out, and not being able to focus on study or work. We’d both been as bad as each other, using our identical looks to screw with little assholes who bullied younger kids. We fancied ourselves as vigilantes, fighting for those who couldn’t fight for themselves…and just because we wanted to beat the shit out of the turds we couldn’t stand. We had the best intentions but with pathetic execution.

  The tipping point was the day the school counselor recommended we go learn some discipline. We wanted to fight, so maybe it was a good idea if we learned how…the right way with rules, technique, and the ability to know when to tap. Chance had it, our parents dumped us at Beat one night after school.

  The first day I saw Monica Miller was the afternoon of our first MMA class. She waltzed in wearing her tiny pleated tartan skirt up around her ass cheeks with an air of ‘up herself private school girl.’ She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and at seventeen, we were already well practiced in fooling around with the opposite sex, so I’d naturally thought about what it looked like under those black knickers she was flashing. Then she called Coach ‘daddy’ and things became interesting. The Coach’s forbidden daughter.

  It was obvious she had eyes for Ash Fuller, her dad’s star fighter. Linc and I had already been wowed by the guy, and he’d been even more messed up than we were. He was the whole package and then some. Ultimate bad guy, good-looking, and fucking great at everything he picked up, so it was only natural she wanted him over me. Problem was, he didn’t want her back, not that it stopped her from trying again and again.

  Monica had used me over and over again as a cry for attention, and I let her walk all over me. I was a hopeless asshole starved for attention from the one girl who was the Holy Grail of vaginas. Any scrap was good enough for a horny teenager with an overflow of anger and testosterone. She let me kiss her a few times, and once, when we were nineteen, she let me finger her in the change rooms at Beat, but that was as far as it ever went.

  Monica and I didn’t have much in common, but the one thing we did was the fact we both had unrequited crushes. If she’d given up, she would’ve turned to me. If I’d given up, maybe I would’ve been a lot happier and found someone who gave a crap about me rather than floating from woman to woman like I did now.

  Now I was twenty-six, and I still couldn’t let go despite the things she’d done to me and to her half-sister, Ren.

  It was like she’d stood still while I moved ahead…but somewhere, in all those years, I’d left my heart behind. It was in the past while the rest of me had grown up.

 
It wasn’t like I didn’t have options. I was a pro fighter now with the body to match. Linc and I were both middleweight fighters, which meant we could afford to bulk up a little. A perfect balance of weight and movement, both in the cage and out of it. Sex came easy for a guy like me. I didn’t have to go looking for it. It came looking for me.

  But it was the more part that was illusive. The more that I’d always seen with Monica.

  Knowing I couldn’t sit here all day, I got out and approached the entrance. Since when did Dean Hayes back down from a challenge? Never. I’d won all but one of my fights since being picked up on the AUFC roster and had never once declined a challenge from another guy. Since when did something as fickle as my heart stop me from going after what I wanted? Never.

  The automatic doors swished open, and I stepped into the gym, my uncertainty bleeding away to nothing.

  On first glance, it was a rough-around-the-edge middle-of-the-road kind of place. Gyms like this catered for the middle class. People who wanted to do their posh yogalaties and cycling to dance music before they got on the train to go to work at their white-collar jobs in the city. There wasn’t a fighter in sight, and with just a cursory glance at the people hammering the weight machines, I could tell they were doing it wrong.

  Shit, I hated places like these. People who were too tight to pay for some professional instruction. It wasn’t the gym’s fault, but sometimes, people just had the stupid gene, and who could fight nature, right?

  “Sir?”

  I glanced to my left at the reception desk and found a woman trying to get my attention.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, smiling sweetly.

  She wore a little blue polo shirt, her hair done up into a tight ponytail, and bright white trainers on her feet. Pretty, but not what I was here for.

  “I’m looking for Monica Miller,” I replied, leaning against the countertop.

  “Are you a member here?” the woman asked, looking me over.