Beauty and the Billionaire

Neither’s Mason.

This is great.

This feels so—

“Okay,” I say, clutching my face. “I’m done.”

What does it is when Mason reaches his hand up toward my face, seemingly to persuade some strand of my hair away from my face, but ends up with his index finger in my eye instead.

He’s trying to stammer through an apology, and I’m trying to forget how recently I’ve hurt him so I can continue to be mad at him for poking me in the eye and at this point, I’ll just be happy if we’re still talking by the time we get out of this bathroom.

Chapter Thirteen

Eggshells

Mason

He’s right there, standing in front of me. The crowd’s mouths are open, but they’re silent; or at least I can’t hear them.

This is my second match: the quarter-finals.

It’s insane how they threw this thing together so quick, but someone’s got to be make money off of it somehow. Right now it doesn’t bother me that nobody knows how.

Right now, nothing bothers me because there’s simply not enough in the world.

There’s Ash standing behind me, supportive in my corner.

In front of me is the man I’m about to fight.

To either side of me are walls of flesh and bone.

Beneath me is the floor, above me is the ceiling, and here I am in the center, ready to do what’s necessary.

The fight must have started because he’s walking toward me now. My hands are up, I’m ready.

He throws a left and tries to catch me with a quick follow-up right, but he’s sloppy and I’m better and he’s down and I don’t know why all these people are trying to pull me away. All I know is that the fight just started and now it’s over.

It’s not until one of the guys holding me reaches up and slaps me hard across the face that I come back to a wider view of the world.

I don’t hear the crowd, but that’s because nobody’s cheering. My opponent’s on the ground and Tom’s with him, checking him.

“Is he gonna be okay?” I ask the open air.

I’m only greeted by harsh glares.

I turn around and look back at where Ash is standing and her mouth is open under her hands.

“You need to come with me right now,” a sharp, but familiar voice says.

Logan’s got me by the hair on the back of my head and he’s leading me through the crowd toward one corner of the room.

He lets go of my head with a shove, saying, “What the hell was that? What do you think you were doing? Were you trying to kill him? What’s the matter with you?”

“Is there a particular question you’d like me to answer?” I ask.

He slaps me in the face and pushes me up against the wall, seething, “You’re lucky we’ve got the people we do in the crowd, man,” he says. “If these people weren’t all fighters, they might have missed the fact that you’d snapped and would have killed the guy if we didn’t jump in.”