Fearless (The Solomon Brothers Series Book 3)
Fearless
The Solomon Brothers Series Book Three
Leslie North
Contents
Fearless
Blurb
Mailing List
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
End of Fearless
Thank You!
Sneak Peek
The Solomon Brothers Series Book Three
By Leslie North
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, NOVEMBER 2016
Copyright © 2016 Relay Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing.
No part of this book may be reproduced, published, distributed, displayed, performed, copied or stored for public or private use in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, including electronically or digitally on the Internet or World Wide Web, or over any network, or local area network, without written permission of the author.
Cover Design by LJ Anderson of Mayhem Cover Creations
www.relaypub.com
Blurb
MMA fighter Henry Lorenz relies on discipline as much as strength to get through life. With his former mentor’s boxing gym now in his hands, Henry is busy training a new generation—including the troubled teen who reminds him of his own past. Despite a spirited social worker’s attempts to intervene, Henry won’t stop grooming the kid for success. The counselor is as stubborn as she is beautiful, but perhaps he can prove to her that there’s more to fighting than knowing how to throw a punch.
Guidance counselor Maggie Kavanaugh gives everything she has to keep kids away from the violence of the streets. She’s busy teaching teens to use their brains, not their fists, to get ahead in life. When one of her most talented teens begins training in MMA, Maggie doesn’t approve. The gym’s owner may be covered in muscles and tattoos, but Maggie won’t back down--especially when a scholarship is on the line. She’ll let the training continue, but she’s going to be watching every step of the way.
While Henry is trying to right old wrongs, Maggie is determined to shape the future. But as their attraction grows, a dark moment from Henry’s past threatens to come between them. He may be a man of few words, but should he stay silent when speaking up may ruin everything? Even for a fighter like Henry, none of us are fearless--particularly when it comes to love.
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(The Solomon Brothers Series Book Three)
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1
Margaret Kavanaugh deliberately parked her rust-speckled sedan beneath the billboard in protest. Crowded with representations of every ethnicity found in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area, kids of varying ages all stood behind a smug likeness of the interim mayor—interim because the elected mayor had taken bribes, mayor because politics was the haven of home-grown wolves leading sheep. The peeling billboard lauded the success of the All Children Learn initiative.
Maggie sniffed at the irony. The ever-present decay of what was once a thriving warehouse district did little to dissuade her. She lived it. Every day, by choice, she lived it. For the first September since securing her teaching certificate five years ago, she wasn’t inside a classroom. The school climate had been insular and structured, with an in-the-trenches comradery she missed at times. But she had gotten out before the system could choke out the last gasp of optimism inside her. She forged her own path toward making a difference—one that didn’t force her to forfeit the talented few for the masses.
She slid her cross-body bag over her head, shot the mayor pro tem rigid double birds and hustled across the street to the non-descript gym housed over a long-abandoned Asian market.
By the time she had skirted the old brick building twice, searching for entry, her arteries were a toxic cocktail of caffeine, frustration, and full-dump adrenaline. Leave it to a fraternal playhouse with a back-alley basketball court to have a secret entry. No wonder the gym had to prey upon the community’s vulnerable youth to stay viable. Sol’s Gym could use a suppository of business savvy. She intended to tell the owner that. Just as soon as she figured out which steroid-driven Neanderthal was Sol.
Maggie expected a sensory assault—loud, curse-driven beats, a prevailing stench of sweat, the general taste of desperation. What she found was quiet, low-key, antiseptic. Punching bags hung still. Florescent bulbs running the gym’s length were dark. A few jet-engine-sized fans circulated the vaguely bleach-scented air.
Of course, it was Monday morning, eight a.m. Sol probably didn’t start his corruption until school let out.
“Can I help you?”
Maggie startled and turned toward the deep voice. Attached to the voice was a man in a full-on business suit. Navy to be exact, set against a crisp, white button-down shirt, all seemingly two sizes too small, none of it substantial enough to conceal an extensive neck tattoo. His hair was dark, cropped close. The juxtaposition of an apparent gentleman in a dimly-lit dungeon did everything to throw her off her game.
“I need to speak to Sol.”
The man stiffened and walked away. “He ain’t here.”
The curt response, the egregious grammar, the fully-visible neck tattoo now that he had begun to strip off his jacket—what was that, a sun?—conspired to rob her of her gentleman moment. She tailed him into a back office that looked as if it had been looted the last time the Alloys or Steelers won a championship, so forever ago she couldn’t remember. Not dirty, exactly, but cyclonic. He hung his jacket over the open door to a trophy cabinet filled with tiny brass figurines in barbaric poses.
Maggie picked her way past a box filled with blue flyers touting an exhibition fight. “He’s interfering with one of my students.”
The man continued to strip—his white shirt unbuttoned down to a chest-hugging tank top, belt stripped from loops at the waistband, navy dress socks balled and tossed onto a wooden desk. His muscles bunched and stretched with his movements, every inch of arm flesh sleeved in colorful ink like a Banksy on a sculpted canvas. She hated tattoos, hated the permanence of any one philosophy when a person should always be seeking enlightenment. More than that, she hated that she was gawking at the play of this man’s tattoos against the rather sinuous muscles beneath instead of focusing on why she came.
“I must insist this Sol fellow cease and desist instructing my charges with such uncivilized skills when it directly contradicts the academic obligations of the boys under my supervision.”
“And what boys might those be?”
“For starters, Roosevelt Ware.”
“Roosevelt?” The man stopped the unbuttoning of his cuffs and leveled her with a direct, contorted stare as if the word had confused him.
&nb
sp; “As in the thirty-second president?” she added.
“You mean the one who called pacifists ‘sissies’?”
Inwardly, she cringed. “History buff and Neanderthal. This day is a study in contradictions, isn’t it?”
He slid off the remainder of his shirt, bunched at his wrists, tossed the garment on an office chair, and reached for the button at his waist.
“Ho,” she turned away. “Do you always greet patrons with a strip show?”
“Only the obnoxious ones. And you’re not a patron. Get out.”
She sucked oxygen in through her rigid nostrils. The fan at the corner of his office assaulted her with stale air and fed her pieces of her own hair. With an angry flick, she scooped the offending locks out of her mouth. “Just tell me where I can find Sol.”
“’Bout five miles down the road. Six feet under. Headstone with the sculpted boxing gloves. Can’t miss it.”
Maggie felt a twinge in her abdomen, not as much as it should have been because he was so cavalier about death. Her mom and dad would want her to be the kind of person to say something courteous. She chanced a peek behind her. The man was changing his pants.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’m sorry I’m not him right now. At least he’s getting some goddamned peace.”
Maggie spun. She didn’t care that she caught sight of his bulging and rather substantial altogether covered in a thin layer of cotton before the waistband of his warm-up pants settled at his hips. “I don’t pretend to know what flesh-eating bacteria multiplied inside of you and ate away at the mood part of your brain not knocked senseless by this, this…crass waste of time you call a sport, but Roosevelt is intelligent, gifted in spatial awareness and physics and the intricacies of calculus, brilliant even, as close to a genius as I have ever known—and I have known plenty of Ivy League doctorates. He has the capacity to be something in this life, something important, and I don’t intend to allow his talents to slip through society’s fingers because some testosteroned oaf sold him a bag of goods about what it takes to be a real man.”
He slung his hands low on his hips, staring at her, open-mouthed, mute. She wondered if he had as much going on between his ears at that moment as he did from the neck down. The guy was as brick-solid as the turn-of-the-century structure surrounding them.
“Roosevelt has the opportunity to build a scale model of one of the most important bridges ever conceptualized—longer than Pontchartrain, more creative than the Malaysian sky bridge, more iconic than the Golden Gate. He has the opportunity to get a full-ride scholarship to one of the premier architectural engineering programs in the world—but he can’t do that if his hands are stuffed into padded gloves, punching the snot out of a stuffed bag every day after school.”
Her lungs were spent, discharged. She gulped greedily for air, her chest rising and falling while she ticked away seconds, waiting for him to say something—anything.
He adjusted himself.
She couldn’t tell if it was a gather-the-boys-in-the-neighborhood-after-dressing kind of adjustment or a suck-this kind of adjustment. The fact that she was mentally debating something so vulgar underscored her point precisely. This environment was offensive. Period.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Zero ticks of his facial muscles. Zero expression. “Nope.”
The fire burn inside her fizzled to a thin stream of smoke.
“Great. That’s just fantastic. You have the future here, in your hands like malleable clay and ‘nope’ is all you’ve got.” She turned to go, but not before she added one thought. “If Roosevelt shows up here again, tell him to go home and crack a book instead of someone’s face.”
“Roosevelt shows up here again, same as any other kid, I ain’t turning him away.”
His ain’t wriggled beneath her skin and held her rebuttal hostage. There was no reasoning with ain’t. She stormed past a very tall man on the way out—athletic but not at all the physique of a fighter.
“Do yourself a favor and leave before you become a ball-scratching heathen who spouts double negatives.”
Only trouble? She couldn’t find the door. Again. She didn’t know the secret exit of the fraternal order of barbarians, so she spent two full minutes feeling like an exhibition before she charged back into sunlight and eloquent English under the laughing smile of the mayor.
2
“The fuck was that?” asked Chase.
“No idea.”
They both stood at Henry’s office window, watching the woman with the sizzling red hair trip over a tire stop in the parking lot then kick it, as if she meant to teach it a lesson about rising up from the ground to assault her. Her reaction would have made Henry laugh had she not just taken a dogmatic, verbal dump in his office.
“You got her six ways of stirred up.”
“Hadn’t noticed.”
Truth was, he had noticed. She had ambushed him into stupidity—the fan spreading her wild mane of reddish-brown curls about her head like Medusa’s snakes—same as they’d look on a pillow if any man had a mind to take her to bed. Certainly would chill her fiery attitude. He had used the same technique Sol taught him in the ring all those years ago: counting. Brought down the heart rate, usually. But counting her spray of freckles had the opposite effect. Focused him on the feminine features beneath her barely-there makeup that made up for her sharp-assed, judgmental tongue.
Chase moved a box of medical-grade tape and settled in a metal chair. “Place is a shithole.”
Henry leaned his backside against the room’s old cast-iron radiator. “Yeah, I been looking for something.”
“A needle by the look of it.”
“Answers. The books don’t add up, man.”
“It’s been eighteen months, Henry. You’ve found all this place is ever going to be. You poured all your good fight money after bad—putting that octagon in here—and look where it’s gotten you. A bunch of old-timers reliving their glory days at the bags and not enough new money to sustain the place.”
“Is this the part where you remind me I’m stupid for holding on?”
“Not stupid, man. Just living in the past. Sol had his dreams. He made them a reality. But you got your dreams. Just like Marcus had his, and I had mine. It’s time to get back out there on the circuit. You got a future to think about.”
Henry collapsed into his office chair, temples buried in his palms. He’d spent the better part of the morning trying to convince investors to pump serious cash into a dying space—the only way Henry knew how to continue Sol’s legacy, the only way Henry knew how to pay back a dead man. He didn’t want a souring reminder that his two street brothers had more money than loyalty. Henry had inherited the space; Henry alone would figure out a way to save it because parting with the place that saved him was worse than putting his mentor—their mentor—into the cold earth.
“He’s here, man,” said Henry. “In the mornings, lining up the gloves on the shelves. In the swing of the bags when no one else is here. I still hear his goddamned booming laughter over the fans most nights. I can’t leave him. I can’t leave these guys. I can’t leave these kids. Just like he couldn’t leave us.”
“If I help you, if Marcus helps you, you’ll never leave. We’ll give you whatever you need—you know that—but not for this. It isn’t healthy for you to be here twenty-four/seven. None of us were meant to stay, Henry. It was a season. Let it go.”
Most days, Henry did what he had to do. He cleaned up, ate and slept here, dug deep for Sol’s lessons so he could structure them for the kids who walked through those doors each day, looking for hope, looking for safe haven, looking for a way out. But today—first the redhead, now Chase—the weight of Sol’s loss was the morning after going ten rounds, every internal organ bruised and battered.
“You should go,” said Henry, dismissively, his jaw set, his eyes boring a hole in the broken tile near the trophy case.
“We just want you to be happy, man. Yo
u haven’t had that. Not in a while.”
“Go.”
Chase stood. He placed an envelope on Henry’s desk, the Alloys logo and ticket office as the return label.
“Every home game this year. I can’t do what I do without you.”
Henry nodded. He couldn’t say what he really wanted to say—that he hadn’t felt connected to either of them since Sol’s death, that he couldn’t find a way to get past the grief for more than a day before it returned to kick him in the nuts while he was already at the mat. He was no longer sure of what he wanted, but it sure as hell wasn’t to be told what to do—by investors, by his best friend, by a hot-headed visitor, by anyone.
Chase left. Henry surveyed the largely empty gym. He wasn’t yet ready to tap out; he had kids coming in six hours and today was all the difference he could make. For now.
“How does the suit fit?” Maggie asked from the doorway.
Roosevelt dropped the ends of the necktie against his starched shirt with a sigh.
“Here, let me help.”
She skewed the ends of the patterned silk—red and geometric would make a bold statement with the interviewer, she thought—and tied a Windsor knot at the boy’s neck that seemed to age him past his seventeen years. They hadn’t known each other long—ten months off and on, one month solid at the Affleck-Martin Residential Youth House—so the awkwardness was still there, an emotional barrier he did not allow others past lightly. She knew it had something to do with the miniature bridge collection on his nightstand: a hand-blown glass bridge, a stone drawbridge that looked straight out of a Robin Hood tale, one suspension bridge snipped, impossibly, from paper. He rearranged his bridges each day, she noticed. When he was ready, he would tell her.
“Very sharp, Mr. Ware.” She cinched the knot and handed him his drawing portfolio. “They’ll take one look at you and see a winner.”