Body Shot (Tapped Out) by Cari Quinn Page A

separate issue.
    Issues were like assholes, and my sister and I had gotten more than the standard allotment of the former.
    By some magical luck of the draw, I ended up accompanying my sister when she attempted to convince Giovanni to fight her. Okay, there was no magic. I offered to help by employing the weapons I’d used since getting my first training bra at eleven.
    Yeah, my tits. So sue me.
    He’d looked at them. Oh, he’d looked. But that wasn’t what drew me to him. He looked elsewhere too. Like right into my eyes while he spoke my name. He called me tesoro —treasure in Italian. Even during his conversation with my sister, he focused all of his attention on me. It was as if we were already communicating on a deeper level, one where our clothes came off mentally no matter where we were. Standing in front of him, I felt naked.
    I liked it. Hell, loved it.
    He eventually agreed to fight my sister, though he did so with a smirk that made me think he never truly intended to follow-through. But he set a high price—a date with me, one I offered willingly. My sister did not approve. But she wanted that fight, so she said yes.
    Little did she know nothing she could have said would’ve stopped us. Stopped me anyway.
    The fight—and therefore the date—never happened. My sister wised up and realized that going up against a hotshot fighter like Giovanni was a quick way to get herself seriously injured, and she was doing it for all the wrong reasons. Fox didn’t need her protection. The dude could’ve killed Giovanni all on his own if he so chose, and he didn’t.
    Eventually everything calmed down again. The Capulets and the Montagues settled their asses down and all went back to normal. At least as normal as it was for me to be hanging around at an illegal MMA fight in a not-so-great section of Brooklyn.
    New York was the last state that hadn’t legalized MMA. I could say that the illegality of the fight taking place before me dimmed my interest in Giovanni, but that would be a lie. Because a doll on a shelf lives to get to play with the real dolls. And to do things no one would ever approve of, if only just to say that she got the chance once.
    Giovanni was just a few years older than me chronologically, but in life experience, he had decades on me. The tattoos that covered him from head-to-toe spoke of some of those experiences, and I ached to peel back his clothes to discover the rest. To listen to his rich, melodic voice tell me all the reasons I should stay away from him while his eyes demanded I stay.
    The problem was, he didn’t seem to respond to usual flirtation. I wasn’t a pro at it or anything, having only been practicing my craft seriously for a couple of years, but I had some native skill. I had the aforementioned boobs, which usually acted as a pretty good icebreaker. Plus I had long hair and blue eyes and an ass that made me lament low-rise jeans on a daily basis, all things that in theory should’ve added weight to my case. Yet he barely seemed to notice.
    Well, beyond the eyefucking. That never stopped. So naturally I attempted to be in Giovanni’s sphere as much as possible to make it happen oh, twenty-four/seven.
    Hanging out at The Cage was both a thrill and a buzzkill. It offered both glimpses of a sweaty Giovanni post-workout and the chance of being detected by my beady-eyed, sex-destroying sibling. Mia was no joke. I kept waiting for the day she hid my birth control pills to try to force me to be good.
    She didn’t mind me dating or having fun with boys. She just didn’t want me anywhere near Giovanni for some reason. Her explanations didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Yeah, he was a fighter. She and Fox had been too. So he was intense. No one could call her sweetness and light. But there was something she saw in him that immediately made her itch to enroll me in the nearest convent. Which only made me want him more.
    And which made me sneak out from under the watchful eye of my sister