The Billionaire's Fight for Redemption Starts at Five A.M. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Pads

Dee holds the pads and hits back; Cal laughs for the first time, and Gavin appears at the door with a camera.

On his fourth morning Cal Ellender scrubbed every toilet in the building before the kids arrived.

He did it without being told twice.

He wore gym shorts and a gray T-shirt he'd bought at a sporting goods store the night before.

The tag was still stuck to the neck.

I reached up and tore it off without asking.

He stood very still while I did it.

"Thank you," he said.

"You looked like a clearance rack."

He laughed, a short surprised sound, and then looked like he wanted it back.

I'd noticed he did that.

Every time something good came out of him, he checked it.

At eight the kids went to school and the gym went quiet.

Frank went home to sleep, because he'd been up since three with the pigeons he kept on his roof.

I stood in the middle of the ring with the focus mitts on my hands and watched Cal wipe down the last bench.

"Come here," I said.

"I haven't finished the bench."

"The bench will wait. Climb in."

He ducked through the ropes, awkward and long-limbed, and stood in front of me with his hands hanging.

"I'm not here to learn to box," he said.

"No. You're here because you've got two hundred hours to fill and you look like a man who needs to hit something."

"That's not-"

"It's been four days and you've scrubbed that toilet like you hate it personally. Hands up."

I laced a pair of old ten-ounce gloves over the wraps he'd put on himself.

They were loose and crooked, and I fixed them, and I stood closer than I needed to.

He put his hands up.

I held up the left mitt.

"Jab. Straight out, straight back. Like you're knocking on a door."

He threw it.

It was a polite jab, the jab of a man asking permission to enter.

"Again."

He threw it again, harder.

"Again."

By the tenth one his shoulders had dropped and his breathing had stopped being careful.

By the twentieth there was a small hard crack when his glove landed in the center of the mitt.

I felt it all the way up my forearm.

"There," I said. "That's the one."

His eyes came up to mine.

They were gray, with a darker ring around them, and they weren't polite anymore.

"Again?"

"Again. Right hand now."

The right came harder.

I braced my feet and took it on the mitt.

Then I pushed back, a short shove with my whole shoulder behind it, the way I would with any new kid.

He rocked back on his heels.

He didn't fall, and he didn't look angry.

He looked delighted.

"You hit like a truck," he said.

"I'm a flyweight's daughter, Cal. Those were taps."

"Then I'll take another."

I held up both mitts.

He fired a combination at them, jab, jab, right.

He missed the rhythm on the last one, and the right glove went wide and caught me on the shoulder.

It didn't hurt.

But he stopped like he'd hit glass, and his whole body went still.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, are you-"

"Don't," I said.

"I hit you."

"You hit me with a ten-ounce glove at half speed."

"You apologize to everyone for everything, and I want to know why."

"It's very clearly not working."

He opened his mouth, shut it, and breathed out.

I watched his face change.

Something that had been held tight in it for six weeks let go a notch.

"It's the only thing I know how to do with my hands that isn't signing something," he said.

I didn't have an answer to that.

So I lifted the mitts again, and said, "Left hook. Slow. I'll show you."

I put the mitts down and stepped in close.

I took his left elbow in my hand and bent it to ninety degrees, and set my palm against his hip.

"Your power starts here," I said. "You turn the hip, the shoulder follows, the fist comes last."

He turned the hip.

My hand went with it, and the heat of him came through the cotton and settled in my palm.

I could feel him breathing.

I could feel exactly how much I should step back, and I stood there anyway, caught.

"Like that?" he said, very low.

"Like that."

His eyes dropped to my mouth.

It lasted half a heartbeat.

Then I let go and stepped back through the ropes, and my face was hot and I hoped he'd think it was the exercise.

"Thirty minutes more on the bag," I said. "Then lunch. Sign out at ten-fifteen."

"Dee."

"What?"

"For the record, I wasn't going to say anything about the hips."

"That's good, because nothing was happening."

He grinned.

It was the first full grin I'd seen on him, and it made him look about thirty.

I was walking toward the desk when the front door swung open.

A man in a navy suit and white sneakers came in with his phone already up.

Behind him a younger man held a camera on his shoulder with a little red light burning on top.

"Cal!" the man in the suit said, bright as a salesman. "There you are. We've got you in the ring, that's perfect, don't move."

The camera swung up and found Cal with his gloves up and the sweat still shining on his neck.

Cal's grin was gone.

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