America's Playboy Heir Was Untouched, Until His Bodyguard Broke the Rules novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Left Hook

At five a.m. in the Tower gym Averett asks for a lesson, Jarek's hand closes on his wrist and neither lets go, and two lenses are waiting across the avenue.

At five in the morning the twelfth-floor gym of the Kingsbury Tower was empty, gray and cold.

Averett had not slept, and he knew better than to stay in bed pretending.

He wrapped his hands badly and hit the heavy bag four times before a voice behind him said, "Stop."

He turned.

Jarek stood in the doorway in a black T-shirt and track pants, with a towel over his shoulder.

The tattoo ran up his arm under the sleeve, black and gray, a ship in a storm that disappeared into the cotton.

"You're not on until six," Averett said.

"I'm on when you're awake."

"Then you'll be tired," Averett said.

"I'll live. You're going to break your thumb."

"I've been hitting this bag for three years," Averett said.

"I can tell."

Jarek crossed the mat and looked at the bag, and then at Averett's feet, and then at his fists with a flat, professional frown.

"Your thumb is inside your fingers. Your weight is on your heels. You're swinging from the shoulder and you'll hurt it."

"Then teach me," Averett said.

"That isn't in the contract," Jarek said.

"Rule six. The people in my gym are the people I name. I'm naming you."

Something moved at the corner of Jarek's mouth.

"Hands up," he said.

Averett put them up.

Jarek walked around him once, slowly, and Averett felt the look on the back of his neck.

"Wider. Left foot forward. Knees bent."

"They are bent," Averett said.

"They're locked."

"I thought you couldn't touch me," Averett said.

"I can move you. Rule one."

He stepped in, put one hand flat between Averett's shoulder blades, and pushed him a half inch forward.

Then his other hand closed around Averett's left wrist.

It was a big hand, warm and callused, and it rotated the wrist until the fist sat square.

"Thumb outside. Like this."

"Like this?" Averett asked.

"Like this."

Neither of them moved.

The hand stayed on his wrist, and then it slid, without hurry, an inch up the inside of his forearm to correct the elbow.

Averett's breath went out of him, and he heard it.

He could feel Jarek standing close behind him, hot through two layers of cotton, and he did not step away.

"I'm being moved," he said, and his voice was not quite level.

"You're being corrected."

"It feels like moving," Averett said.

"Throw it."

He threw it.

The punch landed on the bag, and the sound of it echoed off the mirrors.

The bag swung, and Jarek's hand dropped away from his arm.

It had been there for only moments, and Averett would have sworn it was ten minutes.

"Again," Jarek said. His voice was lower than before.

Averett threw six more, and Jarek said "hip" and "turn" and "better," and he did not touch him again.

By the sixth, Averett was breathing hard and grinning, and the stiff look on Jarek's face had cracked into something that was almost a smile.

"You hit like someone who's never been hit," Jarek said.

"Is that a compliment?" Averett asked.

"It's a diagnosis."

"Do you want to find out how I do on defense?"

"No," Jarek said.

"Coward," Averett said.

"I've been called worse by better."

"By who?" Averett asked.

"By men who weighed two-forty." Jarek pulled the towel off his shoulder and wiped his hands. "I went eleven and three in the cage.

Three of them tried to put me through the floor. I don't box billionaires."

"Why not?"

"It makes the headlines weird."

Averett laughed, a real laugh, the kind he almost never let anyone hear.

Jarek stopped with the towel halfway to his face.

He stared at Averett's mouth for a full second.

Then he turned around and walked to the water cooler.

Averett pulled his wraps off his hands, slowly, and let him go.

He was still smiling when he followed Jarek to the window to look at the avenue coming up gray.

"Look at that," he said. "It's not even six, and they've got no one out there yet."

Jarek did not answer.

He had gone still at the glass.

One hand closed on the back of Averett's arm and pushed him sideways out of the window frame.

"Down," he said.

"What?"

"Rule seven. Down."

Averett went down to a crouch against the wall.

Jarek pointed across Fifth Avenue, at the roof of the building opposite.

A strip of gray sky was reflecting off something small and round that should not have been there.

A long lens.

And a second one beside it, pointed straight at the twelfth-floor gym.

"Who knows you work out at five?" Jarek asked.

"Ardith. The detail. Quarles."

"Anyone else?" Jarek asked.

"My schedule is on a list the whole building sees," Averett said.

"Whose list?"

Averett opened his mouth and found he did not know.

"I'm going to find out," Jarek said, and the hand on his arm tightened. "And I'm not going to be polite about it."

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