in her drink? Was that why she was wary?
When she’d looked at me, she’d been cautious. Yeah, I had cauliflower ear from fighting. My nose had been broken multiple times. I had scars on top of scars. Tattoos. I also dressed like I was from a ranch near a small town in Wyoming, not that I ever went back to that hellhole. I liked my leather boots, jeans and big belt buckle. I wore a Stetson I’d had since I was twenty-two. I didn’t fit the norm for Brant Valley. I didn’t fit the norm for anywhere.
Besides being an MMA fighter, I was a Marine. Beneath all that, I was a cowboy at heart. My first big check from fighting went to buying a ranch of my own an hour from town, just over the Divide. Wide open spaces and lots of quiet. My escape. You could take the cowboy out of the country, but you couldn’t take the country out of the cowboy.
Then I bought the building in Brant Valley, set up my gym and moved in upstairs. This town sure as fuck wasn’t a fighter town, but there was no way I was settling in a place like Vegas. I was famous in the industry, enough to set up my gym anywhere. So I did… in the closest town to my ranch. And the guys who wanted to make it in the MMA circuit sought me out and made Brant Valley their home while they worked with me.
I went for snap shirts and jeans, not suits and ties. Or on the mat, shorts and bare feet. Even so, I looked dangerous, and to some people, was dangerous, but not with Emory. It just proved that my life was fucked up enough that a good girl like her would be afraid to be with the likes of me.
She’d said she was divorced. The guy must have done something epic to fuck with her. She’d been skittish and nervous as a sixteen-year-old girl on a first date. She'd blushed so endearingly, and that proved it. I’d given her space, kept my tone gentle, tried to keep her at ease because, hell, I was pretty fucking scary looking. She’d said she wasn’t scared of me. Just nervous. Well, the feeling had been mutual. I’d been nervous as fuck around her because I hadn't wanted to mess up. But I had anyway. I’d stuck my foot in my mouth over and over. I’d told her I wasn’t picking her up, and I saw her smile slip.
I’d made her think I wasn’t interested, that she wasn’t enough, when in fact she was too much. Too perfect. I hadn’t wanted to be like the other dicks in the bar because while I probably had the same dirty thoughts as the oyster guy, I was gentleman enough to know she didn’t do pickups. She would have run away screaming if she'd known how much I wondered what she’d worn beneath her prim dress. Something sexy and lacy, perhaps. And that had made me debate what color her nipples were, if her skin was as silky soft as it looked. If her pussy tasted as sweet as I imagined.
Emory hadn't been some woman at the bar looking for a good time. She’d admitted outright she wasn’t looking. Period.
The kicker was, she'd had no clue who I was. No idea I was famous in the industry. She didn’t know about my career, didn’t know my wins, my championship belts, my notoriety. Didn’t know I’d been stopped at least five times within as many minutes when I showed up at the bar. There'd been no sign of recognition at all when I told her my name. She wasn’t a groupie hoping for a little reverse cowgirl with a real cowboy, and that made her one of the only women who’d said to my face she wanted nothing from me. I had been the one to pursue her. To give her the option to see me again, and she’d been the first in a long, long time I’d done so.
Unfortunately, fame had its price. Men wanted to be my friend, to be buddies with the champion MMA fighter. Women wanted in my bed, to fuck the Grayson Green. They wanted to be manhandled by The Outlaw, to fuck a bad boy. To go for a ride on a cowboy’s dick. Everyone wanted a piece of me. For themselves. For their own notoriety. Only a select few were on my