HOOKED: An Erotic Romance Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE I'm A Tough Nut

  CHAPTER TWO Late To Class

  CHAPTER THREE Almost Michael

  CHAPTER FOUR A Jab In My Chest

  CHAPTER FIVE Cotton panties

  CHAPTER SIX Rah-ool

  CHAPTER SEVEN Blatant Lying

  CHAPTER EIGHT Going Crazy

  CHAPTER NINE Focus Mitts

  CHAPTER TEN Live A Little

  CHAPTER ELEVEN I'm Your Teacher

  CHAPTER TWELVE Dinner Time

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Privacy Glass

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Warrior Sprit

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Hard For You

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Dutch Courage

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN More Than A Taste

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN A Haze Of Lust

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Public Humiliation

  CHAPTER TWENTY Lone Wolf

  More

  CHAPTER ONE

  I'm A Tough Nut

  ‘Of course I’ll come to a kickboxing class with you,’ I’d said to my best friend Rebecca last week, ‘anything to help a friend.’ Inside, though, I’d been dreading it.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m a tough nut. I’m the boss of a successful company - we shift thousands of tons of letterhead and copier paper every week - we make over a million pounds profit a year. I manage a rowdy bunch of fifty-four employees, more men than women. And they all respect me. I’m a no-nonsense sort of boss, firm but fair. As long as you don’t cross me, I’m amiable enough.

  But… kickboxing? I’d never done anything like that in my life. In my teens, I’d been a dancer. Took part in local, and even national, ballet-dancing competitions. I’d have carried on with it if work hadn’t taken over. I’m a workaholic, see, and the long hours of overtime soon stopped me from continuing with evening activities. All I had time for was a quick trip to the gym twice a week, just to keep, at the bare minimum, in some sort of shape. I was naturally muscular anyway, so I was lucky - as Rebecca often reminded me.

  But yeah, I was short on free time, and didn’t do much other than work. It’s the reason I hadn’t had a boyfriend in over a year, too. I was in a relationship with my job, I guess.

  Rebecca, though, had been going through something of a crisis lately. Her bully of a boyfriend had dumped her, trading her in for a younger model, and Rebecca was doing all the things that spurned lovers do - getting her hair cut, getting a navel piercing, and taking up a martial arts class. I assumed that was what spurned lovers did, anyway. I’d never let myself fall for anyone enough to let myself be hurt by them.

  So I agreed to go to this kickboxing class with Rebecca, until she felt comfortable enough to go on her own. Then I could get back to my own life, having done a good deed for a friend. Hopefully, it would only take a couple of weeks for Rebecca to get her confidence back, and she’d be back to her fun and flirtatious self in no time.

  ‘The problem is,’ she told me, as we headed for the address on the kickboxing leaflet, ‘I just don’t trust men any more. You think you’ve found a nice one, and then they turn on you.’

  I nodded occasionally, letting Rebecca rant and release all that bitterness, knowing it would be good for her. Really though, I was only really half-listening. Instead, I was feeling a strange fluttering inside me. As I say, I’m a tough nut. I wasn’t used to feeling - what was this? Nervous? Yes, that’s how I was feeling now. It was like I was reliving my first day at school, wondering what everyone would be like, if I’d fit in, if I’d be able to keep up.

  I watched my legs striding forwards, long and tanned, in a pair of tight, white hot pants, and wondered if we were really dressed in the right gear for a martial arts class. My white low-cut sports bra and tight, pale pink vest felt provocative, all of a sudden. So taut around the bust, and out here, shivering a little, I could see my nipples poking through the fabric.

  Thank God we were going to an all-female class. I wasn’t here to impress anyone, so I wasn’t bothered about making a fool of myself, but I didn’t want the toxic combination of men and women in one small garage, exercising and getting sweaty together. Men had wandering eyes, and I suspected they came to the mixed classes for the wrong reasons. Like those pervy guys at the gym, lifting weights while they licked their lips, watching me on the running machine. I had good figure, I knew that. But it was mine. I wasn’t a display model for anyone else’s eyes to try out.

  ‘This must be it,’ said Rebecca, holding up the flyer and re-reading the address. The flyer, which Rebecca had been given at her work, looked pretty corny if I’m being honest. I’m surprised Rebecca had gone for it. The entire background was taken up with the picture of a man’s torso, a perfect six-pack, each ab an angular, chiselled, masterpiece of Photoshop no doubt. No-one had a stomach that good.

  I looked up from the flyer at the building in front of us. ‘This can’t be right,’ I said, puzzled.

  In front of us was a small row of what I can only describe as dirty old garages. Each one had rusting, dark blue corrugated metal covering over the entrance, and beside that a grimy black door. ‘This place is a dump,’ I said. ‘It can’t be here.’

  Rebecca looked at the flyer again, screwing up her eyes because she’d left her glasses at home. Really, she was so forgetful it’s a wonder she managed to get anything done. Take this evening, she’d forgotten her water bottle, then her wallet, then her car keys. We had to go back into her house three times before we could leave. We were already running ten minutes late.

  ‘Look, we’re obviously in the wrong place,’ I said to Rebecca. ‘Let’s just cut our losses, go to a bar, get a nice bottle of white or something.’ God, I could use a drink. I was almost glad Rebecca had messed up.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Rebecca, pointing at the door, and suddenly I heard the noise of hands thumping against hard fabric. It was the sound of people punching. There was no mistaking it.

  We were here.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Late To Class

  We shuffled in the door, to the sound of some thirty or forty people, rhythmically punching pads in pairs. Each time they punched, they let out a loud hiss, and I almost stepped back through the door and left. I’d heard there was a good yoga place down the road. Surely Rebecca would be up for that instead? It was meant to be really good for your core.

  But the main thing I noticed as I stepped through the door was this: the place was full of men. It was a small, dank old garage, absolutely chock-full of them. What the hell?

  Rebecca must have made yet another mistake and brought us to the mixed class. And with all these men, it absolutely stank in here. Sweat and testosterone. And even the women in here looked like men - everyone had short hair, tribal tattoos, and hard, angular bodies. I couldn’t have felt more out of place if I’d tried.

  ‘We’ll creep in round the back,’ whispered Rebecca behind me.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Rebecca,’ I whispered back, dying to turn back, but determined not to wimp out before she did. I could do anything she could. I could do it twice as hard.

  I tired to squeeze past a guy holding up pads while his partner threw punches at him, but the guy took a step back, stopping me in his tracks. ‘You’re gonna get it,’ he said, in a low, threatening voice. I noticed that one of his teeth was missing, and he had a scar running across his lip.

  ‘Get what?’ I asked, standing straighter, throwing my shoulders back, a technique I’d learnt for disciplining the more unruly members of the male population at work.

  The guy just winked, looked at my breasts, straining out of my tight pink top, gave me a lecherous smile, showing yet another missing tooth, and then he turned to the green-haired punk punching him.

  Well, this was just great. What had Reb
ecca got us into? She was my friend, yes, but I wouldn’t be coming back here next week to ‘support’ her, that’s for sure. This place was a hive of carnal chaos.

  As I stepped forwards, trying to catch up with Rebecca, who was slipping off her shoes and putting down her water bottle, the punching and hissing suddenly stopped, and the room went silent. Everyone stood with their legs together and their bodies rigid with attention.

  At the front of the room, where I hadn’t yet dared let myself look, the instructor stood, arms by his side. Everyone in the room had their gaze fixed on him, and his gaze was fixed on us.

  Now I’ve seen a lot of men in my life, I’ve even seen a fair number of them up close and personal, but I’d never seen a man like this. He must have been six foot five, at least, tall and imposing, with tanned skin and short black hair. He wore black pants, slung loose at the hips, with mysterious Chinese lettering scrawled tantalizingly around his groin, and a black belt tied in a complicated-looking knot, drawing attention to the space between his legs, where it hung down. And his torso - it was magnificent. He wore a tight, black vest, which his thick arms practically ripped their way out of, and his broad neck and shoulders made the fabric pull apart, almost translucent, over his pecs.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got latecomers,’ he said, pulling back his lips to reveal big, white, angry teeth. His voice sounded barely human, it was so low and gruff - almost like a growl. ‘You know what happens now,’ he said. I noticed a twang of a foreign accent. What was it? Spanish? French? It was exotic, and made me think of dark, hot Arabian nights.

  All forty people in the room looked at him obediently for a moment, and then got down on their knees. They shuffled their hands forwards, so that their flat palms were directly under their shoulders, and then lifted themselves onto their toes, with perfectly straight backs.

  ‘Ladies. It’s your fault everyone’s got to do this now. Find a space. Get into the plank position.’

  I looked at Rebecca, and she raised her eyebrows at me and then shrugged.

  Fine, I’ll do what he says, I thought. But how humiliating. I hadn’t been told off for showing up late to class since I was ten years old. Rebecca would pay for dragging me along to this pay money for this bully to humiliate us later.

  I found a tight space at the back of the room and got down onto my knees. As I put my weight onto the palms of my hands, leaning forwards, I noticed that my sports bra really didn’t keep that much of me in place. My breasts almost fell out of my top, dangling beneath me as I got unsteadily onto my feet. I could see Rebecca was struggling too. Her arms were shaking, barely holding her up. Still, at least she was wearing a tracksuit. At least she still had her modesty.

  The instructor marched to the back of the room and observed our positions. ‘Straight backs, ladies,’ he said, looking at Rebecca first and then me. I tried to pull my stomach in, to concentrate on straightening out my spine, but I felt like the core strength just wasn’t there. Now if I’d been doing yoga…

  Suddenly I felt a large hand pressing down on my back.

  ‘This needs to come down,’ said the gruff voice. Slowly, expertly, he guided my hips down towards the floor. Then, a big hot palm touched my stomach. ‘And this needs to come up.’ He pushed gently on my stomach, sending waves of feeling around my abdomen.

  It was the first time a man had touched me in months. I felt a strange tingle, somewhere deep with me, and tried to steady my breathing. I could smell him, this animal man so near to me, could feel his hands so firm against my stomach and the small of my back, pushing against me, and for a second, I almost felt myself willing his hands to slide down a little further…

  No! Stop it! What was I thinking? This guy was a beast. He stank. And he was obviously a bully.

  I focused on getting my body rigid, and waited for him to walk away. Instead of walking away to examine Rebecca’s posture, though, he lingered by me a little longer. I don’t know how I knew, but I felt his eyes on my cleavage, taking in my tight pink top, my breasts spilling out of it. He was probably thinking how inappropriate my gear was for martial arts. He probably hated my guts.

  His hands still pressed against me, and I could feel their heat, getting warmer and warmer as my body ached under the pressure of holding still. Then, slowly, his hand slid another inch down my back, then another, until it was over my coccyx. He applied a little more pressure, then a little more, until I was fighting not to fall to the floor. My legs trembled under the strain.

  ‘Arses should be lower than shoulders,’ he said in a strange low voice, and then he drew his hand away. My backside, where he’d touched me, throbbed with feeling, as if it had just been smacked. It was as if the heat and strength in his hands had travelled into me.

  I looked up, desperate to catch a glimpse of him, to see if he was going to do the same to Rebecca, but instead, he just walked back to the front of the room. ‘Twenty press-ups,’ he said to everyone, his eyes only on me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Almost Michael

  For the next hour of class, thankfully, Rebecca and I were able to hide in the corner, throwing jabs at one another’s pads with all the skill of two-year-olds trying to wrestle with their parents as their diapers get changed. Our postures were both terrible - you didn’t have to be a World Champion to figure that out. Every time I caught sight of myself in the long mirror that ran across the front wall, I winced at how amateurish I looked. I was getting my jabs mixed up with my crosses, I didn’t understand the first thing about upper-cuts, and as for my hook… my right-hook looked like I was batting away a fly.

  I also noticed, looking in the mirror, that my outfit was even more inappropriate than I’d at first thought. Not only did my breasts come dangerously close to falling out of my top, but my hot pants rode up at the back every time I flung my first forwards, and the taut curve of my buttocks was visible just beneath the hem of the white fabric. I was practically naked; it was obscene.

  Luckily, I was too distracted by the endless instructions being growled at us to worry about it for long. While I was working with Rebecca, the instructor didn’t come near us. We just did our beginner thing, while the others in the room jabbed and crossed and hooked and hissed, and the sweat flew off mats, until we became enveloped in the stench, and we were part of that muskiness, that thick testosterone scent. By the end of the hour, I was surprised to hear myself actually groan as I took a punch. The atmosphere of masculinity in the room was heady, and I could see, then, I think, how something like this could grow addictive.

  At the end of the session, as people packed their bags with gloves and focus mitts, Rebecca looked at me. ‘Well?’ she asked, pulling a stray strand of her red, wavy hair away from her lips. ‘What do you think?’ I couldn’t tell from the glint in her eye whether she’d loved it or hated it.

  I looked over at the instructor, who was packing up some kick pads at the side of the room. His muscular arms bulged as they bent to pick things up, and I found myself daydreaming about what it might feel like for him to pick me up. I shook my head to dispel the image. ‘It was okay,’ I said, in my most carefully measured tone.

  I had been so sure, when we had arrived late, and the whole class had been given the punishment of a plank and press-ups because of us, that I’d never dare set foot in this place again. But right now, I didn’t know. I feel like the experience had filled me with a strange sort of adrenaline. An adrenaline I just didn’t get from selling paper all day at work. This was animal. This was wild.

  ‘Yeah, it was alright, wasn’t it?’ said Rebecca. ‘Shame the instructor’s such a dick though. I thought I was bringing us to the women’s class tonight. Never mind, best to stick with this one now we’ve started, I suppose.’

  I felt myself flush when she mentioned the ‘instructor’, desperate for her not to notice the powerful effect this man had on me.

  ‘Anyway, listen,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and pay him for today then we’ve got to shoot off I’m afraid. I’m meant to be sorti
ng through Darren’s stuff tonight. He’s coming to collect it tomorrow morning, although I’ll probably have burnt it all by then.’

  ‘Hey,’ I found myself saying, ‘why don’t you just go and get on with that? I’ll pay, and then I fancy walking home tonight. It’s a nice enough evening, and I’m boiling. Fancy a bit of fresh air.’

  ‘You’ll be okay walking in that?’ she asked, looking at my outfit.

  I looked down at myself, covered in sweat, which made the fabric cling to my clothes even more, leaving very, very little to the imagination. ‘It’s only a twenty-minute walk,’ I said. ‘And I’d be too hot to wear a jacket, even if I had one with me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Rebecca smiled. She kissed me on the cheek, and I could smell her saltiness from working out. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant. ‘Listen, thank you for this. It means a lot.’ She handed me a ten pound note. ’Tonight was on me.’

  I smiled back at her, and she ran off, mumbling something about what a prick Darren was.

  I noticed, by this time, that the room was empty, apart from me and the instructor. I walked over to him with my ten pound note, checking my cheeks briefly in the mirror, hoping they weren’t scarlet, that I didn’t look too tragic. In actual fact, I was glowing, I saw, with a healthy pink flush spreading up my neck and onto my face, that made my features look fuller, somehow. My lips looked red and pouty. I looked, more than anything, like I’d just been making love.

  The instructor was bending down over a sports back when I coughed. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘My friend and I haven’t paid yet.’

  He stopped whatever he was doing and looked up at me. I felt guilty, weirdly, like I’d just disturbed him. He looked deep into my eyes, holding my gaze for so long it almost felt like he was testing me, and then he stood up, his enormous body towering over me.

  ‘First lesson is free,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Oh,’ I replied, holding the ten pound note, a useless offering, then I let my hand fall to my side. I noticed that I was still a little out of breath after the session.