Shiver Read online

  Table of Contents

  Shiver

  Publication Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Also Read

  Thank You

  Shiver

  by

  Brandy Schmitt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Shiver

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 by Brandy Schmitt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Kristian Norris

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewilderroses.com

  Publishing History

  First Scarlet Rose Edition, 2016

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-0772-5

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-0773-2

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To the person who taught me to be a fighter—This one’s for you.

  Chapter One

  He couldn’t believe she’d fucked around on him.

  Ice O’Malley stood motionless in his corner of the steel fighting cage glaring at nothing in particular on the opposite side. He should have been using this time to size up his opponent, learning his movements as he hopped from foot to foot, warming his mind and muscles for the fight less than a minute away, but he couldn’t get his mind to focus. His thoughts kept drifting back to his lying, cheating ex who’d spread her legs for someone else. His coach, Maverick, would be pissed as fuck if he knew his star fighter’s head continued to be all fucked up right before a fight.

  “Remember what I told you. This fucker likes to play dirty. Stay focused, stay in the game. You’re the Ice Man. Fight like it,” Maverick yelled from cage side, bringing Ice out of his foggy thoughts. Maverick the Mallet would never let one of his fighters enter a cage without him being right there at their side. As head coach, he had rules for his fighters, and the number one rule had always been and always would be, don’t let women get inside your head.

  Shit. Little too late for that one, wasn’t it?

  “Let’s go, Ice. Show this pussy, Conner, how a real fighter fights,” Johnny the Bone Crusher hollered at him as Ice moved away from the side of the cage, finally giving his opponent the once-over. He turned his head, allowing himself to swallow up the crowd, thick with spectators and growing restless for the coming fight. The houselights had lowered, making it harder to see past the fence of the cage, but they were there. His fans would always be there. He owed this crowd a great fight.

  The foot-stomping, hollering, beer-drinking crowd was his home. He had fought his way from the streets of Ireland to the streets here in the States to stand in this ring with the crowd chanting his name. This was where he belonged.

  He searched the faces in the crowd, not sure what he was looking for. They were here for him. They were all here to watch him. Whether they wanted him to crash and burn or to win it all, they would stand by him. He ate up the crowd. He thrived on the blood rush that pumped through his veins as the masses screamed and chanted his name over and over.

  Ice closed his eyes to take it all in. The crowd normally calmed him in an odd way that allowed him to focus on the fight, but not this time. All he could focus on tonight when he closed his eyes were the images burnt into his mind forever. Kelly, his girlfriend of the last few months, spread-out naked on their bed with another man’s face buried in her pussy.

  The lying, cheating she-devil continued to throw him off his game. He damned her again for ruining his match before it even had a chance to start. She had known how important this fight was to him, and she knew what seeing her with that guy would do to him. Hoping he would find her played a big role in why she hadn’t bothered locking the door.

  He wouldn’t put it past her to have planned it this way. She had always used the threat of another man against him to get her way. He never thought she would sink so low as to bring another man home to his bed.

  Fuck her!

  If she knew what was good for her, she wouldn’t show her face ever again.

  “Get your mind off Kelly, bro. That bitch is long gone. You need to be focused.”

  “Shit, look at him, Maverick. He’s out of it, man. He’s not in the zone.” Johnny slapped his hand hard and loud against the metal fencing of the cage, causing a rattling echo of chains.

  Yeah, Kelly was long gone by now. Ice had made sure of that. He still couldn’t believe she had the nerve to tell him she’d take him back as he stormed through their room packing her shit. She had lied to him, cheated on him, and used him for a place to hide out from her junkie friends. She was nothing but trouble. But being the dumbass he was, he thought he could get her clean and change her ways. What a fucking joke that had been.

  Johnny was right. He needed to get his mind back inside the cage and away from the bitch who tried to break his heart. He would be stupid if he ever allowed another woman to have that kind of control over him. What was the motto Johnny lived by? Smile, meet ‘um, fuck ‘um, leave ‘um.

  Seemed a little harsh to Ice, but Johnny got all the pussy he wanted, and he wasn’t tied down to anyone. Ice would have been better off if he had listened to his best friend a year ago. He could have fucked her out of his system and walked away without emotions. But hell no, he had felt sorry for her when she came to him, crying that she needed his help to get off the drugs, and ever since, she had strung him along like a dog on a leash.

  Ice wrestled his anger under control and nodded toward the other side of the cage. His muscles became rigid as he prepared himself for the fight. He needed to get some anger out, and he’d do that by tearing his opponent, a regular around the local MMA circuit, apart. After three years on the circuit, Ice knew most of the other regular fighters and their coaches.

  “Ready,” he said, giving another nod to the referee. The three judges had taken their seats cage-side, and the fighters were ready to ring in. He had three five-minute rounds to get his punches in and stay on his feet.

  The first round went by with hardly any hits from either fighter, but by the time they reached round two, it became obvious he wasn’t on his game. His defense quickly disappeared, and by round three, his head was under water.

  He made one combo move and blocked for the next three minutes. But he wasn’t going down to the mat if he could help it. That was for damn sure. Ice punched. Conner jabbed and blocked, repeating the dance. Conner was the one who landed all the blows. Ice took a combo to the face, another to his chest, and bent over at the knees, several knees to the ribs and guts.

  He tried an uppercut. The other man wrapped his arms around him in a bear grip, taking them both to the mat. Ice attempted moves to get the guy off him faster. A fighter had only seconds for a reaction when trapped in the ring, but Ice’s mind wasn’t in the cage, making his reaction time far longer than it should have been.

  The fi
nal bell rang, indicating the end of the match. No way he was coming out the victor in this one. No submissions were made, but the points weren’t in his favor. Standing in the middle of the ring next to Conner, waiting for the judges to deliver their verdict, was painful. When he come out the loser, he had no one to blame but himself.

  Maverick entered through the cage door. “Shake it off, man.”

  Conner’s crew crowded in with their congratulations. Ice reached over them and shook Conner’s hand, then ducked out from under the metal doorway and headed straight to the locker room. He had lost, and that pissed him off.

  There was nothing worse than the reason why he lost.

  For fuck’s sake, he hadn’t even cared that much about Kelly. He had tried to care about her, but he couldn’t bring himself to fully invest other than trying to help her get clean.

  “You’ll get ’em next time, big guy. Let’s go so you can buy me a beer,” Johnny announced from behind Ice.

  “Yeah, next time,” Ice agreed.

  Next time he wouldn’t have his head in the clouds, because there wasn’t going to be a next time. He made the decision right then and there. He wasn’t going to swear off women in general; he planned on swearing off relationships. Relationships were not meant for guys like Ice. He planned on making it in the national MMA cages. His mind set, he was determined to make it to the cages in Vegas.

  From this day forward, his fighting needed to be more important than any piece of ass or the female attached to it.

  ****

  “I’m sorry, Mark, but I can’t marry you.”

  The loud clapping around the oversized, crowded room came to a dead halt before whispered voices picked up around the room. All of them probably asking the same thing—did she just say what they all thought she had?

  The bright, white smile fell from the face of Mark McCall, Nicole Phillips’ boyfriend of the past six months, a handsome man on the fast track to being a giant shark in the attorney tank. Being an experienced lawyer his colleagues loved him and women adored him.

  Nicole looked down at her trembling hands and the massive, princess-cut diamond ring she held. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice low, keeping Mark the only one who could hear her now. He was the only one who mattered at the moment. Even though she couldn’t marry him, it didn’t mean she wanted to hurt him anymore. From the corner of her eye, Nicole watched as her father pushed his chair out away from his table and started to walk their way. Anger blazed inside him.

  Of course, if any of the guests in the room looked toward Patrick Phillips, they wouldn’t see what his daughter could see. She had years of watching her father mask his anger in front of others. It’s what made him so great at being one of Seattle’s best attorneys; he held all the power over his enemies. When she was younger, pleasing her father had been Nicole’s number one goal.

  Her father was the reason she had begun dating Mark in the first place. He had introduced them the same month Mark went to work at her father’s firm. After a few months of dating, it became clear she couldn’t bring herself to entertain the thought of marrying Mark. Not because the two men didn’t get along, just the opposite. They got along too well.

  Mark reminded Nicole of her father a little too much for her comfort, and after years of watching her mother become a shell of a woman thanks to the man who promised to love her, there was no way she could live that way. She could never take the backseat to a husband’s career as her mother had done.

  Her father walked toward them, and even though anyone could see the bright smile on his face, it was all a show for their guests. Her father is the kind of man who could smile as he cut you down, making you feel like you were nothing but gum on the bottom of his shoe.

  “What’s going on here, you two?” his voice carried loudly enough for the room full of her father’s guests to hear. Once he was close enough, he lowered his voice so the two of them were the only ones who could hear. “I don’t think this is the time or the place for this. Excuse yourselves, and talk it out in the backroom.”

  “Yes sir. I’m sure our girl here is a bit nervous. It happens to all of us,” Mark told his boss as he wrapped his fingers, a little too tightly, around her upper arm and tugged her with him into the backroom of the restaurant.

  Nicole didn’t put up a fight or struggle in any way. Feeling she owed him the show in front of her father’s guests that they were still the perfect, happy couple, she followed him into the backroom, knowing full well the anger he felt toward her. Mark would never hurt her in a physical way, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings either by doing any more damage in front of others.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s the worst timing. It’s a bitch thing for me to do in front of all those people, but I’ve told you I needed to talk to you several times over the past few days and you never had time for me.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t give you the time if this is what you’ve been thinking about doing. Nikki, honey, everything will be fine. Our marriage will be great. You’ll see.”

  Her head slowly shook as she turned the ring over and over on the tip of her fingers. “I don’t want to hurt you, but this isn’t what I want. I’m not ready to get married. I know you think you need to be married so the shark tank will take you seriously and not think of you as the young kid anymore, but I’m…I’m not going to be anyone’s trophy wife.”

  His face drew up tight as the seriousness of her words began to sink in with him. His smile faded away, and his anger reared its head. “I never said I wanted a trophy wife. I just thought you’d want to marry me.”

  “There’s nothing stating we have to marry so soon. I mean can’t we date for a while longer?”

  His cheeks turned from pink to red as if he was holding in a temper she had never seen before at bay. “This is ridiculous. You had to have known this is what I would want at some point.”

  “Yes, but I also feel you’re doing this more to please my father than because you love me.”

  “I do love you.” His words forced through tight lips. There was definitely anger there.

  Her father chose that moment to slip away from his guests and join them in the backroom. “What the hell is going on back here? Did you two love birds work out all the kinks? I have a room full of clients and friends out there sitting on pins and needles, waiting to know what’s happening between the two of you.”

  Nicole turned to her father; he would side with her if she told him the truth. “I’m trying to get Mark to see that our marriage would be a mistake. We shouldn’t get married so he can get a better job. I mean, when I marry it should be for love, right, Daddy?”

  Her father had always stood at her side against the world.

  “Actually, Mark’s right.”

  Her heart stopped at that moment. “What?”

  “It’s past time for you to think about settling down.”

  Now she knew everyone had lost their minds including her father. “Dad…what are you talking about?”

  Her father’s eyes grew darker, showing off a buried anger she hadn’t seen before.

  “Come on, Nicole, you are twenty-two years old. You’re not in school, you don’t have a job, and you gave up on dancing…what are you doing with your life?”

  That hurt. Her father knew why she had stopped dancing. Being a professional dancer had been her dream since she was four years old. Lessons began at the age of five and she never stopped. Every day after school she danced. Every weekend, every holiday, every summer she danced. She never took a break until six months ago, around the same time she started seeing Mark. After going to audition after audition and only getting small roles, she let her discouragement overrule her thinking, and Mark had agreed it might be for the best if she took a little break and rested up.

  “I didn’t give up. I’m taking a break is all, and I’m not going to marry someone because you want me to.” Her voice shook with the start of her own anger.

  “What the hell does that mean? What? Now yo
u don’t love me?”

  Resentment welled up getting the best of her. This wasn’t how she wanted this conversation to go tonight. “Of course I did—I do. I’m not ready to settle down.” She needed to stand her ground, but looked like she’d be standing there alone, with no one on her side.

  “Nicole, stop with this ridiculousness, and let’s get back out there. I have clients and guests who are waiting on the two of you. The least you can do is stop being selfish, and put a smile on your face and thank everyone for coming tonight.”

  Her father’s words were cold and harsh, his voice low and demanding as if he were daring her to defy him. He had never talked to her like that before in her life. He used the same tone he used on her mother when they argued years ago. When she was little she used to think nothing of it when he talked to his wife in such a way because her mother seemed all right with his treatment toward her. It wasn’t until Nicole grew into her teenager years that she saw the hurt in her mother’s eyes.

  Nicole swallowed back some of her fear as she stared her father in the face. What in the hell was the matter with him? Shocked and hurt by her father’s words to her, she stared in awe as he slapped the back of Mark’s shoulder with his hand, turning him around so they both could head back to the room of strangers.

  “Come on, son. She’ll come around. You’ll see. Let’s go make an announcement before everyone starts to think she actually turned you down. Nicole. Let’s go.”

  Those last three words were colder and harder than her father had ever spoken to her in her life. Her eyes stung with fresh tears. She had never been treated this way. Had the argument been about anything but marriage, she probably would have let her father win without putting up much of a fight. This is her life, her future. She wasn’t going to be forced into a marriage with anyone not of her choosing. No way she was going to end up with an arranged marriage.

  “No! I’m not going back out there so you can tell all those people lies. I’m not going to merry Mark, Daddy. I’m sorry, I know you like him, but he’s not the man I need.”