Chapter 6
It seemed that survival instinct never died. As she pushed the stop button on her machine and shut down her mp3 player, only silence surrounded her, but she wasn’t fooled. For the last two weeks, Deva had trained at night after work and never felt discomfort or unease. The reason she felt it now meant she was about to become a prey and damn it if she would ever be that again.
Forcing herself to get her breathing under control, she looked around both for the threat, and anything she could use as a weapon. When she left her father and his crew, she had taken extensive self-defense training with Beatrice and her husband, helping to get her footing back, and she hadn’t ceased training ever since.
As she moved silently across the mat, she took one of the bamboo sticks used for agility training. It wouldn’t inflict much damage, but she knew how to use it and where to hit to inflict enough pain to distract whoever was lurking inside the gym. It may not be enough against a firearm, but she felt more secure with something in her hand.
The greater space of the gym was empty, and there was no light in any of the offices, except in her workspace where she had left one of her ambient lamps on. Deva hesitated before entering. It was a dead end, and if there were indeed an intruder in the gym, she would be trapped. But her phone was in her bag, and she needed it.
“You can come in. I won’t eat you up unless you want me to.”
Deva didn’t recognize the voice but detected the Russian accent. Aleksei. Leaving the stick outside the door, just in case, she let out a steadying exhale before entering the room. The Russian fighter, still in a fitted black t-shirt and black tech pants, was sitting on her massage table, a fucking grin on his gorgeous, rugged face. His liquid silver eyes danced with mischief. His tattooed arms flexed as he gripped the table’s edge, drawing attention to his body.
“Hell, Voronov! Why are you trying to scare me?”
And the cad simply smiled, lifting his hands in capitulation. “I didn’t want to scare you, Deva. But I had left my phone in the locker room and just came back to get it.”
“The front door was locked.”
“It’s only a lock, Deva. Something that can be opened easily by someone with skills don’t you think?”
The way he said her name, lingering with a deep rumble, heat pooled between her legs. Deva hated her reaction to him as much as she understood it. Sometimes the body had ways of making its needs known.
“And this is not the locker room. You are in my personal space, sitting on my work table.”
“Da. I see you have excellent eyes. And when I returned, and you were still here, I thought it was the perfect moment to ask you for a... treatment.”
Deva knew better and crossed her arms. “I’m off the clock, and I don’t offer the ‘services’ you are clearly asking me for.
Something flashed in his fascinating eyes before his face closed off. “I know what you do here, and I’m not looking for a whore. I have no interest in that. I’ve never paid for sex in my life.”
And Deva was convinced it was true. With his muscled body and the charisma around him like a magnet, there was no way a sane woman would say no to him.
“So, what do you need, Mr. Voronov?”
His stance calmed at her question, and a smile returned to his lips. “Please, call me Aleksei. I decided to jog back here, but I started to feel a slight pain above the right knee. At first, I thought it would calm down once my body had warmed up, but instead, it increased.”
Was it an elaborate lie or the truth? Even if she had her suspicions, the therapist in her decided to check it out. She crouched in front of him and started to unfasten the side of the pants from the ankle up to two snaps above the right knee. There again, was more ink. Crouching in front of him, she started to run her fingers on each side of the joint, pressing to detect anything unusual. “Does that hurt?”
“No.” And he wasn’t lying; his breathing was deep and slow.
As a comparative, she unfastened his left leg and ran her fingers against the joint. Aleksei remained still as a statue, only answering her questions with a yes or no. When she returned and touched just below his right knee, she felt him tense in anticipation. “Does that hurt?”
“No.” And she had guessed right. Gently, she let her fingertips glide over his knee, feather-light. Continuing her examination, she didn’t detect any edema or inflammation, but some tension. A few inches past the problematic area, she pressed harder on the thigh muscle, and the man jerked.
“Did it hurt?” Same question, but this time he hesitated.
“It’s a kind of ache, but there’s no pain.”
As she suspected, she got back on her feet. “Lie down.”
“I don’t need to lie down for you to treat a knee pain.”
Crossing her arms, Deva looked at the man who was annoying her, and more. “Your knee is okay so far, but the tension in the thigh muscle is pulling too much on it. If you don’t relieve some of the tension, it can impact your tendons and then provoke knee pain. It seems to be a common type of pain for you fighters, along with shoulders and lower back pain. With you sitting like that, it doesn’t give me proper access.”
“Access?” Aleksei arched a brow as if he didn’t understand the sentence.
“Do you want me to help you? Because I’m too tired to play games. If you don’t, I’ll close up here and go take a shower at home and eat.” She knew she had an opening, the first and maybe only one, and by playing hard, she may lose it. However, acting out of character would be a dead giveaway.
