Desire Uncaged: An MMA Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

form. Sara lay her head on his firm chest. If she could lay there forever, she would have.
    * * *
    Emily, Ethan’s now-ex, was seething. How could he leave her after everything she had put into their relationship? She had been to every fight, bought tickets, T shirts, dealt with his shitty used car and put up with his irritating roommates. And now he had left her. She was furious and hurt.
    At first, she assumed, he would call or text. Once he had calmed down. But he never did. Not an email, not a message, not a text. She texted him. Nothing . She was certain, he had to still love her. He wouldn’t just throw her away. She was too hot, too much of a catch for him. He just had to see her, one more time. Then he would get it. Emily drove to his house. Thankfully he was home. She was just about to get out of the car when the door swung open. There was Ethan, and some other girl! She was ugh some fat redhead! She could hardly believe he had left her for someone like that. She was furious. She couldn’t even get out of her car. In a huff, she turned the engine over and drove off. She would get Ethan back, she wasn’t going to lose her man to that slut. Not on her life…

Chapter 2
    The copier whirred mechanically in a steady rhythm. The sound of page after page stacking on the tray filled the room as it completed its task with absolute, soulless, perfection. Sara and Ethan sat at the adjacent table, eating quietly in silence as they both eyed their portly coworker whose doughy physique and sagging stomach contrasted the efficient perfection of the machine he operated.
    With a final clamor of plastic parts the cacophony of the machine fell silent. The man grabbed the papers and huffed off, out of the office break room. As soon as he disappeared from sight, Sara turned to Ethan. She smirked.
    “I thought he was never going to leave. What on earth was he copying?”
    Ethan, Sara’s now-boyfriend looked up at her with tired eyes.
    “I dunno. It looked like some kind of presentation. Something with a million slides. He only actually made a couple of copies.”
    Sara tucked an errant red hair behind her ear. She looked at Ethan, who was chewing laconically on a carrot slice.
    “He shouldn’t be making that many copies. We keep getting memos about people overusing paper.”
    “ We’re a publishing company with a paper problem.” Ethan chuckled at the irony.
    Sara couldn’t help but be perturbed by Ethan’s appearance. His fight was only two weeks away, and his diet—the strict regimen he was on to allow him to compete in the smallest weight class possible—had kicked into overdrive. Sara was shocked to see both how rapidly he had lost the weight, and the extremity of the diet itself. Even Ethan himself admitted it was ‘not sustainable’.
    One side effect, was that Ethan had also become a shadow of his former self. He had been quiet before, but now he was sullen, and listless. All his energy, by his own account, was being poured into training. Sara couldn’t help but feel a little slighted by it all, to be trumped by his fight career. But Ethan had been clear with her that this sort of thing was going to happen. “The last two weeks are always the worst” had been his refrain. And so, Sara kept quiet and rolled on with it.
    “What’s on the calendar for today?” Sara asked innocently.
    Ethan looked back at her, “Just more sparring. It’s really my last hard day before the fight. I’m not looking forward to getting punched, but I’m looking forward to being done with it. At least for this fight.”
    Sara had learned that each fight was preceded by a six-to-eight week preparation period where the fighters redoubled their efforts, focusing all their energy on preparing for their opponents. Ethan had studied his adversary’s movements, watched footage of his old fights, studied how he threw punches and shot takedowns. Ethan and his coaches used this information to formulate his own strategy. To Sara, a casual