Crash: A Bad Boy MMA Romance by Haylee Delane

country while drinking margaritas on the beach. I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that to anyone.
    I finished my breakfast and excused myself. I needed to clear my head. I needed to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I walked out the back door of the house and made my way down the trail towards the beach. Seagulls squawked overhead and ravens burst from the dunes into the sky. Little seabirds skittered along the sand and the waves lapped against the shore.
    The late morning sunlight glinted on the breakers, the water blue, gray and white as it churned from sea to land. It was all so beautiful, so different than the beaches in Brazil.
    Even Southern California couldn’t compare to the tropics of San Paulo. Especially in winter. Even LA got cold. I walked along the private beach, bending every once in a while to pick up a little shell or a smooth piece of beach glass. I rubbed it between my palms, trying to bring myself back to the here and now.
    But it wasn’t any use; my thoughts were dark and turbulent, like the ocean during a storm at night. I believed that women should have a choice as to what to do with their bodies. But the baby inside me was mine. It wasn’t a hypothetical question or a political one. It was flesh and blood: growing and alive. It was my baby, or it would be, if I let it bloom inside me.
    How could I terminate my own child? Even if having it would ruin everything I’d ever wanted? My thoughts turned and burned inside my mind until the outer world was invisible to me. It was no wonder that I didn’t see him until he was standing right in front of me.
    “Good morning, sis,” Crash said. His glinting blue eyes and his brilliant white grin shone down on me like the morning sunshine.
    I put my hand over my eyes to shield them from the light, looking up into Crash’s handsome face. The gash he’d had over his eye in Brazil was mostly healed, but it looked as if he had never had it properly stitched or bandaged. A scar was already forming that he would have for the rest of his life. A new scar to join the others that already marred his skin.
    I could see a scar on his bicep that twisted the tattoos there. There was another scar that ran down his neck all the way to his shoulder blade. The man had lived a brutal life, so different from my own middle-class existence of honor rolls and carpools.
    “Please don’t call me sis,” I said, my voice muted under the sound of the crashing waves and the breeze.
    “What should I call you? Fuck buddy?”
    What an asshole. I gritted my teeth and glared at him.
    “Definitely don’t call me that,” I said. “No one can ever know what happened between us. Ever.”
    “Why the hell not? Who fucking cares? I don’t care.”
    “You might change your mind about that,” I said.
    “Why the hell would I change my mind? I don’t care what other people think about me.”
    “Has Don talked to you yet this morning?” I asked.
    “Yeah, he said hi up in the house. I asked where you were. Said I wanted to thank you for doing the DNA test yesterday.”
    “He hasn’t said anything about his will?”
    “No.” He narrowed his eyes and a line appeared between his brows.
    “Well, it really isn’t my place to tell you this. But Don informed me and my mom this morning that he was considering leaving you half of his estate. Don is worth a fortune. He said he isn’t going to change his will until he knows what kind of man you are. Do you really want to risk losing what could be a billion dollars just to mess around with me?”
    “I don’t need Don’s money,” he said, moving towards me. He gripped my upper arm and tried to draw me closer, but I pulled away.
    “I’m not going to be responsible for you losing your inheritance. Don’t try to make me responsible for that just because you have some lingering attraction for me. We both know that this is meaningless, just like every other girl that you’ve ever been with.”
    “That’s where you’re