Silas by Tilly Delane

Silas:
When I look into my future it’s like looking down the barrel of a gun.
Trying to pay back a debt that was never yours, a hopelessly fractured family, and betrayal by those you trusted the most will do that to a man.
Most days I just survive. Alone.
The guys at TripleX, the club that hosts the biggest illegal fight league in England, where I fight and bounce, all know that I keep myself to myself.
I don’t do hanging around after lock up to pick up drunk girls from the bar upstairs.
I don’t do staff drinks.
I don’t do socials.
I don’t do going to the gym together.
I don’t do friendship.
I work, I get paid.
I fight, I get paid.
End of involvement.
The irony is, there is nothing in Brighton, the seaside city that I call my home, or in my life, actually worth fighting for.
Until Mum brings home a stray American.
A soft, curvy woman with bottle-red hair and green eyes and a mouth made for sucking.
And no matter how hard I try to ignore her, she’s there.
In my bed.

Grace:
I’m here on a memorial tour for my mum – never mom, she was born British, and no matter how long she lived in Washington DC, she refused to be called mom.
I lost her a year ago, and it still hurts like crazy.
I saved up every penny I made since her funeral for this trip. Being here, in England, in Brighton, was supposed to help me keep her memory alive, to remember her and the stories she used to tell me.
But in true Grace style, I fall at the first hurdle.
The company I booked the hotel through has gone bust, the hotel never got my reservation and there isn’t a room to be had elsewhere in a ten-mile radius because of a small thing called the Brighton Festival.
I’m ready to sleep in the lobby when the head of housekeeping offers me a room in her house, at a rate I cannot refuse.
A room, it turns out, that smells of man in the best possible way.
And with the scent comes a fighter, brooding and beautiful, and about as lost as I am.
I want him.
Badly.
I just need to convince him that he’s worth the fight, and that maybe together we can find our way out of the woods.