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Unguarded: A High-Heat MMA Sports Romance
Paperback
Series: The Knockout, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 27 2026
Pages: 178
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She finally understands why he fights.
He finally understands why she is the only person he wants watching.
Jace Bennett has his professional licence back, a rising position in the MMA rankings and a clear path towards the biggest fight of his career.
This time, Maya Hayes is not evaluating him from across a desk.
She is in the third row.
As Jace faces increasingly dangerous opponents, Maya learns how to read every decision he makes inside the ring. She sees the patience behind his power, the calculation behind every risk and the reason he willingly enters a world where there are no excuses and nowhere to hide.
But the deeper Maya enters Jace's life, the more of himself he allows her to see.
A secret fight from his past. The grief he locked away after his father's death. Boxes he has avoided opening for seven years. A future built around the gym, the junior fighters who depend on him and a championship path that will demand everything he has left.
Maya is building a future of her own, including a groundbreaking professional paper inspired by everything Jace has taught her about accountability, self-knowledge and the difference between observing someone and truly knowing them.
Neither of them expected love to feel this quiet.
Or this certain.
But just as they combine their lives and prepare for the next stage of Jace's career, a journalist begins searching for footage from an underground warehouse fight that only six people were supposed to know existed.
Jace has finally stopped hiding from Maya.
Now they must discover what happens when the rest of the world starts looking beneath the surface.
Unguarded is Book Two in Knockout, a high-heat continuing-couple MMA romance series. Jace and Maya's story begins in The Evaluation and continues in Book Three, Below the Surface.
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