I woke up to thunder.
It took me a moment to understand that it was manmade. The deep growl of motorcycles as they travelled as a group through the streets of Entrance had become familiar and I recognized the sound now as it descended on the front of my property.
I jumped out of bed, mindless of my pretty little rose patterned nightgown, and flew to the window to draw back the curtain just in time to see at least ten bikes roll down my steep driveway. I spotted the golden blond head of the man responsible for my rude wakeup call immediately.
Without thinking, I pushed open the old window and leaned out to yell, “King Kyle Garro, what in the hell do you think you are doing bringing this riffraff to my home at the crack of dawn on a Saturday?”
He continued swinging off his bike and ignored me as a huge white truck came down the drive. I watched as he directed it to the only space left to park at the front of the house, on an old flowerbed that was now just dry dirt.
“King!” I called again.
“Hold on a sec, babe,” he called without turning around.
“I’m not your babe, I’m your teacher,” I yelled at him.
A few of the men chuckled but otherwise, everyone ignored me.
As soon as the truck was parked, the men converged on it, pulling tools, buckets and heavy equipment out of the loaded cab. Most of The Fallen men wore their cuts but tons of them were shirtless beneath them, some had even shrugged off their jackets to reveal worn, dirty tees over old jeans and athletic shorts.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I called again, so furious and confused that I didn’t even blush at the curse.
“Why don’t you come down and find out?” King shouted, finally turning around to face me hanging out of the window. “But before you do, put on some clothes would you? My brothers don’t need to see how fuckin’ cute you look in that nightie.”
“Might motivate us to work harder?” Nova suggested.
King hit his friend on the back of the head but I ducked out of the window, suddenly intensely aware of how much skin I’d exposed to all the guys out there. I rushed to my closet, donned an old pair of jeans that I’d long ago cut into shorts and one of my book t-shirts, this one with The Great Gatsby cover on the front. I dashed into the bathroom, stared at my sleep swollen eyes and rumpled brown waves but decided I didn’t have time to do anything but secure my hair back with a lavender bandana wrapped around the crown of my head.
“King,” I called even before I had the front door fully open.
“Yeah, babe?”
I stopped abruptly as I watched him carry a huge bag of soil out of the truck and dump it on a growing pile beside my front yard. Four bikers followed suite while the rest had disappeared.
“The others are round back. Told ‘em to finish the weedin’ so we can move on to the serious stuff,” King said as he dropped the bag and ambled over to me.
I stood stupefied as he leaned in to press a kiss to my cheek.
He smelled like laundry and sweaty, hardworking man. My knees wobbled but through sheer strength of will, I remained standing instead of diving into his arms.
“What are you doing here?” I said instead.
He cocked his head to the side. “Whaddya mean?”
“What. Are. You. Doing. Here?”
“Babe,” he said with a frown. “You needed help with your yard, yeah? I brought my brothers. We’re gonna spend the morning working on it and you’re gonna reward us by making some of that pulled pork Rainbow Lee is always talkin’ about.”
“King,” I started, incredulity and awe at odds in my voice. “I’m not even going to ask you how you know about my pulled pork. But you’re my student, not my boyfriend. You can’t just be at my house and you certainly can’t bring gang members here!”
His frown screwed tighter. “Right. Let me get this straight. My brothers show up to help you with your yard work because they wanna help you out and you call them fuckin’ gang members? What the hell, Cress?”
Shame doused my anger like a bucket of cold water. “Ugh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way, I just—”
“Shut up, I wasn’t finished,” King growled, stepping close to me so that he could lean down into my face. The only thing that kept his posture from being totally threatening was the hand that found its way to the back of my neck, under my hair. I realized that he did it when he wanted to connect with me, when he needed to reassure both of us that I was his. It scared me how much I liked it. How much I needed it too.
He is your fucking student, Cressida, the adult, respectable, and moral side of me reminded myself.
He is also hot as fuck when he’s like this, the other side, the darker, deviant one that had always lived deep inside me but was steadily clawing closer and closer to the surface of my being.
“Second, you’re right. I’m not your fuckin’ boyfriend. Children have girlfriends and boyfriends. Idiots let their women walk around unclaimed, secured by a fuckin’ hope and a prayer because they don’t make their women feel owned, cherished like the ultimate prize. No, I am your man, babe. The fuckin’ man that sees you strugglin’ to make ends meet because of your prick of a soon-to-be ex-husband so he calls in his brothers to help her out even though he knows they’ll give him shit for being pussy whipped. I’m your fuckin’ man because I love being that for you. Now, do you hear me?”
My breath panted out in the sliver of air between us. His words had me wound up like a toy, ready to spring further without any thought to the consequences. I tried to think of all the reasons I couldn’t let this man be my man and the first one that sprang to mind was, stupidly, what I went with.
“You can’t be my man because you’re still a boy. You’re eighteen, King.”
Even though his eyes were pale, like sunshine on ice, they were perpetually affable. He was a happy, social guy with innate charisma and a wealth of charm, a guy who loved life and was generally stoked to be living it. So, it was with actual terror that I watched those eyes drain of all warmth.
His hand on the back of my neck squeezed almost painfully.
“I got work to do, so I’m going to ignore your repeated attempts to piss me off until after the guys leave and I can show you just how much of a fuckin’ man I am.”
I swallowed painfully at the look of disgusted reproach in his eyes as he pulled away from me, already shouting orders at the men.
“It’s real hard to piss that boy off, but sure looks like you succeeded,” the deep rumble of a familiar voice came from behind me and I knew before I even turned around that Zeus Garro was standing there.
He looked as enormous and dangerous as ever, too hot for anyone’s good, hotter even than his son if you liked a man who looked like he could literally and easily kill someone with his bare hands.
Unlike the other guys, he was still leaning against his bike, wearing his leather jacket, smoking a cigarette in a way that said he knew how to make love to a woman and, conversely, that he didn’t give a fuck about your opinion of his cancer stick.
Still, I said, “Those will kill you.”
Because I was looking for it, I saw the flash of humor light his eyes, nearly the same color as his son’s but more silver than pale blue.
“Maybe it’s not such a surprise you piss him off,” he amended.
I shrugged helplessly and went over to his bike to lean on the huge metal beast with him. There was something about King’s father, someone whose very posture dared anyone to fuck with him, that put me oddly at ease. I knew he wasn’t interested in me, that he didn’t condemn me for lusting after his son or having an ugly yard or a messed up marriage. Zeus Garro didn’t give a fuck about anyone until he did, and then he didn’t care who you were or what you’d once done.
I had a feeling that I was edging into the latter category and it made me warm inside the way pleasing my parents to keep their affection, or obeying William because it was my duty as his wife, had never done.
Zeus offered me the damp tip of his cigarette. When I raised my eyebrows at him dubiously, he hitched a shoulder and said, “Can’t hate it if you’ve never tried it.”
I peered at him, thought about how I’d never done drugs, not even smoked a joint, never had sex in public, stolen a lighter from the gas station or kissed a stranger. I thought about how I’d left William so that I could finally live, let the darker me finally breathe, and I’d barely done that.
I took the cigarette and put it to my lips, drawing in a tiny puff. Zeus watched me, his lips already curled before I started coughing like my lungs were on fire. He chuckled deeply as he thumped me on the back with a meaty paw.
“Not for everyone,” he admitted.
“You,” I said between fits of hacking, “knew I would hate it.”
“Woman, there isn’t much I don’t know and most I learned, I learned from tryin’. Purest way to live life.”
“Why don’t you stick to the biker marauding and I’ll do the teaching,” I advised drily, tossing the cigarette to the ground to stomp on it with my bright pink flip flop.
When I was done, I stared up at Zeus with a sassily tipped chin.
He burst out laughing; throwing his head back the way King did, exposing his thick, beautifully corded throat. I was shocked into silence by the magnificence of the man and of the privilege I knew it was to see him laugh.
“Hey, old man,” King shouted from the side of the house. “Just ‘cause I’m mad at her doesn’t mean you can hit on my woman. Find someone uglier who’s willin’ to put up with your horrible mug!”
“For Pete’s sake, I am not your woman,” I yelled back, hands immediately fisting on my hips.
Zeus stared at me, humor forgotten. “Boy’s got it bad for you, teach. He’s made no fuckin’ bones about it. He wants you. In his mind, it’s a done deal. Raised ‘em spoiled but you can’t blame me. My ex-wife is a crazy cunt, so I mighta overcompensated, but he’s a good kid, a good son and brother, and one day he’ll be a good man for The Fallen. He’d make a damn good partner too, all that love and loyalty wound up in him just waitin’ to unspool and attach itself to the right people.”
“I see where King gets his poetic talent from,” I said quietly, because I wished I didn’t have to say it. “But I’m his teacher. No matter how we met, it doesn’t negate the fact that being with him would not only be unethical it would be socially unacceptable.”
“Never grew up carin’ about what people thought of me so can’t speak from experience when I say, who the fuck cares?”
“Ugh, the school board, maybe? I need this job,” I reminded him. “Not everyone can run a marijuana empire.”
Zeus’s eyes flashed. “Like your sense of humor, teach, but that ain’t something you should joke about, ya hear me?”
“Yeah,” I swallowed back my instantaneous fear. “I hear you.”
He nodded curtly, uncrossed his arms to rise fully to his impressive height and faced me. “Point is, I don’t give a fuck if you wanna be with my son. Far as I’m concerned, you’re both consenting adults and you seem like a decent broad, a little skinny for my tastes but hey, if my son likes it,” he shrugged, humor dancing in his eyes as I drew up to snap at him. “Easy, teach, I get you. Life’s tough when you care what people think. You got a job, friends who might judge you. Just sayin’ you can always get another job, new friends. The bitches at the MC aren’t bad women. You’d like ‘em. Decide you want to do this, I’ll get Maja, Buck’s woman, to give you a call. She runs the MC bitches.”
“This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had,” I admitted. “And, just to say, calling women bitches in 2017 is totally misogynistic.”
He shrugged one huge shoulder. “Like I said, don’t really care ‘bout those kinds of things. She’s a fuckin’ peach, changed Buck’s shit luck for the better. I think the world of her, so what difference does it make?” He watched me absorb his compelling but bizarre biker philosophy and nodded. “And, just to say, you’ll probably have more of ‘em, you stick with my son. The kid’s a piece of work.”
“Thank you, by the way,” I said quickly, sensing he was about done with me. “For yesterday. William is being surprisingly tenacious.”
His eyes swept over me. “Not so surprising.”
“That’s nice but really, he didn’t care much about me when I lived with him so I don’t really get why he cares now.”
“Men don’t like losin’ what’s theirs, especially if it’s a pretty little teacher with sass but a serious thirst to please. He’s pride hurt and a man like Willie-boy can’t stand that. I’m workin’ on something so he gets the fuckin’ picture but for now, he thinks you’re with me and, he’s a lawyer and a smart man, he’ll back off.”
“I think more than just William thinks I’m with you,” I ventured, thinking about those noses pressed to the glass while we had our parking lot altercation.
It occurred to me that a lot of life changing events happened to me in parking lots.
Zeus shrugged his mighty shoulders. “What do I care if people think I got myself some hot teacher ass?”
“King’s, um, okay with that insinuation?”
“For now.”
I swallowed painfully but didn’t question his vague and terrifying response.
I stood up and moved away from the bike because even though I was reeling, it was clear he had said his piece and was going to leave. The Prez of the club had more important things to do than help a lady in her garden, but I deeply appreciated, in a strange way, his taking the time to comfort me, to give me his take on the situation. It also disturbed me to know I essentially had his parental consent to fuck his son.
