I moved into the Garro house just in time for Christmas. It was strange to live in a house filled with a close but busy family. Harleigh Rose went to Entrance Public school, which started fifteen minutes later and ended half an hour earlier than EBA and at first, she spent most of her time out of the house hanging out with her boyfriend but as the month progressed and the Christmas spirit deepened, she spent more and more time at home with the family.
King and Cress were home for winter vacation from university and splitting their time between Zeus’s house and the clubhouse because Cress’s cabin on Back Bay Rd. was undergoing serious renovations. This meant that I walked in on them making out a lot. As in all over the house at all hours of the day. They were two university students without a whole lot to do over break so they mostly just holed up in King’s room in the basement or made out when they surfaced for air.
It was strange living with Zeus. I’d never lived by myself, let alone with a lover before so I’d never experienced tripping over men’s clothes strewn across the floor because he never picked up after himself or falling into the toilet because he never put the goddamn toilet seat down. He was also the Prez of a highly successful, highly illegal MC that turned wicked profits growing top quality BC Bud and selling to distributors, as well as several lucrative lawful businesses that needed minding. On top of all that, his life was his club, which meant that I didn’t see Z as much as I would have thought.
He didn’t have a schedule. He was a biker so he did what he wanted when he wanted and most of the time, he wanted to hang out in the morning fucking me in his bed, eating breakfast with his kids and working his big, hulking body in the gym attached to his garage. In exchange, he wasn’t around much in the evenings so I ended up spending a lot of time with H.R. and Mute, watching TV, playing poker and cooking. Zeus refused to eat the healthy meals Mute made whenever he was in charge of dinner but I was learning to make things he liked, massive platters of lasagna, homemade deep-dish pizza and a meatloaf that was actually good.
I’d even made Christmas dinner with H.R., Cress and Mute and it’d been really fucking good. We’d all eaten at the clubhouse so that we had space for any of the brothers and their families to join us and a lot of them did. When we were done eating, before the serious drinking began, Axe-Man, King and Bat had taken H.R., Cress and me out back to teach us how to use our Christmas presents (identical Sig Sauer hand guns) on bottles they lined up outside. We hadn’t had a Christmas tree or decorations because bikers didn’t go in for that stuff and I didn’t have any money to get presents for anyone so I’d made do with writing them letters, but it was the best Christmas I’d ever spent. Not least of all, because Zeus had surprised me with a new car because Benjamin had mine repossessed the week before.
It was a Camaro and it was kickass in the extreme, silver-and-matte-black just like Z’s Harley.
The past two weeks had been rough because the chemo was hitting me harder now but our New Years Eve party at the clubhouse had been epic.
I didn’t drink or smoke, but I fucked Z in his room in the middle of the chaos because he couldn’t take the sight of me in my fishnet thigh highs and little black skater dress anymore. I’d played pool with Nova, Axe-Man and Boner and laughed with everyone else when Boner lost and was made to drink a pint of toilet water. I danced until I felt dizzy with Lila, let Buck teach me how to play darts even though I already knew how, and had a silent argument with Mute over what playlist to put over the surround speakers until he’d given up with an expressive blink and retreated to the bar for more booze.
It was one of the best nights ever.
But the first day of the New Year was even better because I’d woken up beside my man and I was in the mood to worship at the altar of my god.
I wanted to lick the veins that stood out against his bulging muscles, trace the lattice of roots up to his heart and press my tongue there to taste his heartbeat. I wanted to use my tongue, teeth, lips and fingers to explore every inch of his giant’s body and I’d taken my time doing so, stroking over the coarse hairs on his thick arms and licking over the steep wedges of muscle cutting up his torso into defined lines. I’d done everything but touch his cock for so long that he was growling and shaking like a grumpy bear, his taste gone to salt with sweat under my tongue.
He was laid out for me, his huge body taking up most of our king-sized bed, his thick thighs parted and bent at the knees to make room for my body.
It was only then I’d set my lips to his flushed cock and worked him over with my mouth.
I looked up from my place on my knees into Zeus’s lightning-bright eyes to say, “Happy New Year, Z.”
Then I opened my mouth wide and sucked his entire length down my throat and hummed in triumph as his legs shook, his hands tightened in my hair and his cock jumped in my mouth.
“Fuck yeah,” he growled long and low as he started to cum in my mouth. “Take my cum, little girl.”
A shiver rippled up my spine as his taste filled my mouth, warm and salty, so delicious it made my pussy pulse so close to orgasm all I needed to do was grind my clit against his hair roughened leg to come. So, I did. Gyrating on him like a dirty, wanton girl desperate to get off. He spanked my ass lazily as I climbed up his body to collapse on his chest. He’d wrapped his fist in my hair and taken my mouth, not caring about the taste of himself on my tongue. In fact, loving it because he was a dirty old man and having me young and forbidden in his bed made him want to enact his dirtiest fantasies.
Needless to say, I was loving my life at Zeus’s side, in his house and in his bed.
I’d never smiled so much in my life as I had in the last month of living with him.
I was still smiling when I dragged myself out of his unmade bed to clean up a little in the bathroom. My body felt loose and limber as it only ever did rarely now and always with him. Even my face, gaunt from the chemo, glowed with post-coital satisfaction as I braced my hands on the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My blond hair was tousled all around my face in such aggressive bedhead it made me laugh. I lifted my hands to rake them through my locks and my heart stopped.
Carefully, I continued to pull my fingers to the ends of my hair and brought them down to the sink basin. Thick ribbons of gold silk lay across my palms like an offering to a lover.
No.
No.
I knew this. I remembered it from the first time it had happened ten years ago when my nanny was brushing my hair and it had all started raining down around us like spilled thread.
It was happening again.
I was losing my hair.
A sob bubbled up my throat and burst open in the air.
No.
It was such a stupid, vain thing but I couldn’t stand to lose my hair, not again. Not when I was dating the most gorgeous man I’d ever set eyes on and he looked at me like I was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever dreamt of.
“No,” I choked out on another loud sob that echoed through the big bathroom.
I bent over the sink with my discarded hair in my hands and cried into the porcelain.
Thirty seconds later, Zeus’s rough hands were wrapping around my hips and he was folding his big body over mine.
“Little Lou, babe, what’s wrong with my girl?”
I cried harder.
I hated that he had to go through this with me. He’d already held my hair back while I puked into the toilet until all that was left was bile, putrid and green. He’d taken time out of his busy days to sit with me while the poison therapy churned through my veins, playing poker with me even though he always won and entertaining me with stories about his brothers and his youth. He drove me to every checkup and sat with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed as if he could intimidate the doctors into giving us better news.
And now this.
Now, I was subjecting him to a potentially bald girlfriend.
When I didn’t answer him, he gently pulled my body upright and into his then even more tenderly unfurled my fists. A low sound of sadness rumbled through his chest as he traced a finger over the lost hair in my hands.
“My girl loves her hair,” he muttered.
I nodded, too overcome to trust my voice.
He pressed his nose into the hair above my ear, ducking down slightly so he could do so. Then he started talking in a low voice I felt in my blood, his eyes burnished steel on mine as he traced over my face with two calloused fingertips. “You know what I love, Lou? Love the shape of your face like a heart in my hands, the way your lips look swollen and so fuckin’ lush even ’fore I kiss ’em. Love the way your ribs narrow and your hips curve so there’s this space for my big hand right at your waist. Love the skin behind your knees and ears, at the base of your throat and between your plump tits ’cause it’s so fuckin’ sensitive and it flushes such a pretty pink.”
He spun me away from the mirror and lifted me onto the sink then stepped between my thighs. I tipped my head back to look up into his solemn face because he had such a fierce grip on my heart, I was worried it would rip in two if I disengaged before he let me.
“You lose your moonbeam hair, your bombshell shape and your sexual appetite, I don’t give a fuck. ’Cause I love your soul better than I love anythin’ else and that includes the fan-fuckin-tastic package it comes in. You got me, Lou?”
I couldn’t breathe because he held my breath, couldn’t think because he’d rewritten my thoughts into ones of his own making. He controlled me but only to love me, to make me understand how I could love myself better than I already did.
Suddenly, I understood that I’d insulted him by being heartbroken about my hair. Of course, Z would never care if I were bald or pink-haired or blonde.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
He cupped his hands around my face and pressed a kiss to the tip of my nose. “Love you even when you don’t.”
Another sob catapulted out of my mouth.
He caught it in his as he kissed me, our tongues salty from my tears.
“My girl loves her hair,” he muttered again, scouring my face when he pulled back from me. “Listen, want you to do somethin’ for me.”
“Anything,” I said immediately.
He looked hard into my eyes then nodded and opened the drawer to the left of my hip, pulling out his electric shaver and plugging it into the wall behind me. He never used it unless it was to give his beard a quick trim. My man had a lot of hair, thick gorgeous waves of it that fell to his shoulders like gold-dipped mahogany. It was one of my favourite things to run my hands through the windswept tangles, to tug it while he feasted between my thighs and hold it tight while he kissed me.
I looked up with confusion in my eyes.
“Want you to cut it for me, Lou,” he explained.
“No!” I said immediately.
“Yeah, little warrior. See, it’s important to me you get that I’m in this with you. Can’t suffer what you suffer, can’t take that pain from ya like I want to more than fuckin’ anythin’. But I can stand with you. Don’t know if you’ll lose all that hair but if you do, I wanna do it with you.”
Tears burned in my throat as I tangled my fingers in the ends of his shoulder-length hair. “But I love your hair.”
“You love yours. Mine’ll grow back just like yours.”
My body felt saturated with love, water-logged with gratitude so great that I felt I would drown in it. “What could I have ever done in a past life to deserve a man like you?”
His eyes flashed as he leaned close. “This isn’t about that shit. We deserve each other ’cause we get each other. I know the heart of ya and you know the heart of me. Deservin’ or not deservin’ has nothin’ to do with it and it fuckin’ can’t ’cause if I get to thinkin’ ’bout that question, I lose every time.”
“Z,” I breathed, wrapping my legs around his hips and diving my hands deep into his hair. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t what you are.”
He grinned at me, amused and feeling indulgent. “And what’s that?”
“A true fallen angel, too bad for heaven, too good for hell, stuck on earth like a living divinity.”
“I think I’ll stick to bein’ a monster,” he teased.
But I was serious, and I let him know it by sticking my tongue out at him.
He chuckled. “You’re the fallen angel here, Lou, and I’m never fuckin’ givin’ ya back to Heaven.”
“I’m good with that.”
“Good, now come on. Take this fuckin’ mess off my head,” he ordered.
I watched him from my perch as he stepped back and turned on the bath. His glutes were round, powerful half moons at the base of his strong back and his thick thighs were dusted with dark hair that condensed at his groin and tapered off just above his wide, brown feet.
He was a god, something from ancient times when gods roamed the earth beside mortals and acted wicked and strong just because they fucking well could.
Just like my man.
He turned to me when the bath was set to running and declared, “You can wash my hair first. Like it when you do that for me.”
I liked it too. It was one of the little rituals we’d developed when I’d moved in and we had the opportunity to develop routines. We showered together whenever we could because Zeus liked my curves and he loved them slippery. He also liked my cunt and his fingers slipping among my folds, ostensibly cleaning but really getting me ready to fuck pressed up against the wall or bent over with my hands pressed against.
I’d miss washing that glorious head of hair more than I’d miss washing my own if it all fell out.
But I got where he was coming from because if the situation were reserved, I’d want to do it for him too.
So, I watched as he lowered himself into the tub, his body so big that his limbs barely fit in the big well of it. He hooked his arms and legs over the sides and sank back into the steaming water looking just as ridiculous and strangely charming as a giant taking a bubble bath would.
I giggled through my drying tears and went to sit on the side of the tub, settling his big head in my lap. He hummed like some great beast under my petting hands as I squirted shampoo into them and stroked them through his locks, using my thumbs hard on his skull. Then because I couldn’t help myself, I dragged my sudsy hands down his strong brown throat, rubbing at the corded muscles there and then down farther still, to circle my palms over his marble pectorals and flat, brown nipples. He didn’t have any tattoos on his chest and when I’d asked him about it, he’d told me that there’d never been anything important enough to wear near his heart. He already wore the name of his children on either pulse point at the underside of his wrists. The fact that he was such a good, loving dad turned my crank harder than it should have, given I was only seventeen.
When I was done rinsing his hair with the handheld showerhead, I leaned down to pull the drain and Zeus caught my hands in a firm grip.
We caught eyes.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I warned him.
Of course, he fucking dared.
I screeched as I went tumbling into the bath on top of him.
He laughed so loud it seemed to shake the walls and the water sloshed all around us, over the lip of the tub.
I hit him in the chest.
“Like the look’a ya wet,” he grinned, ducking his chin so he could see my nipples against his chest.
I shook my head at him but didn’t resist the urge to lean down to kiss his full lips. Then because he was Zeus and even though we’d had sex three times in the past twelve hours, we made out until the bathwater was cold.
I drained the water and dried off my man with a towel because the opportunity to do so was any girl’s wet dream. Then I dragged a chair into the bathroom and sat him down with his head resting over the sink and turned on the electric shaver.
I stared at it vibrating in my hand and felt the tears clog my throat again. Zeus opened his eyes from his comfortable laze and grabbed my hand with one of his, totally engulfing it.
He held my eyes as he brought it awkwardly down to the middle front of his hairline and pressed down into his crown of hair.
I sobbed as we cut off an inch from the root in one long, thick strip.
Then I sobbed even harder as we worked together all over his broad scalp until a thick pile of sun-kissed hair lay in the sink and all that was left on his head was a short pelt of mink. I turned off the buzzing shaver and fell into his open arms, straddling his waist and kneeling up so that I could press my palms to each side of his bearded face and kiss all over his newly shaved hair. My tears watered the shorn tresses until they gleamed and then Zeus had had enough and he pulled me down into his arms so he could seal my crying mouth with a hard kiss.
“I got you,” he murmured into my hair. “I got you.”
The Garros and I were going for breakfast at Stella’s Diner to kick the rest of their hangovers. I was holding Z’s big hand even though everyone on Main Street stopped to stare at good girl Louise Lafayette walking beside the notorious Zeus Garro. It made my spirits lift to be able to offend their sensibilities like that so I stopped my man often to plant a big kiss on him just to hear the gasps of offended townsfolk.
Cress was trying to convince me that Satan was the hottest character in the history of the written word.
“Seriously, you should read it. Honestly, I’m thinking of making it a mandatory family read,” she declared with a confidence that moved me.
There was no doubt in her mind that we were all a family. King was her man, I was Zeus’s and therefore we were part of the Garro clan.
The thought warmed me the way being a Lafayette never had.
“I don’t read,” H.R. declared. “Unless it’s magazines.”
Cress gasped and held an agonized hand to her heart.
H.R. giggled.
“Satan kicks ass,” Mute decided to say.
We all stared at him for a second, surprised he’d spoken and even more surprised he’d read such a difficult book.
To my infinite joy, he blushed and looked at me to explain, “King liked it so I read it.”
His best friend slung an arm around his shoulders because that was how he operated, close and casual, even with a man who didn’t like to be touched. “I fuckin’ agree. Satan’s the shit. And hey, if Mute’s read it then H.R., you gotta too.”
She rolled her eyes. “Unlike you, I’m not trying to get into Cress’s pants so I’m gonna pass.”
All of us, even Mute, laughed.
King smiled smugly and tucked Cress under his other arm. “Who said I was still tryin’?”
It was Cress’s turn to roll her eyes. “The second you stop trying is the second I’m gone.”
King winked at me, completely unperturbed by the threat. “She’s fulla shit. Got my fuckin’ words tattooed on her skin. She knows she’s my Queen for fuckin’ life.”
I laughed at their banter as I always did and started to unwrap a cherry lollipop. I noticed with feminine satisfaction that Zeus’s burning gaze immediately landed on my mouth. I pretended not to notice him as I rolled the round red treat between my lips then sucked it hard into my mouth.
He groaned softly and the hand in mine pulled away so he could tuck it into the back pocket of my jeans and squeeze my ass.
I was so distracted by his wicked grin that I didn’t notice when we all pulled up in front of Bones Barber Shop. It was only when the bells chimed over the door as we entered the old-fashioned wood-paneled space that I stopped to take in my surroundings.
There were brothers everywhere. Men in leather cuts with long hair and long beards looking hungover as shit because it was the first day of the New Year and they’d partied hard in only the way true rebels know how to party the night before.
I frowned at them all.
“Stella’s is down the street,” I informed them.
“Nothin’ funny,” Nova declared, wincingly holding his handsome head from where he was sprawled half in and half out of a chair. “In fact, no fuckin’ talkin’ ’less it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Hit the bottle too hard last night?” Cress laughed at him.
He grinned. “Two bottles of Patrón and a pair of twins up from Vancouver. Was fuckin’ worth it.”
“Seriously, what are we all doing here?” I asked, turning to Zeus because he was being conspicuously silent.
He stared at me with his arms crossed, his booted feet spread apart like a general about to issues orders for war.
“Told the brothers why I cut off my hair. They’re here to do the same.”
I blinked at him and in that time, the tears came.
Fuck but I hated to cry but fuck if this wasn’t the time to do it.
I brought my fist to my mouth to stop the sobs and turned slowly again to face the twenty odd bikers coalesced in the room. They all stared at me with varying degrees of solemnity.
“Don’t try an’ talk us outta it, Foxy,” Buck grumbled from his chair. He had coarse grey hair he wore in a short queue at the back of his red neck. “Not askin’ your permission. Just figured you’d wanna be a part of it.”
I took a deep breath, in and out as I felt the Garros surround my back and H.R. came up beside me to take my hand.
“Cress and I are cuttin’ ours too. Just to our shoulders but we got long hair and we’re gonna donate the clippings to the cancer foundation that makes wigs for chemo patients,” she explained in a sweet voice I only heard from her rarely, usually when she was speaking to her dad, brother or Cress.
And she was using it with me. While holding my hand. And telling me that she was going to cut off half of her thick, crazy-beautiful hair for me.
“This is way too much,” I whispered because my voice wouldn’t work properly past the lump in my throat.
Zeus’s heat hit my back a second before his arms wrapped around me and his voice moved through my body as he said, “Nothin’s ever too much for family.”
I deep breathed as I stood in the circle of Z’s arms, in the circle of his blood family and within the greater circle of his chosen one and I knew then if I’d ever doubted it before, that I had made the right choice in choosing Z,and more, in believing enough in myself to have made that choice at all.
He waited a beat to let me collect myself then stepped forward, rolling up the sleeves of the black Henley he wore under his cut and saying, “Let’s get this show on the fuckin’ road so we can hit Stella’s for some fuckin’ grease and pancakes. Someone hand me one of those fuckin’ shavers. I’m doin’ Nova’s hair. That pretty boy’s always had it comin’ to ’im.”
