King sat up, ignoring the way my mouth dropped open at the sight of his beautifully masculine naked chest. “Weirder than fuckin’ while they’re waitin’ on us downstairs? Weirder than the fact that my Dad’s pretending to date you to give you protection against your motherfuckin’ asshole of an ex? Weirder even than the fact that you just took my cock, a-fuckin’-gain and you fuckin’ love it more and more each time?”
“There’s no need to be crass,” I told him.
“There’s also no need to be a bitch for the sake of fuckin’ propriety. I’m into you in a big way, Cress, think I’ve made that pretty fuckin’ clear. What you also need to be clear on is this; I may be younger than you, I may be your student in the classroom, but here, with us and in real life, I’m a man who knows what he wants and takes it. No questions asked and definitely no regrets. That’s the kind of man I am. Now, I get that you don’t really know what kinda woman you are because you were tied like a puppet on strings for your ex and your parents. I get it. Doesn’t mean I’m going to stick around and put up with this bullshit. I’m not making excuses or apologies and I’m tired of yours. I’m not judgin’ you for your past but you keep judgin’ me for mine. You want this thing to work, you gotta make it work for you, Cress, and fast.”
“This thing? King, honey, seriously, we cannot have a thing,” I said softly, but even to me I sounded like a broken record.
“Yeah?” he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me. It would have been funny, the idea of this gorgeous blond man sitting cross-legged and cross-armed naked in my bed trying to convince me to be with him. Any sane or insane woman would jump at the chance.
I know I did.
“Tell me why we can’t do this,” he dared me, as if he was asking me to debate something difficult, the ethics of capitalism or the merits of torture techniques in modern day interrogation.
“Um, okay. One, I’m your teacher and therefore in a position of power over you,” I ignored his ignoble snort, “so even though you are technically an adult,” another snort, “I can still very much be fired and raked over reputation-ruining coals if anyone finds out about us. Two, the age difference. I may have just gotten out of a mediocre marriage but that doesn’t mean I’m over the idea of having a husband and a family some day in the future. You’re eighteen and you have your whole life ahead of you. And finally, you’re seriously involved with a criminal organization and whether you decided to patch in or not, that will always be a significant part of your life seeing as your father is the President of The Fallen. I’m a soon-to-be divorcee who has only done three bad things in her life and doing them nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“What three things?” he asked, making me feel like he wasn’t really listening to me.
I counted them off on my fingers for him. “I took a drag of your dad’s cigarette yesterday. When I was eighteen, I accidently led a man on when I was really drunk at a bar. I slept with you.”
“Slept with me implies you’ve only done it once,” King pointed out reasonably. “I’ve been inside you four times in the last twenty-four hours and I had my tongue in you twice before that.”
“I think you’re missing the point,” I reminded him.
He shrugged one shoulder. “You always tell us in class to be specific so, I’m just sayin’, be specific.”
I rolled my eyes and leaned forward to punch him in one of his delicious pecs. “Do not use my own words against me!”
He snagged my wrist and tugged so that I toppled over onto him and he fell flat on his back. “I’ll do whatever I gotta do to get you to hear me. One, we’re careful. I’ll probably still fuck you at school because, babe, you bein’ my teacher is not a turn-off, but we’ll be careful. I know you need the job, I got it. Two, I may be a high school student but like I told you, I’m a man. We see where this goes and we like it, I’m into babies and in a way that’s more than just likin’ the idea of planting them in you.” He waggled his eyebrows and cupped my bare sex, still wet from our sex.
I shoved at his hand but only to distract myself from the thought of blonde, pale-eyed babies that looked exactly like King.
“As for the criminal stuff, I don’t got much to defend myself other than to say, I’m not asking you to push drugs or lie to the police or carry a gun. I’m asking you to trust that I won’t get you involved in any of that. But honestly, right now, I’m just askin’ you to give the life a try.”
I bit my lip as my thoughts spun fast and clunky like an overfull washing machine, churning our combined baggage over in my mind.
This was what I’d asked for, what I’d only dared to dream of for the last twenty some-odd-years. A life of adventure with a man strong enough to anchor me through it.
I looked up through my eyelashes at King and asked a question as my answer, “You think I’d look good in leather?”
He blinked then wrapped his arms tight around me and burst into laughter.
“Oh my God, that is totally smokin’ on you!” Harleigh Rose shouted at me even though I was only a meter away from her in the small change room of Revved & Ready Clothing.
I also did not think the tight leather mini dress with a V-neck that plunged down to my naval looked ‘totally smokin’ on me. I thought I looked like a poorly made blood sausage.
I told her so.
She laughed, but I’d already learned that, like her brother, Harleigh Rose loved to laugh and she did so freely, beautifully, with her mouth spread wide over her teeth and her hand pressed to her belly. She was only fourteen but she was already a knockout, with a huge head of streaky blonde hair, enormous eyes that were a deep, true blue, and legs so long they seemed to sprout from her ears. Now, if anyone could pull off the dress I was currently trying to wear, it would have been her.
“Yeah, it’s a bit much,” Maja agreed.
This was Buck’s ‘old lady’ (a term I’d just learned meant something a little more intense than ‘girlfriend’ but could also mean ‘wife’). She was wearing skin-tight, distressed blue jeans that rode so low on her hips, I could easily see the stamp across her back that declared her ‘Buck’ed up.’ A fifty-something woman, she wore the outfit surprisingly well, probably because she looked like a) she didn’t give a fuck what you thought and b) if you voiced your unwanted opinion about said outfit in any way, she’d fuck you up.
Seriously, the woman carried a gun in her metal-studded clutch purse.
I knew because she’d showed me in the car on the way to the store.
“I think you should try on the pink one,” Tayline commented from her spot on the floor. She held a tub of popcorn on her lap that she’d bought from the old school movie theatre across the street. Apparently, she never went shopping without sustenance.
“Agreed, we need to sex her up a bit,” Cleo chimed in. She was two years younger than me and her dad was also a member of The Fallen who apparently went by the name of Axe-Man.
I didn’t know where they came up with these names and when I’d asked the ladies, they’d laughed at me but not in a mean way, more in a ‘bikers are crazy people, what can we say’ kind of way.
“I think King wants to sex her up enough as it is,” Harleigh Rose told the others with a wrinkled nose. “He spent like an hour and a half upstairs ‘comforting’ her after her crazy parents and ex-hubby blew through.”
“Jealous,” Cleo breathed with stars in her eyes.
“Rock on,” Lila crowed. She wasn’t anyone’s old lady or relation but she seemed to be an intrinsic part of the group that had assembled at the store to help me pick out something appropriate for me to wear to my first biker party.
When I blushed, Hannah, the owner of Revved & Ready and a woman who showed most of her skin but most of it was tattooed so it was somehow cool instead of indecent, waved away my embarrassment by saying, “Girl, I’ve been livin’ in Cougar Town a long time. Can’t say it’s a bad place to be. Those boys can keep a woman satisfied all through the night.”
“Um, ew,” Harl
eigh Rose made a puking sound. “We’re talking about my brother here, Han. Can you maybe rein in your inner pervert?”
“One day you’ll meet a man and you’ll understand,” Hannah told her.
Harleigh Rose made a face but then quickly ducked behind a thick sheet of her hair so she could hide her flush.
Interesting.
But I was really done with the talk of my sex life with my student so I retreated back into the change room while mumbling something about trying on the pink dress.
Seconds later, Tay pushed through the curtain with her popcorn bucket tucked under her arm and took a seat on the stool. When I paused in my undressing, she said, “Oh go on, it’s not anything I haven’t seen before.”
“Yeah, on yourself. Not on me,” I pointed out.
“Girls get naked in front of each other, Cressida, it’s not a big deal,” she said like I was stupid but then she winced. “I’m sorry, I know you’re new to the whole ‘normal social behavior’ thing.”
“Somehow I doubt this is normal social behavior,” I answered drily but I did wiggle out of the leather dress.
“So, are we going to talk about the last forty-eight hours or what?” she asked just before she unhinged her jaw and shoved a fistful of popcorn into it.
I sighed, but I’d known this was coming since the moment the bell chimed above the door as Harleigh Rose dragged me into the store to meet some of the biker babes and Tayline ended up being one of them.
After King and I finally got out of bed to shower (together in the end, so it took a little longer than normal), we’d joined Zeus and Harleigh Rose in the living room where they’d made themselves totally at home. The pack of beer my dad had left behind was beside Zeus as he reclined in my huge leather chair and he was already on his fourth one while Harleigh Rose had appropriated one of my romance novels and was reading it while sitting upside down on the couch.
I’d worried that it would be awkward because, well, it was awkward. Instead, the Garro family had all acted like we spent every Sunday together like some kind of screwed up modern day family.
It was the best Sunday I’d ever had.
Harleigh Rose helped me cook. Not because we were ladies, but because the men were bikers and the only things they could successfully do with their hands was make engines roar and ladies purr (this they told me themselves). When I’d opened my mouth to sass them, King’s sister had quietly informed me that they would cook if I wanted them to but that it would be far from edible.
So, we cooked.
And I found out that Harleigh Rose was hilarious, confident in the way of only the most well-loved kids, and utterly genuine. She gabbed away the entire time about boys (of all whom seemed to like her but none of whom she seemed to like), girls (much the same deal), and how awesome The Fallen was. I wondered if Zeus and King had elected her the MC spokesperson because she waxed on about how they organized huge charity fundraisers every year, how well renowned the garage was in the automotive community and how cool it was to grow up with so many ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles.’ It struck me hardest when she talked about her mum and how much of a ‘total bitch’ she was but how much it meant to her to have all the biker babes to talk to about things she couldn’t go to her mum about.
I wanted that.
It was obvious that Harleigh Rose noticed because when we all sat down to dinner at my rickety dining table that I’d bought from a garage sale for forty bucks, she’d informed the guys that they were going to throw a BBQ to celebrate the start of Spring Break and to properly introduce me into The Fallen.
I was terrified and I objected until I was blue in the face, but both Garro men seemed to think it was an awesome idea so by the time I served the apple pie I’d made for King that morning, the news had spread through the biker network and plans were set.
Which led me to that moment in the changing room with Tayline, trying on clothes because Harleigh Rose had raced up to my bedroom after dinner to check my closet for ‘party gear’ and found nothing suitable. She’d rounded up some of the biker babes, calling it a ‘total fashion emergency, like ‘9-1-fuckin’-1’ and dragged me out of the house to meet them all at Revved & Ready.
My heart had been lodged somewhere in my throat even before I’d seen Tayline. Telling more people our secret didn’t seem ‘careful’ of us but when I’d tried to express that to King, he’d laughed and said, “babe,” in that way of his that was supposed to be enough of an answer.
I told him he did that and I didn’t like it, which made him laugh some more. But then he’d said, “Babe, The Fallen is a fuckin’ vault. You think anyone is gonna nark on the fact that the son of the Prez is fuckin his teacher? Not fuckin’ likely.”
When he put it like that, it was difficult to argue with him.
Tayline knowing was a whole new kettle of fish.
For one, she was my friend and she now knew that I’d kept a pretty colossal secret from her. Our friendship was new but I loved it, loved her. She was tiny but enormously personable, pretty but unafraid of the ugly truth. Tayline Brooks was the kind of woman who lived the way I wanted to live and I’d be crushed if I’d lost out on having a friend like her because she decided I was a gross perv for sleeping with a student.
Then, of course, there was the unassailable fact that she was my colleague at the school where said student and I conducted our professional (and sometimes overly personal) relationship. Ethically, she was honor bound to tell the Headmaster about my inappropriate transgressions. This time tomorrow morning, I could be out of a job and known across Entrance as a whore.
“Told you that night in McClellan’s,” her soft voice pulled me away from my miserable inner monologue. “A man without respect for the law isn’t a man without respect for anything. That kind of man sees a woman he wants, he’s gonna have her even if she doesn’t want him at first. Fuckin’ wear her down ‘til she’s can’t even remember the reasons he wasn’t supposed to be her dream man.”
I slowly turned around to look at her, my heart jumping from my throat to my mouth. I felt like I was going to throw it up.
Her huge brown eyes were wide and sad on me. “I’m trying to tell you that I understand. First off, the kid is sinfully hot. Like honestly, they shouldn’t send a student like that to anywhere but a monastery. Even then,” she shook her head, “he could probably give them some lessons in corruption if you know what I’m saying.”
Despite myself, I snorted with laughter.
She sobered quickly. “I’m telling you I get it but I’m also really worried, Cress. I know you look like a Disney Princess but this is real life and I think you know enough to understand that happily ever afters don’t happen real often. Not saying it couldn’t happen for you and King but given the circumstances, you can’t think the odds are in your favor.”
“Trust me,” I muttered. “I don’t. Honest to goodness, Tay, I don’t even know how I got here. One second I’m married and miserable, the next I’m sleeping with a freaking teenage boy.”
“And loving it,” Tayline guessed accurately.
I nodded and slumped against the wall, only vaguely registering that I was still half naked. “Loving it. He’s even hotter than Satan, Tay.”
“You’re so weird.”
“And he’s sweet too, in a badass biker kind of way that’s even better than normal levels of sweet because it’s so manly.” I shivered delicately.
She laughed and stuffed another handful of popcorn in her mouth. “Cy is the same way. You’ve got to watch yourself, The Fallen men take you by surprise. They look broken in ways that can’t be fixed but once you get to the heart of them, you find the kind of men most women would pray for, beg, and bribe to be with.”
“Yeah,” I agreed softly. “And mine just happens to be eighteen.”
“In ten years, you’ll love the age difference.”
“You sound like King. I’m not even legally divorced yet, he’s still in school and he’s talking like we’ll be together for… a while
.” I shivered, this time in discomfort.
Tay cocked her head and peered at me. “Do you really think you’d jeopardize your career and your reputation for something that isn’t going last ten years?”
Her question hit my soul like a hammer to a gong, reverberating through me. The blast set things that had fallen off kilter in my whirlwind affair with King back into place but at new angles.
I wanted the same things that I always did. Love, laughter and living large right beside fear, anger and tears. I wanted it all, every single thing life had to offer me. It was actually fitting that each one of those things was wrapped up pretty in King Kyle Garro. Like all good covetable things, he wasn’t wholly good for me, which made him all the more desirable.
“Glad I could talk some sense into you,” Tay joked when she’d had enough of my daze epiphany.
I laughed. “I love you, Tayline. Really. Thank you for trying to understand.”
She stood up, carefully placed her popcorn on the ground so it wouldn’t spill, and crossed the two steps it took for her to wrap me in her little arms for a big hug.
“Welcome to crazy town, population badass bikers and their bitches, us sane ones have to stick together.”
Later, after I’d tried on six more outfits and finally settled on one that I knew would blow King’s mind, the biker babes and I were at Eugene’s just outside of town drinking a Eugene classic cocktail he’d made up called a Maple Sour that was basically just a whiskey sour with maple syrup. It was delicious, and I told Eugene it was officially my drink of choice. I was on my third one.
“The man’s got one eye, how the fuck does he stay on target?” Maja asked Tayline who had just recounted a tale of her sexual escapades with Cy (apparently short for Cyclops) on a trampoline in some random backyard one night after they’d been drinking.
“He compensates in other, more important areas,” was Tay’s sly response.
Lessons In Corruption (The Fallen Men Series Book 1) Page 19
