WAYLON (Ruthless MC 1)

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” My voice comes out a strangled whisper. I’m so ashamed.

No more sexy thoughts, all I want to do is run away and hide.

But when I try to get up—to end this farce, I can’t. He’s got an iron-clad hold on me, and for some reason, he’s not letting up.

“You need to let me go.” I reach down and try to pry the hand he has wrapped around my waist loose. “I don’t—I don’t want to hurt you.”

But my attempts to get free only make him pull me in that much closer. “All you ever did was fix me and take care of me. You ain’t going to quit that and start hurting me now.”

He sounds so confident, but… “That’s almost what I just did. I slapped you, and if you didn’t have such quick reflexes, I could’ve hurt you.”

“You think that tap you gave me is enough to scare me off?” He chuckles like we’re talking about spilled tea, not a full-on slap across the face for no reason at all. “You could punch me, and I still wouldn’t get mad.”

“I have punched someone before,” I confess in a whisper. “I’m weird and way too jumpy in bed.”

“Yeah, I’m noticing that.” He lifts both eyebrows. “What happened?”

“It’s stupid. Whenever anyone does anything I’m not expecting, I just lash out without thinking. I once broke a guy’s nose in high school when he tried to reach up under my shirt.”

Waylon lets out a low chuff. “That’s a funny story.”

But then he looks up at me, his expression deadly serious. “That ain’t what I’m asking, though. You need to tell me what happened to make you jumpy in the first place so I don’t trigger it again.”

I freeze. All these years of bedroom disasters, and not one guy has ever asked me that. I don’t know how…I can’t answer.

“Somebody touched you?” he guesses despite my lack of answer. “In one of them foster places?”

Saliva floods my mouth, threatening to make me lose my dinner. Social workers didn’t guess. They talked about how lucky I was to receive a foster to adopt placement. Even after they hauled Ant out of the house and deposited him in juvie, they didn’t guess—just assumed the sweet boy who walked into that house had somehow become a tween capable of violence on his own.

But the biker guessed? How?

“Yeah, that’s what happened,” he says into all my silence. “And you don’t want to talk about it. I get that.”

He gets that, but he doesn’t let me go. He pulls me forward again—this time to press his forehead into mine, and…that’s it.

He doesn’t try to kiss me again. Doesn’t let me go. Just holds me there. It’s weird and tender and unbelievably intimate somehow, even if we’re not doing anything remotely sexual.

“You should let me go,” I whisper. “This was a bad idea.”

“Fourth Rule: if you want to be good in bed, don’t tell a man it was a bad idea to have sex with him.”

I almost laugh. Almost. “The lesson is over. There’s something wrong with me. There’s no way you want to keep on going. I’m broken, and I don’t know how to fix myself enough to be able to do this with you. Or anyone.”

“Fifth Rule: Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

He scrapes a hand over my hair. “You ain’t broken, angel. You’re perfect. And all I want right now is to show you that. But it ain’t going to be easy because….”

“I’m awful,” I finish for him.

“Because I’m an impatient mother fucker,” he corrects. “But that’s alright. I can and will make myself go slow. For you.”

“You shouldn’t—” I start to say.

“You like the way I kissed you?” he asks before I can finish my sentence.

“I mean, sure, yes, but—”

Once again, he interrupts me before I can finish. “Good. We both agree we like the kissing part. So we’ll do more of that, then when you’re ready, you take my hand and put it where we want it to go.”

Where we want it to go…

His words sizzle through me. More command than suggestion, even though he’s technically putting me in charge.

I don’t know how to respond to that. But then it turns out I don’t have to. He takes my mouth.

And before I can come up with a good reason not to continue with the lesson, we’re kissing again.

At first, I can’t relax. I can only think about what he guessed. What I don’t talk about to anyone. Not even Ant. Terrible memories and anxious thoughts swarm my brain. I can only imagine how stiff I must feel—like making out with a scared piece of wood.

But he just keeps on kissing me. Slow and languid this time. No pressure. He lazily moves his mouth over mine like we have all the time in the world and didn’t just have an awkward conversation about the real reason I’m so terrible in bed.