But we made exceptions.
Hot guy exceptions, usually.
“Well, if it isn’t the prettiest girl I’ve seen,” Sway greeted, always laying it on thick.
“You clearly didn’t glance Nyx’s way yet then,” I shot back before letting my gaze slide across the table.
It took effort, but I made sure Judge was the last man I looked at.
But when I did, I could see his hungry gaze moving back up from doing a once-over.
And I swear every inch of me he looked at felt like it had suddenly burst into flame.
He looked even better than I remembered. He’d grown scruff that was shaped like a beard, which only added to his hotness.
Prison had made him a little wider, a little more solidly built.
I imagined if I was locked in a cage for four years, I might pick up a weight training routine too.
It was only four years, but I felt like the time had carved away some of the boyishness from his looks. It had chiseled out his cheeks a bit, and had sharpened his jaw.
He had to be, what, twenty-nine? Maybe closing in on thirty.
Still the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen.
“Hey,” I greeted.
Yep.
Hey.
Four years to consider all the things I might say to him when he possibly waltzed back into my life. And what I came up with… was hey.
Maybe I needed to become a nun.
It would at least give my virginity some meaning. And not just because, you know, I was awkward and about as sexy as tapioca pudding.
I figured, in the grand scheme of things, that was possibly the least sexy thing in the world.
Just try to think of tapioca pudding without picturing a kindly old senior gumming it.
Exactly.
You can’t.
I rest my case.
To that, Judge’s lips tipped up just ever so slightly.
“You wanna get out of here?”
That was it.
No flirting.
No working myself up into knots over how ridiculous I was acting.
Nope.
He was cutting right to the chase.
I knew I shouldn’t have felt as excited as I did.
After all, to a starving man, even tapioca pudding was a treat.
What can I say?
If he was hungry, I was more than willing to be his meal.
“Absolutely,” I said, putting my pad and pen down on the table as he got to his feet.
With that, he slung an arm over my shoulder, and we were heading out.
Over my shoulder, I caught sight of Nyx who quickly made a plucking motion, and then mimed me calling her on the phone after.
Giving her a nod, I walked off to the unknown with a man I’d wanted for years.
CHAPTER THREE
Judge
The clubhouse was pretty much exactly what you expected from a long-abandoned factory.
It was three floors of too much space to fill.
The first floor was the main living area.
The club had done a good job making it look halfway habitable. The actual bones were the same. Lots of glass windows. Brick walls. Exposed rusted metal beams across the ceiling.
But they’d given it a sort of house feel by creating an open-concept layout.
From the front door, you walked into a makeshift foyer where helmets were lined up on a long bench and keys were hanging from nails under each helmet.
From there, you moved into the living room/common area. It was a sprawling space with a massive TV, sound system, and an overly large sectional.
Right beyond that was a small game area with a pool table with bright purple felt, a foosball table, an air hockey table, and darts set up.
Toward the back was one sectioned off space where, I imagined, a bathroom could be found. And then the kitchen was to the side of that.
It was an industrial-looking space with oversized, commercial-grade stainless steel appliances. From the eight burner stove to the stand alone fridge and freezers that I could probably comfortably stand inside. The cabinets were black, and the tops were stainless steel.
I guess someone cooked, if they bothered to put that much work and money into the kitchen.
The second floor had been sectioned off into bedrooms. Ten in all, and each of them something like twenty-by-fifteen. Big personal spaces. And to someone who’d shared a small six-by-ten cell for the past four years, it was practically a fucking mansion.
The rest of the space on the second floor consisted of four full bathrooms and a sitting area.
“How fucking big is this place?” I asked Crow as he walked me through the place.
“Fifteen-thousand square feet. Divided equally among the three floors.”
“What’s on the top floor?” I asked as we made our way back toward the staircase.
“Spiders,” Crow said, shrugging. “We don’t have a use for it yet. Until we do, we are leaving it. We’ve done enough work already.”
“Are you expecting to use it for more bedrooms?”
“Don’t know Slash’s exact plans, but I think he wants to grow us to be big. The mother chapter of our club had twenty men in the first generation alone. I figure he wants something like that.”