We’d been taught young about what really mattered in life.
Family, brotherhood, loyalty, freedom.
And love.
Maybe none of the men who’d raised me said it explicit, but that’s what they’d taught me. It was love that made Axe-Man leave his old chapter of The Fallen MC over in Calgary and move to Entrance, B.C., and love that made Bat give up his military career to get home to his wife (even though she ended up bein’ a bitch). It was love that made my dad go to jail for years when he shoulda been raisin’ my little sister, Harleigh Rose, and me.
Love made people do things.
I wondered as I stared across the asphalt when I was done laughin’ and locked eyes with a waif of a woman with a fuck ton of just gorgeous hair if it was love that made me wanna cross that lot and claim her for my own.
Name unknown, characteristics unchartered.
I knew just by the look of her that she was it for me.
The one.
Romantic thoughts for an eighteen-year-old son of a notorious outlaw motorcycle club Prez, but not unusual for me.
Born that way. Romantic as hell and desperate for a time when the girls ’round me weren’t just vapid or clingy bitches to be enjoyed for mutual pleasure before I shoved them off. Desperate for a time when I’d find the right kinda woman and know in my bones I had to make her mine.
And I felt it, my skeleton hot and too heavy in my body, weighted with lust and words like destiny that I’d never before understood.
Lookin’ at Cressida Irons, the woman who would become my woman despite all the obstacles, I knew she would always be fuckin’ mine.
And me, irrevocably, fuckin’ ecstatically, hers.
Four years after that fateful day in a grocery store parkin’ lot and I still felt electrified with my love for that woman.
But watchin’ the professor of American Lit pace back and forth in a short tweed skirt over swayin’ hips that drew male eyes like a hypnotist’s pendulum, I found myself intrigued with her too.
She was short, slight, but woman in all the ways that counted. The pert breasts pushin’ against the cotton button-up would perfectly fill my big hands, just as the little waist would fit under the bracket of my palms like they were made to frame them. I liked this woman’s confidence as she spoke about allegory and verisimilitude as if they were literary diamonds she wanted to collect and polish and ache over. I even liked the way she bit the edge of her lip as she listened to a student’s response to her question, as if she had to hold back her excitement physically or it would froth over like uncorked champagne.
She was bright and intelligent and so magnetic with passion for her subject that every single student in the room was enraptured by her.
I sat in the back row of the lecture hall with my heavy boots propped on the seat below me, a pen between my teeth to satisfy my urge to take her between my teeth, and I watched her for the entire three-hour class. When it was over, I wasn’t the only one who lingered to speak with her. There were four guys, all muscle and bravado like your typical university hotshots, and an overeager girl who swarmed the professor like moths to a flame.
Still, I waited.
I was good at it. A patient man since birth, which was fuckin’ good ’cause I had a sister who would try the patience of a saint and a family who regularly got up in each other’s shit in a way that could be irritatin’ as fuck.
But I was a man who was born wanting to meet his soulmate now, and I’d waited years for that, so I could wait a while more for this professor with the prim skirt and dirty girl big hair.
At least, I could wait until one of the punk ass kids got too close to her and smiled an inch down into her face.
I was up outta my chair, eating up the stairs between the stage and me like they were nothin’, and then I was there, between the idiot and her.
Her.
My woman.
The one I’d dreamt about since I was a fuckin’ kid but never really believed was real, because how could God or the universe or anything like it create someone so breathtakingly perfect for someone else.
The moment I stepped into play, the air between us went electric with tension. It took strength to decide to scare off the punk ass college kid instead’a takin’ the woman I’d been lustin’ after for the past three hours into my arms in a ravagin’ embrace.
Then I decided, what better way to stake a claim someone like that idiot would understand than to do exactly as I wanted to.