“Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, face heating as she arrived at the booth full of seriously eye-catching and rugged men. Men like these—rough around the edges, muscular, dirty-mouthed, denim and leather wearing, sexy—well, they hadn’t existed in her life prior to two years ago. She’d had no experience with this strong, protective type who also knew how to joke and play.
While the men she’d grown up with played at being alphas, they didn’t have a tender bone in their bodies. Most were embittered by life, and were hateful, distrustful, bigoted, and downright nasty. Leaders of the community tried too hard to dominate their little slice of the world. They overcompensated for their internal weakness by being cruel to those they perceived even frailer than they were. The bikers at that table…well, authority oozed from their pores. They wore it like a second skin.
And wore it well.
Yet from what she’s witnessed, they treated their women with a kind of respect, love, and caring she’d thought existed only in books and movies.
They were the most attractive group of men she’d ever been around. And they ate at the diner every day.
One of them, a very muscular, brown-haired man with his arm around a taller, more slender blond man, snorted. “Ain’t nothing gentlemanly about those two,” he said, pointing at the two bikers sitting across from him.
One was huge; absolutely enormous in height and width. She’d met him a few times since he was the boyfriend of her coworker, Holly. LJ looked like he could flick his finger and send her flying across the room. She suppressed a shudder of fear. After being on the receiving end of punches, kicks, and blows from men, wariness of those more physically powerful came with the territory. The guy next to him was smaller, not small, just smaller, and…gorgeous. So stunning that when he smiled, she clenched her teeth to keep her tongue from lolling out.
“Hey! Fuck you,” LJ said. “Pretty sure you’re the only one at this table who ain’t a gentleman. Right, Gumby?”
The man he called Gumby glanced at the guy sitting next to him with an almost sappy grin. “Oh, I don’t know. He was quite the gentleman last night when he let me come first while—”
“Ahh, Screw, make him, stop! Lalalalala.” LJ stuck his fingers in his ears and hollered.
“Well, that I can do,” the one she guessed was Screw said, right before kissing Gumby with some serious passion.
Makenna’s mouth dropped open, and she stared at the men lost in each other. She wasn’t completely naive, after living away from the sheltered community for two years. She knew men could be in a relationship with each other, but she’d never seen it up close and personal. If they’d lived in the community, they’d have been punished harshly, possibly even killed, so that kind of relationship just didn’t exist. Hell, it was a demographic her father actively fought against.
Since she’d fled, she and her siblings had lived in small towns that weren’t meccas of homosexuality either. Witnessing it up close and personal was one of many new experiences since meeting the men and women of the MC.
Once done kissing his guy, Screw laughed. “Bet you wouldn’t have a problem hearing what he did to Jazz, though, would you, LJ?”
The one called LJ shrugged. “Well, no.”
And then there was the fact that Jazmine, one of her bosses, was also involved with these two men. That just completely boggled her mind. In the community, men weren’t faithful to one woman. They only married one at a time, but they prided themselves on having as many children as possible, so they spread their seed around. In fact, of the six of them, only she and her brother Lee shared a mother. According to Jazz, she and these two men were in a committed, loving relationship.
“Pretty sure our waitress doesn’t want to hear the nasty shit you do to her boss, brother,” the gorgeous man said, flashing her one of those brain-numbing smiles. She’d seen him around quite a few times but had never been formally introduced.
“Hi. We haven’t officially met yet. I’m Thunder,” he said as if reading her mind. He stuck out his hand.
Wow. No one man should be that good looking. With tanned skin, a sharply angled face, crystal blue eyes, and a dusting of light brown stubble across his chiseled jaw, he was lethally gorgeous. Then there were the full lips. And the longish, light coffee-colored hair. She needed to take a breath because she did not notice men like this. All the testosterone at the table must be scrambling her brain.
“Think you stunned her, brother.”
He was so attractive, she’d swallowed her tongue. “Sorry.” She took his hand, which was warm, strong, and just a little bit rough. “I’m Makenna. Most people call me Mak. I work here.”