Mess Me Up (Bear Bottom Guardians MC 1)

Then I met Izzy in real life but had no clue that she was RP’s Biggest Fan. I liked her, too. Ever since my son’s funeral, I’d done a whole fuckin’ lot of soul searching and I knew that Izzy deserved a fuckin’ medal for the way she took care of everything in the background during my son’s last days. Caring for Matias and inevitably me, also. She, at least, deserved a thank you. The one I hadn’t been able to give because I was too deeply entrenched in my own pain.

I also wasn’t in a place where I could admit that she meant something to me, but she’d earned a place in my heart by taking care of both of us and bringing my son cookies.

Those few minutes after I’d realized my son was gone, she’d held me and cried. At the time, I couldn’t see or feel anything beyond the crushing loss of my son. But in the months that followed, I couldn’t help but think about Izzy, and it was then that I realized that I was definitely feeling a strong attraction to her.

But I also knew I needed to heal so as not to work my sorrow out on her and taint anything that had been developing between us.

If I was going there with Izzy, it was going to be real and for the right reasons.

After all I’d been through with Tara, and then seeing Tyler with his true soulmate, I knew exactly what I wanted.

But the problem was I was struggling with the letting myself move on to something that would make me happy. How was I supposed to offer her my heart when half of it had died with Ty-Ty.

Then there were Izzy’s problems.

I had no fucking idea if she actually wanted something with me, or if she was just being nice. Maybe all that flirting that we’d done over letters for the past year hadn’t meant to her what it meant to me.

That was another problem.

Thinking that the author of the letters and Izzy were two different people, I would be able to hold strong. I would have probably held off, thinking that now wasn’t the best time to get into a relationship because my perfect woman didn’t exist.

But, now that I knew Izzy and my letter writer were one and the same?

Yeah, that was just something that I’d never be able to fight against.

Both Izzy and my letter writer had helped me through some tough times.

Izzy through the death of my son, and RP’s Biggest Fan through my son’s sickness.

Learning that they were both the same person was something that I was still trying to process.

A car’s honk startled me from my thoughts and had me looking up. I waved at the car that I’d walked in front of and mouthed an apology to the driver.

The woman narrowed her eyes at me, and then they widened as they moved along the upper half of my body—and across my cut identifying me as a patched-in member of Bear Bottom Guardians MC.

There was fear in her eyes, but also a little bit of attraction.

I turned away and continued toward my bike. I got on it and headed in the direction of Izzy’s place.

When I arrived—surprise, surprise—she was not on her front porch.

Sighing as I shut the bike down, I kicked the stand into place and got off, heading to the door that was hanging wide open.

Walking in without knocking, I took a look around her place.

It was a small duplex that shared a wall with a neighbor who never seemed to be home.

The walls were white. The furniture was white. The decorations were white.

Hell, the only color I saw was the red dishtowel hanging over the faucet of the sink, and a black cereal bowl filled to the brim with Lucky Charms.

Her place was immaculate—which I guess I should’ve assumed would be the case since Izzy owned her own cleaning business.

“Iz?” I called loudly, not moving from the door.

Izzy peeked out from the doorway just past the kitchen, and her face flushed. “I spilled my cereal on my shirt. I have to find another shirt, and I’ll be ready.”

I looked over at her cereal.

“Your cereal’s getting soggy,” I pointed out, trying to keep my eyes from roaming down her body, even though the only thing I could see was the long column of her neck and one bare shoulder.

Over the last week, I’d looked at Izzy’s body a lot.

I couldn’t seem to help myself.

It all started out the day she’d walked over to my place, and she was wearing those tight ass yoga pants.

Then the next day, after she’d been cleaning, she was wearing a pair of even tighter workout leggings.

The day after that she was wearing running shorts that molded perfectly to her ass.