Lessons in Corruption (The Fallen Men 1)

I gasped and pressed myself even closer to King, who swore viciously under his breath.

Bikers on all sides of us, two closing in front of our bike so we were forced to slow down.

My eyes swept over the litany of chrome, black and leather, the flurry of bearded faces and tattooed skin. The skeletal face of The Fallen MC’s infamous patch stared at me from all angles. It was like something from a horror film.

Immediately, I knew I deserved whatever horrors came next. This was what I got for taking a risk.

“Don’t be afraid, babe. I’m gonna pull off at the next shoulder,” King called through the roar of wind and gunning engines.

I didn’t bother trying to answer both because it would be impossible to match the volume of the wind and because we had already begun to pull off the road.

We were barely stopped before King was gently peeling me off the bike, mindful of my aching, inexperienced body.

“I want you to stay here and don’t say a word, yeah?” he murmured to me as he settled me carefully against his bike.

“Okay,” I whispered, my eyes darting to the small group of leather-clad men pulling up beside us.

“Hey,” he said, pinching my chin between his fingers so that I was forced to look at him. “Nothing is gonna happen here. These guys, they’re my family. They saw me with a chick and they probably just want to razz me about it. No worries. Just let me deal with it alone. They aren’t the kind of men someone like you would understand.”

Something flashed across his face, something that looked an awful lot like regret followed swiftly by shame, but he was moving away from me before I could decipher it.

I watched his loose, rolling gait with a little bit of lust despite my discomfort. He called something to a short, stocky older man wearing all black with a shock of white hair he had spiked all over his head. They gave each other one of those manly, slam-a-fist-on-the-back kind of hugs before grasping each other by the back of the neck to bring their foreheads together as they spoke quietly about something.

The other guys hung back, laughing and shooting the shit, looking at me curiously but keeping their distance. One guy started to walk over but King’s hand flexed and released—a subtle sign, but one that the advancing man heeded instantly.

I noticed the enormous white, dark green and black patches on the backs of their jackets and vests and tried to swallow my apprehension. I’d been right all those weeks ago to think that King was involved with something dangerous in that back parking lot of Mac’s Grocer. He was part of The Fallen MC, the criminal gang that had cornered the market on the marijuana trade not only in Vancouver, but throughout the entire province and most of western North America.

I would be a fool to get involved with someone like that. A criminal. Because if King was a biker in The Fallen, that was exactly what he was. I’d wanted some excitement in my life, a change from William and our modern day suburbia, but that didn’t mean I was ready for outright anarchy.

I couldn’t deal with another person I loved going to prison and coming out so irreversibly fucked up that they were a different person. I couldn’t do the visitations, their evolution from forced cheer to inadequate silence to nothing because in the end, after things had gotten really bad, my brother Lysander had refused to let me see him anymore.

My eyes settled on King again, seeing him throw back his head and laugh that laugh I had fallen in love with in the parking lot, that laugh that had been the final catalyst in my marriage. I barely knew the man, what he worked for, what he believed in, what he desired, and yet he had already irrevocably changed my life.

I dropped my gaze when he turned around to gesture at me with a smile and a wink as he’d obviously said something about me to the older biker. I didn’t want them to talk about me. I didn’t want these outlaws to know my name. I’d trained my whole life to be a good girl, a good wife and woman, and I told myself that I wasn’t going to throw that away for a pretty face.

I peeked through my hair to see King laugh again and groaned.

A damn pretty face.

“Sorry ‘bout that, babe,” King said as his clunky boots filled my vision.

It disturbed me how sexy I found the sight of those manly shoes, so different from my husband’s loafers and Sperry boat shoes.

“Babe?” His fingers found my chin and raised it so I was looking into his amazing ice blue eyes. “You good?”

“I need you to take me home. This was a mistake.”