“Um, I don’t have anyone to come get me tonight,” I told The Protector, “But I’ll call my Gram. She can come get me in the morning. She can’t drive at night,” I hurried to explain before running my tongue between my braces and my lips. My mouth was dry from whatever I’d drunk at the party, and my lips were starting to stick to the little metal brackets in my mouth.
“Yeah. Call her. But tell her I’ll bring you home,” he grumbled, staring at my lips.
“But—,” I started, but he cut me off.
“No. You’re not staying the night in my goddamn motel room. Not gonna happen. Call your fuckin’ grandmother, or a friend, or your fuckin’ priest, but you’re not staying here.”
His voice was so sharp that I felt my breath catch in my throat. I mean, I knew I was a nuisance, and I could tell that they didn’t know what to do with me, but he didn’t have to be so mean about it.
I flipped open the phone and dialed the number from memory as The Protector went to stand against the wall, his eyes never leaving me. After only half a ring, she answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Gram. What are you doing up this late?” I put my hand to my forehead in embarrassment as one of the guys chuckled quietly at my attempt of small talk.
“Callie? What’s going on? Where are you? This isn’t your number.”
“Yeah, I lost my phone.” I looked up to see The Protector swinging my purse from side to side across the room. Okay, I guess I didn’t lose my phone. “Well, I mean, I couldn’t find my purse.”
“Your purse? Why aren’t you at home?” she asked, and I could hear her leaning forward in her creaky recliner.
“It’s a long story, Gram. I’m on my way—I have a friend bringing me to your house. If Mom calls can you tell her I’m there and I’m asleep?” I asked, crossing my fingers. Asking Gram to cover for me was hit or miss, I wasn’t sure if she would help me out.
After a minute of silence, she answered slowly, “Yeah, I’ll tell them. But if you’re not here in an hour, I’m calling your dad.”
I’m not sure what she heard in my voice, but she knew I needed her to help me out, and for once she wasn’t going to give me shit and leave me hanging ‘for my own good’.
“Thanks, Gram. I’ll see you soon. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Get your ass home,” she told me and then disconnected.
When I looked up at the room, eight eyes were watching me closely, and it looked like the man who’d saved me had gone pale. I looked around the room, trying to figure out what the problem was, when the man by the door barked out a sharp laugh.
“Holy fuck, Romeo. You decide to play fuckin’ knight in shining armor, and the bitch you bring home is jailbait.”
Chapter 3
Callie
The Protector didn’t say anything as he moved around the room. He pulled two hoodies out of a duffel bag at the foot of the bed and handed me one as he pulled off his vest.
“Put that on. It’s gonna be cold on the bike,” he instructed, most of his words muffled as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head and then threaded his arms back through the vest. When he lifted his arms, his black Metallica t-shirt raised just enough that I could see some sort of tattoo across the bottom of his stomach. I quickly looked away before he could catch me staring.
I put the sweatshirt on and took a deep breath, noticing it smelled like him. His scent was a mixture of leather and surprisingly, Armani cologne. It was almost ironic, those two scents mixed together. Who was this guy?
As soon as I had the sweatshirt on, I stood up and he handed me my purse so I could sling it over my shoulder. I knew that I should check my cell phone for messages, but I just didn’t think I could take any more drama. I decided to wait and see who had called once I was safe at Gram’s; I’d deal with everything then.
I was lost in my head, trying to decide how I was going to explain everything to my parents when The Protector’s voice cut through the silence in the room. Half of his mouth was pulled up in a smile, his eyes were crinkled at the corners when he looked at me, and I just knew I’d been thinking out loud.
My face burned in mortification as they watched me, but I straightened my shoulders and tilted my chin up as if they hadn’t just heard me talking to myself.
“I’m Grease,” he mumbled, lifting his arm out to shake my hand. As soon as I took hold, he gestured with his other to the men in the room. “That’s Dragon by the dresser.”
“Hey,” Dragon called out quietly, busy messing with the phone in his hands.
“His voice isn’t usually like that,” Grease shared, a genuine full-blown smile on his face. “Got strep-throat from some chick with kids.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Dragon spat back, looking up from his phone.
With a smile in his voice, he introduced the last two in the room. “That’s Tommy Gun by the door. The guy with the Mohawk is my brother Deke.”
The men both lifted their chins at me, watching me from their sides of the room, but didn’t say a word.
He stopped talking as I nodded to the guys around the room, but he never let go of my hand, and I didn’t try to pull away.
“I’m Calliope. Callie,” I replied nervously, wondering if I should have given them a fake name. It’s not like Calliope is a popular name, it wouldn’t be hard to find me if they were looking. Then I realized that Grease would be driving me to my Gram’s house, so it’s not like giving them my real name would’ve mattered anyway.
“What kind of name is Grease?” I asked as he pulled me out of the room, following the other men as they strode down the stairs to the back parking lot. He was pulling me quickly, and my legs weren’t quite up to the pace he was keeping, so I kept stumbling over nonexistent dips in the concrete.
“Only name you’re gonna get,” he answered, pausing for a second so I could catch up with his long strides.
As we made our way out to the bikes, Grease never let go of my hand. I thought that maybe he was afraid I’d take off if he didn’t have a hold on me, but when I glanced up at the expression on his face, I knew differently. I wasn’t sure what happened in the room that I didn’t notice, but the hand-holding was for the men’s benefit, not mine. He was staking his claim.
“Stand right here. Don’t move,” he ordered, placing me next to a big black Harley.
“Um, okay…” I answered, wondering why we weren’t getting on the bike.
He answered the question in my voice by walking six feet away to where the rest of the men were huddled at the far end of the bikes. I couldn’t hear a word they were saying, but the body language of Dragon and Tommy Gun led me to believe that they weren’t happy with whatever Grease was telling them. When my eyes moved to Deke, I noticed he was watching me, completely ignoring the conversation going on around him. When he smiled at me, his entire face changed and I smiled back, wondering why he’d given me such a weird feeling before. He seemed nice enough.
Grease caught our little interaction and slapped Deke on the back of his head, breaking our eye contact. After a few more words, he broke away from the group and walked toward me.
While I stood waiting for him, I finally grasped how very bad this could potentially go for me. I was climbing on the back of a motorcycle with a man I’d never met before. The whole night had turned into some after school special, a warning for kids who disobeyed their parents and drank alcohol. My hands started to shake, so I stuffed them in the front pockets of the hoodie that was hanging down covering my shorts. If there was any question about how I could handle myself against these men, the fact that the sweatshirt I borrowed hung to the middle of my thighs gave a pretty clear answer. If any of them decided that I was easy pickings, they would be correct. I was completely defenseless.
Before I could open my mouth to tell Grease I’d just call my parents, he spoke, and my apprehension started to fade.
“You ever been on a bike before?” he asked, pulling a helmet off the back of the bike and putting it on my head.
“No. My uncle had a motorcycle when I was little, but he died before I was old enough to ride it,” I overshared, watching his face as he scowled at the helmet. Suddenly, he pulled it off my head, causing my hair to fly in all different static-filled directions.
I startled when his hands came up to both sides of my face, but stilled when he gently began pulling my hair back. He brushed it with his fingers, grabbing it in his fist before pulling a hair tie off his wrist. He tied it back and then ran his hands down my neck as I stopped breathing altogether. His eyes weren’t on my face, they were on my throat, and the look in his eyes was one I’d never seen before. I couldn’t decide if I should pull away or not, and before I could make my decision, his hands had made it to the nape of my neck and he was pulling the hood of the sweatshirt over my head.
He acted like he hadn’t been just ogling my neck—he was all business as he plopped the helmet back over my hood-covered head and buckled the strap.
I took the time while he was situating the helmet to explain where my Gram lived and asked if he needed directions, but he seemed to know the area pretty well. I wasn’t sure where he was from, but I wasn’t about to ask him if he lived in San Diego. If he did, I would have to decide whether I wanted to try and see him again, and if he didn’t, I would have to deal with the disappointment. I didn’t want to do either.
“Helmet’s still a little big, but that should help a bit,” he told me with a nod before he started messing with his bike. I just stood there like an idiot, wondering if that look he’d given me had meant something. Was he into me? It was a ridiculous question, I knew he was older than me and completely out of my league, but I couldn’t help but feel like he’d been checking me out.
He climbed on to the bike, settling in, and I just stood there staring. He had long hair. How had I missed that before? It wasn’t super long like the guy on the front of Gram’s romance novels, but it was long enough to put in a hair tie at the back of his head. Normally, I would’ve laughed at a guy with long hair, I mean, really? But he worked it. The fact that he didn’t seem to care how long it was, and the ponytail was more of a completely tangled bun than a slick ponytail… it was hot.
His back was slightly toward me, giving me a good glimpse of his broad shoulders and his jeans pulled tight across his thighs in a way that made my heart speed up. Holy shit. I’d never even noticed a guy’s thighs before. They were just a part of someone’s legs, right? No big deal, nothing particularly special about them. But for some reason, looking at this guy’s thighs made my stomach clench.
I was snapped out of my perusal by the clearing of his throat. When I cut my eyes quickly toward his face, I knew he hadn’t missed the way I’d been staring at him. Half of his mouth was pulled up in a grin and his voice was laced with humor as he spoke.
“Well? Climb on.”
Chapter 4
Callie
I made it onto the bike with little trouble, though I thought for sure I was going to wipe out. I sat with my hands wrapped around his waist and my cheek against his back for most of the ride. I could tell he loved it—the wind and the open highway—because his whole body seemed to relax once we were on the road. He made riding seem so easy, his movements fluid and graceful, and the ride would have made it to the top ten best moments of my life if not for one thing.
I was fucking freezing.
The wind cut through the sweatshirt I was wearing, and at first it didn’t bother me much, but as soon as we were on the freeway, the wind felt like little shards of glass cutting into my skin. My legs, completely uncovered in the shorts I’d thought were so risqué earlier in the night, almost felt sunburned from the cold air. It was miserable.
The first time I shivered, I didn’t think he noticed, but when my teeth began to chatter against his back I felt him tense. His shoulders only tightened for a moment before he dropped one hand off the handlebars and reached down to rub my thigh briskly, running his fingers as high up as he could reach and then back down over my knee to my shin. He did this over and over before switching hands and rubbing the other thigh the same way.
At first, it didn’t seem to matter what he was doing, my legs continued to burn and I counted the seconds until we would make it to Gram’s. But less than five minutes later, I was burning up for an entirely different reason.
When I started to squirm behind him, he paused with his hand on my knee. I was afraid he was going to stop what he was doing, but instead he reached even further back and grabbed my hip, scooting my body toward his until there was no space between us. Once he was sure I was done moving around, his hand found my thigh again, his pinky sliding under the side of my shorts before sweeping down my leg slower than he had before.
He let go of my leg as we took the exit we needed and I shuddered once before getting control of myself. I felt my face heat as I thought of the way I must have looked, practically purring as he warmed up my legs, and I was happy as hell that he couldn’t see me make a complete ass of myself when he was only trying to warm me up.
Gram lived only a couple blocks off the exit in a small trailer park that I knew would have been silent at four o’clock in the morning if it weren’t for the roar of his motorcycle. Thankfully, the people who lived there were closer to my Gram’s age than mine, so the possibility of waking them up sans hearing aids was pretty slim.
I let go with one arm as we neared my Gram’s trailer, digging the fingers of my other hand into his stomach even though we were going less than fifteen miles per hour. I’d made it the entire half an hour trip, I didn’t want to fall off the bike when I was so close to making it home in one piece. I used my free hand to point him in the right direction, but as we glided closer I realized that he would’ve known where to go anyway. It was the only trailer in the park that was entirely lit up and Gram was standing on the front porch waiting for us as we pulled to a stop.
I hopped off the bike as soon as we were stopped, wobbling and tripping like an idiot as I got my feet back under me. Gram was backlit by lights so I couldn’t see her face, but all of a sudden, whatever bravado I’d had on the ride over was completely gone, and I was anxious to get in the house before she laid into me for being out so late. I was fumbling and pulling at the strap of the helmet, trying like hell to pull it off when I realized Grease was climbing off the back of the bike.
I felt my eyes go wide, the universal ‘stop what you’re doing’ look, but he completely ignored me and took a few steps forward. Gently pushing my hands away from the helmet, he slowly unlatched the buckle as if my Gram wasn’t giving us the evil eye from the porch.
“I programmed my number into your phone back at the hotel, Sugar,” he rumbled quietly. “None of this shit should blow back on you, but you need me for anything, you call.”
I stood there staring at him, not sure what my reply should be, until Gram’s voice broke through the quiet night.
“Well? You two coming in?” she asked, causing my head to jerk around in surprise.
“I better get going, ma’am,” Grease called out quietly.
“Bullshit. You just brought my girl home. You’re probably hungry. Come on in and eat, I’ve got breakfast ready.”
“Gram—” I tried to reason with her, but she cut me off.
“Callie, get your butt in this house. Bring your friend with you,” she told me, turning back to walk in the door.
I spun around to Grease to tell him he didn’t have to stay, but he was already at my side. He placed his hand on my lower back to lead me inside, and I sputtered as I walked toward the porch steps.
“Sugar, your grandmother asked me inside. I’d be an asshole if I just took off. I’ll eat and I’ll leave. No problem,” he assured me as we reached the porch.
When we got to the front door and could see Gram’s kitchen table covered with food, I heard Grease chuckle in my ear. He leaned close until I could feel his breath at the side of my neck.
“Your grandma always cook full meals in the middle of the
night?” he whispered, a smile in his voice.
I snorted and answered him, “More times than you could possibly imagine.”
We sat down at the table as Gram moved around the kitchen, washing dishes and putting things away. She was wearing a nightgown that covered her from neck to toes and an apron wrapped around her waist. I watched for a few moments as her nightgown billowed out behind her legs as she walked, wishing I hadn’t gotten her out of bed to deal with my mess. She’d never complain; to her it was just what family did. If someone needed you, no matter what time it was or why, you stepped up and did what you could.
I handed Grease one of the plates that was stacked in front of me and started to dish up when Gram came and stood behind me.
“Thanks for bringing my girl home. Not sure what she got herself into, or how you’re a part of that… but thanks for getting her home. I’m Rose,” she told Grease as she squeezed my shoulders. I felt tears hit the back of my eyes as the ramifications of her words set in.
She wasn’t going to ask. It didn’t matter where I’d been or how I’d gotten there. I was home safe, and that was enough for her.
Grease’s eyes looked back and forth between Gram and me as he finished chewing, and he took his time wiping his mouth with a paper towel before he replied.
“Asa,” he said quietly, half of his mouth tipping up as he noticed the look of surprise on my face. “And it was no problem, ma’am.”
“Well, you two fill up. I might as well go get dressed.”
I was staring at Asa, trying to get my bearings, when Gram stepped away from me. Before I could ask her to stay, Asa was standing and moving around the table. My body tensed as I watched him, but I relaxed into my chair as he gently grabbed Gram’s elbow and guided her back to the table, speaking quietly in her ear.