Page 3 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies
“Cardamom?” His voice is a little rougher but just as amused.
I look up and see a man with iron threaded through his dark hair and a beard kept so precise it feels like a statement.
His face is calmer than the first man’s, and his eyes are a colder blue than a flame at the bottom of a wick.
He tilts his chin toward the panna cotta. “You infused it.”
“I did,” I say. “Lightly, with orange peel, just enough to make you wonder why it tastes like winter in a warm room.”
His mouth curves in quiet approval. “Deacon,” he says.
“Marisa,” I reply, and he nods like we’ve sealed something.
Roman appears again and glances between us, smirking faintly. “She intended to carry that crate in through the storm . Got pretty far without dropping a thing. You should’ve seen it.”
“I’d have carried it for her.” Deacon’s eyes flick to me. “But you got there first.”
“I’m fast,” Roman retorts, slow enough to make me wonder if he’s talking about the crate at all.
“And modest,” Deacon drawls, setting the towel beside my elbow.
He taps the table twice like a man who’s already imagined this kitchen running under his rules.
I arch a brow. “Do you two always narrate over people’s work?”
“Only when the work’s worth talking about,” Deacon says, and Roman’s smirk deepens.
A voice calls for them from across the tent—high, sharp, impatient—and they both glance back at me, sharing the same easy, conspiratorial smile before they turn to go.
I watch them leave, the sway of their shoulders cutting through the subdued light, and my cheeks are hot and my neck is uncomfortably warm.
It should be absurd to feel watched in a storm with a wedding limping toward celebration.
Yet the sensation crawls down my back in a not unwelcome way.
I’m not watched like a girl in a wet dress, more like watched like a new recipe that might hold if given time, watched like someone measuring the line of my spine and the steadiness of my hands and the fact that I am still here and still working and still trying to save the lemon bars.
“Those are pretty enough to make a man confess,” someone says to my right, and the smile in the voice eases the knot between my shoulder blades.
The third man is all sun where the others were weather.
He’s warm, with a softness that reads as earned and not easy.
His eyes are brown and lit at the corners like someone who laughs often.
His curls are wet and he pushes them back with a wrist that bears a rosary of wood beads strung tight.
He looks down at the tray of bourbon pecan bites I piped at two in the morning and lifts one between finger and thumb, pausing for permission like a gentleman hiding inside a scoundrel. “May I?” he asks.
“If you tell me the crust holds,” I say, trying not to notice the way his smile folds into itself when he’s pleased.
He bites, nods slowly, savoring, then points to the pan of candied orange peels and winks.
“Teach me that,” he says, and this time I have to look away because my cheeks are too warm.
He slides a thermos toward my hand. “Hot coffee. Too many of us here think good coffee is optional.”
“Those are the men you keep at arm’s length,” I say without thinking, and he laughs in a way that brings the whiskey barrels into the joke.
