Page 465 of Hell Hath No Fury
“Well at the risk of statin’ the obvious, you’re hot as fuck, Bryn, and I’d like to get to know you better, but if you let the age difference get in the way, that won’t happen.”
“You think I’m hot?”
“As fuck,” he repeated. “You got a man?”
“No.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A woman?”
I smiled. “No.”
“You got any objection to bein’ with a biker?”
“Are you a criminal?”
“No.”
“Do you have a criminal past?”
“Technically… no.”
I frowned. “What do you mean by ‘technically’?”
His expression grew dark, and he took a deep breath. “Had an incident more than a few years back. Was with a girl. Stella. She was it for me. She’d wanted to go for a ride, but it had started rainin’. I shoulda said no, but I made a fuckin’ stupid mistake and took her for a ride anyway. We hit a slick patch and went down. Her leg was pinned under the bike. No one knew it at the time, but her femoral artery had been sliced open.”
“Oh my god, Harm, I’m so sorry.”
He met my eyes. “She was the sister of my best friend, and he’d followed us. She died in his arms. I lost him that day as well, so to say it wrecked my life for a time…”
I bit back tears, trying not to say anything.
“I don’t know how I didn’t go to jail for the crash, because I should have, but I was lucky. Hatch, my president, took me under his wing and basically saved my life and my sanity, so I’ve been able to come to terms with things.”
“And your friend?” I asked.
“All good,” he said. “We’re good. It took a while, but he’s with a good woman out in Colorado and we keep in touch.”
I smiled. “I’m really sorry that happened.”
“Thanks,” he said, sipping his beer.
Our food came, which gave us a few minutes of reprieve from the heavy subject.
“So, that’s it for my skeletons,” Harm said, once the server left. “Feel like opening your closet?”
“Wow, you really want to know?”
“Hell, yeah, I want to know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Married my high school sweetheart at twenty. At the time he was a pastor of a brand-new church, which is now huge. I was a nurse until I had Briggs. I was able to keep working when I had Baylor, but with two little ones, daycare was too expensive, so I decided to stay home for a few years.”
“Your man wasn’t willin’ to stay home?”
I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”
“I can only assume you made more money, right? And he was probably home during the week anyway. It would make sense to me that he’d stay home with the kids so you could work outside the home.”
“Lordy, where the hell were you when he and I were having this exact same knock-down, drag out fight at two in the morning while I was breastfeeding Briggs?” I retorted.
