Raw: The Ultimate Mc Collection (59 page)

“I’m Mike, by the way.  Mike Montgomery,” he said, his smile still charming me.

“Yes, Big Mike, right?”  He raised his dark eyebrows and cocked his head to the side.  “Rosie told me.”

“Oh, of course.  Yes, but you can call me Mike,”  he said, winking at me.  He reached behind him and pulled his wallet from his back pocket.  He pulled out a huge wad of cash, and pushed it towards me.

“Is this enough for your trouble?”  he asked.

“What? Oh, no…gosh, no.  No payment necessary, really.  It was my pleasure and it gave me a chance to get to know Rosie a little.” I was still smiling up at him, inhaling his leathery scent, drinking in the pure masculinity of this man and that’s the moment the world seemed to fall away completely.

Sure, I knew where I was.  I could see Rosie watching us from his bike behind him.  There was even a bee buzzing around us.  I was aware of these things, but anything in the world that existed outside of that parking lot?  As far as I was concerned, that was all in another dimension, and had no impact on this moment - this monumental moment that I would never forget in my entire lifetime - and everything fell away into insignificant oblivion.

God, it was pure bliss.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Absolutely, Mike,” I replied quietly.

It was then, as he stopped talking, as he did nothing but stare at me silently and smile, that I remembered my prediction for the day.  It whispered in the back of my mind - this is it! - the seed of something important, and yet, even then I still didn’t completely put it together.

Mike’s wad of cash disappeared back in his wallet, and I felt a flush come over me as I watched his gaze fall to my feet, and then trail up my body slowly.  When his eyes met mine again, his brown eyes darkened with unmistakable desire, and I felt all the air leave my lungs.

My heart pounded loudly as I struggled to breathe again and my brain searched desperately for something to say.  The silence screamed - an excruciatingly delicious, wordless conversation that passed between us.

“You seem nice,” he said finally, after what seemed like hours.  Such a simple statement, and yet I knew he meant something entirely different than ‘nice’.

“Nice? I…,” I wanted desperately to say something witty, something cute, something smart, but my brain was racing with inappropriate thoughts.  “Sure,” I finally squeaked out.  Sure? Really? I couldn’t very well tell him that he was the hottest thing I had seen in Los Angeles and that I wished it was me about to climb on the back of his bike, could I?

“That’s good,” he said, his perfect lips sliding against his white teeth.  “I can tell Rosie likes you.

I swear if he didn’t stop smiling at me like that, then I was going to melt right there on the sidewalk.  The school janitor would hate me, and I would forever be known as the scary teacher that melted on the sidewalk on the first day of school.  The kids would tell tall tales while embellishing the truth wildly, and claim I haunted the hallways on cold, winter nights. What a legacy I would leave behind.  All because of Mike Montgomery’s smoldering smile.

“I like Rosie, too,”  I replied, overtaken by an urgent need to be alone and screaming into my pillow.

“Good,” he whispered in my ear.  He leaned in so close I could smell the heat coming off the leather vest he was wearing.  “I look forward to getting to know you, Daisy.”

He winked again, then turned without waiting for a response.  As he walked back to his bike, my eyes memorized every inch of him.  From his black leather boots to the tight Levi’s that wrapped around his muscular ass, all the way past his broad shoulders and his long, black hair that trailed in the wind behind him - I committed every detail to memory.  I didn’t even struggle to look away.  I drank him in like I had never seen a real man before.

And a man like Mike Montgomery?  A man that oozed masculinity like that?  I don’t think I ever had seen a man like him before, not before that moment, that one life-changing moment outside of George Peabody Elementary School.  Hell, if I had previously met a man like that, I’d have already done my damnedest to have him tied to my bed.

But Mike Montgomery?  Well, he wasn’t the type of man you tied up.  He was strong.  He was all man.  And he was sexy as fuck.

He was almost sexier walking away from me than he was walking towards me.

I watched them drive off in a roar, Rosie’s arms wrapped tightly around her father.  It was then that that feeling I had in the morning came back with a vengeance.

I didn’t know how, but I knew Mike Montgomery was going to be a force to be reckoned with in my life.

And no matter how he made me feel when he bore those chocolate brown eyes into mine,  no matter how lonely I was in this new town, no matter how desperately I wanted to feel those big, rugged hands sliding over my skin — the last thing I needed in my life was a man.

Especially a man like Mike Montgomery.

CHAPTER THREE

MIKE

“Rosie, do you have any homework tonight?”  I asked Rosie as soon as we returned to the clubhouse and took off our helmets.

“I have a few math worksheets.  Ms. Daisy said she didn’t want to give us too much on the first day of school,”  she replied, in her sweet voice that I adored so much.

“Ms. Daisy?  I thought her name was Ms. Sinclair?”

“She said we could call her Ms. Daisy.  I don’t know,”  she replied, as she slipped her tiny hand in mine as we walked into the clubhouse. “I guess you can call her whatever you want!”

I can think of quite a few things to call her, I thought to myself.  Pretty. Sexy. Blonde. Hot as hell.

“Well, hello, Rosie!  How was the first day of school, darlin’?” A deep voice bellowed from the corner of the room as we walked in, our eyes adjusting to the stark darkness.

Rosie let go of my hand, ran right to the corner and jumped up into Reaper’s lap.  As soon as she landed, our five year-old bulldog, lil’ Mike, scrambled on top of both of them.  Rosie squealed, hugged him, and then scratched his floppy ears as she talked to Reaper.

“It was awesome, Reaper!  My teacher is super nice and she’s really pretty, too,” she said to the enormous man who was smiling a crooked smile at her and listening to her intently.

“Oh, yeah? Nice and pretty?  Sounds like you lucked out, little girl!”    Reaper ruffled Rosie’s black curls and they laughed easily together and began chatting about the rest of her day.

Reaper was my best friend, and also the VP of my club.  I trusted him with my life, and more importantly, Rosie’s life, too.  We grew up together, joined the club together, and had gone through hell and back together - and we were barely thirty-five years old.

Reaper had held things together while I was mourning the loss of my wife Rose, Rosie’s mom.  Everything had been so full of happiness and hope up until then.  The club had been successful, without having to shed too much blood in the process, and we had some good brothers in the club, too.

Loyal and fierce.  That was our motto.

It wasn’t just Reaper I trusted with my life, but the other guys, too.  Death, the Secretary, was a big, burly, round man with unruly grey curls that framed his plump face.  He looked a lot like Reaper, but he was a little older and a little fatter. Sandman, the Treasurer, was a powerhouse of a man.  Bald, six foot ten and three hundred pounds, all he had to do was turn his intense blue eyes on someone and they would be intimidated into complete submission.  He was the perfect man to have around in a conflict.  Demon, my Sergeant at Arms, was the quietest of them all, and the smallest, too.  Often, Demon’s opponents underestimated his strength, but he was always willing to show them exactly how strong he was and how quickly he could take them down.  I think he liked the surprise, although he would never admit it.

These men, along with the rest of the brotherhood, are what kept me sane when Rose died.  And Rosie.  Always Rosie. 

It’s amazing the feelings that consume you when you have a child.  Intense love,  intense protectiveness, and intense, constant worry.  It was wonderful and excruciating at the same time, and I stumbled through the days doing my best to do right by her. If I didn’t have my brothers to back me up, hell, even hold me up when I needed it, I would never have made it this far.

And one look at Rosie made me feel that maybe, just maybe, I was doing a decent job.  It killed me that she would never know her mother, never hear Rose’s sweet voice, or feel the tender warmth of her kindness.  If there was any way I could go back and change things, I would.

But we never saw it coming.  Up until the day of Rosie’s birth, the pregnancy was normal and routine.  When Rose’s water broke that morning, our hearts swelled with happiness that our little bundle of joy was finally arriving.  But shortly after we arrived at the hospital, Rose’s doctors kicked me out of the room, and I paced up and down that hallway like a lion,  consumed with worry.  It was eight hours later that the doctor finally came out and told me Rose didn’t make it, but the baby was okay.

I was devastated, and I broke down right there in the hospital hallway, sobbing in Reaper’s arms as he tried to keep me from collapsing.

The next few days were a blur of the most fucked up mixture of happiness and hell.  I held my perfectly healthy, happily cooing baby girl in my arms, as I watched them lower her mother’s body into the cold ground on a rainy Sunday morning.

It’s worth repeating - if I didn’t have my brothers to help me through all of that, I never would have survived.  I owed them my life.

The first year was incredibly hard.  I missed Rose fiercely and the loss of her broke me.  There were days when it was all I could do to look in Rosie’s eyes because they were Rose’s eyes staring back at me.  I was alone with my new daughter and the ghost of my wife, with nothing but my love for Rosie and my club to keep me going. 

Both my parents and Rose’s parents had died long ago.  I wasn’t prepared for the exhaustion that settled into my bones, a result of raising an infant on your own. Those long, sleepless nights almost did me in, but then when it got to be too much, I finally let Reaper and Sandman come over and help me out at night.  

I’ll never forget those mornings after I was able to get a few hours of much needed sleep, and waking up to the sight of Reaper singing lullabies and cooking pancakes in my kitchen, while Sandman gave Rosie a bottle — they still made me smile to this day.

On Rosie’s second birthday, all the brothers chipped in and surprised Rosie with a puppy.  I was pissed at first, because they didn’t ask me beforehand.  I was so overwhelmed at being a single parent already, and the last thing I needed was a damned puppy.  But Rosie promptly named him after me, since she had been begging for a little brother, too young to understand that you needed a mother for that.   

When I heard her say his name the first time, and saw the joy that washed over her face when he snuggled up against her, there was no way I could protest, as much as his name embarrassed the fuck out of me at first.  I forced myself to take the brother’s teasing in stride and after a while I didn’t mind at all.  That’s when I became ‘Big Mike’, and it just stuck.

It was memories like that, the ones that crept into my brain at the oddest of moments, that made me love these men like my own brothers.  They were the most loyal people I had ever known.

Loyalty and fierceness.  That’s what the club was built on, and that’s what our future would be built on, too.

CHAPTER FOUR

DAISY

Stop it, Daisy!

All day long, I had to catch myself and put my thoughts back in more appropriate and safe places.  As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t stop thinking about him for very long. 

I’d be grading papers, and before I knew it, I’d find myself just staring at the paper, my mind filled with an image of his smiling lips.  Or, I’d be standing at the chalkboard and talking to the class, and one look at Rosie’s smiling eyes and bouncing curls would make me think of him — of his kind, brown eyes, of his hair that looked so soft I just wanted to bury my face in it, of his irresistible smile formed from lips I desperately wanted to kiss — and I would begin to stutter and lose my train of thought.  While this was of great amusement to a group of twenty-five seven year-olds, it was really bad news for this thirty year-old schoolteacher.

What the hell was wrong with me - fantasizing about an outlaw biker?  An incredibly handsome, irresistible, leather-clad, masculinity-oozing, outlaw biker - but still!  This was no way for me to be acting!

Not now.  Especially now!

Hadn’t I learned my lesson?  Wasn’t I old enough to know better by now?  Didn’t I already learn everything the hard way?