He was hot.
That was a given.
It seemed the Sons of Templar liked to patch in badasses who could also make a mint in male modeling. Though none of them would do such a thing for any kind of money. Except maybe Lucky. He wouldn’t do it for the money, though. He’d do it for the attention.
My beer fairy was no different. He was tall, although not as tall as someone like Bull, but you’d have to be a basketball player to have that honor. Muscular in a bulky way, everything sculpted, including his biceps straining the fabric of his tee.
One of his arms was covered in tattoos travelling all the way up to his neck, the other completely bare. His hair was a light blond, mussed at the top of his head in that artful way that surely took longer than it had for me to do mine. Granted, I’d just thrown mine up into a messy bun because with two kids, you get the choice of doing your hair or makeup, never both. Unless you were superheroes like Gwen and Amy. Or weren’t a single mother like me.
Which was what I was. A widowed single mother. The title burned on my chest like a scarlet letter.
This man with the artfully mussed hair, tattoos, muscles, piercing blue eyes and a slightly crooked nose hadn’t noticed this label, somehow.
He had an open face. I didn’t know how to explain it other than that. Sure, he had all the ingredients to a biker badass, but something about his face—wrinkle free and young—was open and friendly.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why are you sitting here?” I asked, a bite to my tone.
Now, many of these men were well practiced in menacing glares, in deadly threats and general airs of danger. But us women were also well versed at ways in which to make even them go back on a motorcycle boot.
Not this guy, though. No. In the face of my scathing tone he just grinned.
Grinned.
Showing straight, white teeth, showing me that he was definitely a man who smiled often.
“Why wouldn’t I sit here?” he quirked a brow. “You look like you need company. I’m new here, haven’t seen you around. Wanted to introduce myself.”
“I don’t want company,” I shot back, taking another sip of my beer. Even though I had the whole dead husband pass, a part of me recoiled at being so rude to a perfectly nice and perfectly attractive stranger.
“Because you lost your husband a while back, and this is your first time back at the club, so you wanted to escape all the well-meaning women and men currently watching us both like hawks?” he asked conversationally.
I blinked at him. The man with the eyes, the open face and easy smile. I was used to people tiptoeing around me. That’s what you did with widows. You treated them with care, even though there was no point because there was no way to care for broken things. All I craved was for people to treat me like my husband wasn’t dead so maybe I could pretend he wasn’t for a hot minute.
But here was this guy, coming and saying all this shit within a minute of meeting me.
“Yeah, because of all that,” I murmured.
My eyes flickered to the large group of partygoers, and like the man had said, more than a few eyes were pointed in my direction.
“So you know all of that, and you still decided to come over here?” I continued.
“I did.”
I waited for more. There was nothing more. Just him sipping his beer and sitting in what looked like content silence.
That annoyed me. For whatever reason.
“You can leave now,” I grumbled.
“I haven’t even introduced myself,” he replied, not reacting to the ice in my tone.
I frowned. Wasn’t it the duty of all the men who had welcomed me in their alpha male way earlier tonight to seize any—seemingly unattached—member of the opposite sex communicating with me and tell him that I was off limits?
Or at least for one of my friends to come and try to protect me. Although their eyes kept flickering, no one moved toward us.
“Yes, well you do seem to have me at a disadvantage since you know not just my name but all of my tragedies,” I said, suddenly curious about the young, attractive, far too friendly young man who had decided to chat with me despite his chances of getting a shiner—at best—for even talking to me.
“You’re right,” he nodded, taking a pull of his beer. “It’s only fair I share some tragedies with you.”
He put his beer on a table then turned his body, giving me his full attention. It was oddly unnerving. “My dad left the second my mom got pregnant with me. He wasn’t into commitment. Or fatherhood. Or a life that wasn’t lived completely on his terms.”