The forest rose high on every side, a hedge of protection as evergreens stretched for the blackened heavens, a slew of stars littering the sleeping sky.
The bike tailed me over the hills and curves and turns.
Smoothly.
Effortlessly.
As if tracking me was what he was meant to do.
My spirit thrashed and anxiety gripped and this flicker of that something I didn’t want to voice ignited anew as I drove toward my little house in an old, quiet neighborhood on the opposite end of town.
By the time I made the last turn onto my street, where the tiny, more-than-modest houses were eclipsed by towering, ancient trees, I couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t process the push and the pull.
The gravity that paraded as repulsion.
A fluttering of erratic wings flapped and danced in my chest.
I whipped into the single-car drive, threw my car into park, and tore out of the door just as the motorcycle rumbled to a stop on the street behind me.
Menacing, dark, and intimidating. Every part of it was matte black. Custom and cold and hard.
As wicked as the man who sat at its helm. His head was turned so he could stare across at me while those tatted hands still gripped the handlebars.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I hissed, storming three steps in his direction. The words came out so low there was no chance he heard it over the loud rumble of the powerful engine.
Though it was clear he knew exactly what I’d demanded.
The longer part of that raven hair whipped in the wind, and that sinewy muscle tightened and flexed beneath the designs that covered his arms.
My belly quivered where I froze. I couldn’t move, but those butterflies flew.
Slowly, he reached over and killed the engine.
In an instant, a burning silence consumed us. The only sounds the whisper of the trees.
In it, we were held.
Captured.
Finally, he kicked the stand and balanced the bike, and my heart did a flip when he swung off it and straightened to his full, towering height.
The man a fortress.
An inferno.
And there he was, standing at the end of my drive as if he didn’t understand the reason for it any more than I did.
“I asked what you’re doing here.” I demanded it again, though this time the grating of my voice cut through the air. Confusion and need.
Did he feel it, too?
He gruffed a hard sound. “No fuckin’ clue, Kitten.” He dipped his head toward his heavy boots, those hands shoved back in his pockets before he was peering at me with those penetrating eyes. “Other than the fact I needed to make sure that you’re alright.”
Warmth filled my chest, but I forced myself to lift my chin, sure I needed to protect myself, that I was probably in more danger in that second than I’d been in my whole life.
“I told you I was fine.”
“That was a lie, though, wasn’t it?” It was a soft accusation from that wicked mouth. Ripping me in two and fracturing more of my chinked armor. “You gonna stand there and pretend like that was just another day for you?”
I swallowed around the lump that had taken a seat at the base of my throat. “Isn’t that the only thing I can do?”
His chuckle was disbelief and speculation, and for the quickest flash, the hardness slipped from his features. “Is it, Eden? Is it the only thing you can do? Because it seems to me you have more important things in your life than wasting it away in my club night after night.”
Broken laughter heaved from my chest. “Yeah, you’re right, Mr. Lawson. And saving the school is one of them.”
My students. My joy. My father’s legacy.
My life.
I almost toppled with the truth of it. It was all I had, the same as my father. That and our devotion to each other. And I had no idea who either of us would be if we had that stolen from us.
Trent wheeled back.
Caught off guard.
“That school tuition is a small fortune,” he argued as if my claim was absurd.
I scoffed around the fullness that had suddenly clotted off my throat, so thick it had become difficult to breathe, cutting myself open in front of the very man I should be protecting myself against. “Tuition that goes right back into every program that is run out of that school and church, Mr. Lawson. Given to the families that come to us for help. Not everything is done out of greed.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face, frustrated and concerned, and…and, God, who was this man?
He was conflict and contradiction. Everything that I didn’t understand. And the scariest part was how much I’d begun to want to.
“Money run dry?” he asked.
A pained sound escaped before I could stop it, the confession gushing right out. “My daddy has always run it right up to the edge. Giving and giving and giving to the point of breaking. And someone he trusted most, loved the most, my own sister…” I clutched my chest when I admitted it. “She came in and stole from him. From us. It wiped us out. Knocked out the last leg that had kept that fragile balance.”