“When was the last time you saw Dani anyway?” Pete asked.
I cleared my throat. “You’d just brought her home from the hospital, right after she was born. She was so pink, she looked like she’d been freshly scrubbed.”
I could feel Dani’s gaze on me but I didn’t dare look at her. If I did, every drop of blood in my body would rush south. The last thing I needed was a raging hard-on for Pete’s daughter in his own damn kitchen.
Pete let out a low whistle.
“Twenty-one years ago. Hard to believe it’s been that long.”
He kissed Dani’s cheek and reached past her to open the refrigerator, retrieving two beers.
Dani was twenty-one. That meant I was thirty years older than her. I scrubbed the back of my neck and blew out a breath. I definitely needed to calm down.
But it seemed Dani was going to put my self-control to the test.
“Dad won’t tell me much about his motorcycle days. I’d love to hear any stories you might be willing to share, Mr. Crow.”
I huffed a dry laugh. “Trust me, you don’t. And it’s just Crow. Not mister anything. Crow.”
She regarded me from beneath her lashes. A delicate pink color stole across her cheeks that made her even more endearing.
“There will be absolutely no story time between you two,” Pete said. “Crow here did all the dirty work for our Chicago charter. If we needed someone to cave, Crow was the man we would call in to break kneecaps and leave a memorable scar as a reminder that you don’t mess with the club.”
Dani’s eyes flickered wider.
“Oh,” she mumbled into her iced tea.
Well, as bittersweet as it was, that did the trick. I could tell Dani was a good girl living a sheltered life. She wouldn’t want anything to do with a calloused old brute like me.
Pete shook his head with a sigh.
“Can’t believe I ever lived that life. It sounds so rough, looking back on it now. I don’t know how you manage to stick with it, Crow.”
I shrugged, scratching at the label of my beer bottle with my thumbnail. I stayed because I didn’t have anything else. What few family members I had were either dead or in jail. Pete was lucky, finding a good woman to make a fresh start with. Some of us were only meant to duke it out in the trenches, fighting to survive, to watch the backs of your club brothers and make sure they survived, too. This life in the suburbs with the perfect house and the perfect family…I never had a chance at it.
“You were always a softie,” I shot back. “Now, how about those steaks you were talking about earlier?”
As I followed Pete into the backyard to get the barbecue started, I found Dani staring after me. When she realized she’d been caught red-handed, she blushed, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear self-consciously before she glanced away.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe sweet, sheltered Dani wasn’t put off by the threat of danger but drawn to it instead, like a moth to the flame.
I knew how to tell when a woman was interested and Dani had all the bashful subtlety of an innocent girl faced with the overwhelming desire tofuck, probably for the first time in her life.
I paused on the threshold of the back door. If I was thirty years younger, I wouldn’t have hesitated to act, sweeping in to steal a kiss from Dani that would have left her breathless and craving more. I would have whispered in her ear to meet me later that night when her dear old dad wasn’t looking.
But those years were behind me now. As tempting as it was to take a blushing Dani to bed, she was only twenty-one, accustomed to a quiet, safe life. She was everything soft and sweet while I was all rough edges, hard lines, and bristly.
So, I stepped outside and closed the door behind me, leaving Dani alone in the kitchen and trying to ignore the hole in my gut when I walked away from her.
Chapter Two
Dani
Ever since meeting Crow, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I’d never felt such a strong attraction to a man before that left me tongue-tied and blushing. I’d dated a few guys in college but no one made it seem as if the temperature had cranked up in the room by twenty degrees like Crow did. No one made eye contact feel as decadently indecent as Crow did.
“Dani! You’ve been spacing out on us all day,” Hannah said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
I blinked myself back to the present. Guilt nagged at me. I was spending the weekend with my two best friends, Amy and Hannah, and instead, I was daydreaming about a guy I didn’t even know and twice my age. I doubted a guy like him, dressed in black leather and part of a motorcycle club, would bother to give me a second look.