SEVEN
Who the fuck was this douche canoe? Taco had been sitting outside the little ranch-style house with the ugly box hedges and stone and weed planter boxes debating what to say once he saw Bambi when Khaki Man came strolling up the walkway.
At first, Taco thought he was a salesman, but it became quickly obvious that he was there for something more personal. Maybe it was the grocery store flowers and the bag of goodies that tipped him off. Taco was observant like that.
Douche canoe must be the new boyfriend, he thought with disdain as he watched him barter, and knowing Bambi, he had been certain the next course of action would be seeing Mr. Khaki do the walk of shame.
But she’d welcomed the fucker inside.
That had made Taco’s blood boil. He didn’t like the idea of her with another man, and he sure as shit didn’t like seeing another man with her. That he was in her house at all sent Taco’s thoughts spiraling down into a dark place.
He had to exercise every ounce of patience to make himself stay planted in his car, a newly rebuilt IROC. He’d figured it would be better to roll up in a car than on a motorcycle, especially if she had a kid. Made him look more responsible.
Shit, why did he even care what she thought? It wasn’t as if she was waiting around for him, pining away. She had a fucking man in her house, and he was the one sitting outside like a damn stalker.
Taco had his hand on the key, about to start the car and get the hell out of there, when Khakis came strolling out carrying a car seat in one hand and a baby in the other. Bambi was hot on his ass, and she was glowing.
She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a pink, V-neck T-shirt that showed off a lot more cleavage than he remembered her having. Taco looked her over a little closer, noting that her hips seems a little rounder, her stomach a little softer, and her thighs a little heavier.
Damn, she looked good. She’d always been sexy, but now she was…hotter. Sexier.
“Shit,” Taco hissed. No way was she just babysitting that kid. All those new curves? Those were from pregnancy.
The question now was, whose kid was it, his or Mr. Rogers?”
Well, he certainly planned to find out. Sitting back, he waited for the guy to finish getting the kid settling into the back of his totally average Joe Kia sport—what was this guy, an accountant?—before holding the door open for Bambi to get into the passenger side. And from the looks of it, she was eating that shit up.
So she liked being doted on? And here he’d thought he’d been doing exactly that. Maybe she just liked having the attention of several men instead of just one. Well, he planned to find that out—today.
Taco waited for the Kia to pull out of the drive and head off down the street, then he pulled out and followed behind them. With each light they passed through, he couldn’t help laughing at himself. Here he was, a badass biker, shadowing the girl he used to fuck like some kind of creep. Look what she’d reduced him to—a stalker, a twisting up shell of a man who had to see for himself that she was done with him rather than read the writing on the wall.
But, he reminded himself, there was one question above all else that he needed an answer to: was that his kid or not?
***
Taco ended up spending an hour sweating his balls off in a hot car while he watched from the parking lot as Bambi and Khaki Boy pedaled their way in circles around a small pond at the park. What angered him even more was how cozy the guy was with the kid. He held him in his lap and comforted him when he cried as if he were his own. So, hell, maybe he was the father, and maybe Taco just didn’t want to admit it because he couldn’t accept that she’d moved on with someone else.
The timing would be so tight that it would mean she’d been playing him. That she’d left him for this guy. So if that were the case, he found himself thinking, then what did he have that Taco didn’t?
Shit, why was he even asking himself anything? It wasn’t as if he wanted a damn kid. He wasn’t exactly eager to sign up for the job. He was just jealous because she’d ditched him before he’d gotten tired of her. Yeah, that was it. He was just being a kid about it, not wanting to share his old toys.
Well, he just needed to get the hell over it. Bambi wasn’t his toy anymore. Boo hoo. And her total one-eighty with her taste in men told him she was either experimenting or she’d never really been into the biker scene in the first place.
The fact still remained, none of it was his business nor his concern. She could do whatever she wanted with her life and leave him out of it. So why was he still sitting here watching them, and why was he feeling all kinds of pissed off that he wasn’t the one in that boat making her smile?
Dammit, he was sick of this shit right here. All Taco wanted was to know that he didn’t have a secret baby out there and to tell her to her face that he was done with her, not the other way around. And since he hadn’t accomplished that last part of his mission yet, he told himself he was justified in sitting there a little longer, waiting for the happy couple to finish their afternoon jaunt and get back home where he would confront her. Then he fully planned to be on his merry way back to the clubhouse where he intended to take not one but two—hell, maybe even three—bunnies back to his room to celebrate.
Thankfully, Bambi and her boyfriend-slash-baby daddy or whatever the hell he was didn’t keep him waiting much longer. After another turn around the pond, the kid started to throw a fit, and they called it quits.
Taco tailed them back to Bambi’s residence, grateful they didn’t decide to do something more quaint, like go for afternoon tea— No wait, he’d gotten ahead of himself. Taco’s frown turned into a scowl as they took a few new turns, leading them close but away from her place…and to a damned café that looked all new age, with Wi-Fi.
Grudgingly, he parked off to the side and watched them go in. Through the window, he could see the college-aged men and women dressed in their polos and buttons downs and Birkenstocks seated at tables with laptops and their phones, fully engrossed in whatever they were doing. He hated those places. They were so pretentious.
Just like Mr. Rogers in there.
Somehow, Taco just knew that guy was stuffy. He probably sucked the oxygen right out of the room. He’d never been able to stand those types, which was a lot of the reason he hadn’t bothered going to college. He just didn’t fit. Bambi, on the other hand, was more the type. She wasn’t stuffy or pretentious, but he knew about her background, her affiliation with the government. She’d gone to college, gotten her degrees, and that meant she was crazy smart in a lot of ways. She’d even managed to fly under Spartan radar, fooling all of them, which was pretty hard to do considering they were all sharp as razors.
In short, Taco was impressed by her, and they’d gotten along so well, he couldn’t imagine her going for a guy like Mr. Pleats, but there she was, proving him wrong.
They stayed entirely too long in the café, but around the time Taco noticed the baby start getting fussy, Bambi shifting him from arm to arm and her smile apologetic, they finally left. This time, they went straight to her house, and after homeboy helped her inside, he finally left.
Taco resisted the urge to go after him, to shake him down just to hear the sissy boy squeal. What he wanted wasn’t in that economical vehicle. It was inside that house.
Plan forgotten, Taco got out of the car and walked up the driveway. He was going to say his piece, then he was going to get gone. The last thing he wanted to see was a vision of Bambi in his rearview mirror.