Summer
I DON’T KNOW what time it was when I woke up, but light was streaming through the big windows of Tiger’s warehouse apartment, illuminating the vaulted ceiling above me and the heavy beams that criss-crossed it.
I lay on my back staring up at it, for a second disorientated about where I was. But then Tiger shifted beside me, his arm tightening around my waist, and I remembered.
After another intense round of sex on the couch, he’d picked me up and carried me into his bathroom and got in the shower with me. Then he’d washed me carefully, like I was a child, before drying me off and carrying me up to the mezzanine floor where his big low bed was.
He’d done things to me in that bed. Things that had made me scream and cry out his name over and over again. Things I was never going to forget.
I wanted him to do those things all over again, but a quick glance revealed he was still asleep and if I wanted to have a look around his apartment without him getting in the way, it was going to have to be now.
Carefully I wriggled out from under his arm and slid out of bed, wincing a little at the way some of my muscles decided to remind me of what we’d been getting up to the night before.
It had been worth it, though, so worth it.
My clothes were downstairs, so I went down the iron stairs still naked, coming down into the living area. The dark blue T-shirt he’d been wearing the night before was on the floor and on a whim, I picked it up and put it on myself.
It was massive, falling to midthigh, but it was soft and it smelled like him and for some reason I didn’t want to take it off.
You don’t know me and good sex doesn’t mean a fucking thing.
His words from the night before echoed suddenly in my head, making my chest tighten. Which was stupid. Of course I knew it didn’t mean a fucking thing and, sure, maybe I didn’t know him.
So why do you want to then?
Good question, and one I didn’t have an answer to. Perhaps it had been something to do with the sex after all. Or perhaps it was all about the past and my fascination with him. Or maybe it had simply been after I’d gone on and on embarrassingly about how wonderful his tattoo was, and he’d finished my ravings about how everything had fit together by saying it was like a bike engine.
It had been the most perfect simile, the way he’d understood thrilling me deeply. There weren’t many people I could talk to about what excited me, mainly because people’s eyes tended to glaze over whenever I mentioned math. But Tiger’s hadn’t. In one simple sentence, he’d managed to encapsulate my feelings about puzzles and equations, and life in general so perfectly that I knew he’d understood.
Even thinking about it now made a jolt of excitement go through me, making me want to charge right back up the stairs and wake him up, talk to him some more about the similarities between bike engines and mathematics.
Except that wouldn’t let me explore and I really wanted to do that.
I began to slowly poke around his apartment. It was a massive place, a basic galley kitchen down one end, a motorcycle workshop up the other, with a living area sandwiched in between. Everything was scrupulously clean and tidy, the remotes for the TV and stereo neatly lined up on the coffee table next to a sleek laptop and a stack of bike magazines.
Interesting how he was so tidy, because most guys weren’t. Or at least, not the ones I’d had any dealings with.
There were no bookshelves and no books, though. At all. Maybe bikers didn’t read? Or were only interested in magazines? There weren’t photos or anything either, which was annoying. I’d been hoping to find a few family pics to give me some insights.
Moving past the living area, I wandered over to the workshop end of the space. There was a workbench running along the length of one wall with cupboards and shelves above it, plus a few larger metal cupboards down one end. A big bike was up on a stand, the chrome gleaming in the morning light.
This area too was neat and tidy, the workbench clean except for a shiny piece of metal that looked like it came from the inside of an engine. I picked it up, the weight of it pleasing in my hand, and turned it over, thinking about him, thinking about the tattoo he’d apparently designed himself, the way all those shapes, the spirals and circles and arcs and squares all fit together.
There was more to him than sex and an easy smile, I was sure of it. And I wanted to know what more there was. He was a puzzle and I wanted to solve him.
I turned around to put the piece of metal back down on the workbench, leaning against it, still thinking. Then I suddenly felt heat along my spine, as two large masculine hands came down onto the bench on either side of me.
I went still, shivering as Tiger’s tall, rangy body pressed me up against the workbench, his breath feathering the side of my neck. ‘Good morning,’ he murmured. ‘What are you doing down here? You should be upstairs, naked in my bed and ready to suck my cock.’
The feel of him against me and the scent of him, musky and spicy, made my head swim. I sighed, leaning back into him. ‘Nothing much. Just looking around.’
‘Uh-huh. Stay out of my stuff, baby girl.’ His mouth brushed over the nape of my neck, the kiss taking the sting from the words. ‘I like you in my shirt, though. You can keep wearing that.’ He shifted his hands, sliding them underneath the hem of the T-shirt I wore, cupping my bare butt, squeezing me. ‘No panties either. I approve.’
I wanted to arch my hips and press myself into his hands, but I had a feeling that was another distraction technique, like he’d used the night before when he’d avoided telling me something that no one else knew about him.
I turned my head, trying to ignore the feel of his hands on my bare skin. ‘Is it later yet?’
‘What do you mean later?’
‘You were going to tell me something about you that no one else knows.’
He squeezed me again, his hips flexing, and I felt rough denim and heat as he pushed himself against me. ‘Yeah, it’s not later yet. Not when my dick is hard.’
Definitely distraction techniques. If I wasn’t careful, they were going to work, too. Because his fingers were skimming down over the curve of my butt and pressing gently between my thighs from behind, brushing the folds of my sex. And I could feel the pleasure already starting to take hold, the deep, intense throb of it stealing my breath.
But I wasn’t going to let him distract me, not this time.
‘I’ll tell you something that no one knows about me.’ I tried to disguise the breathlessness in my voice. ‘I...get afraid a lot. In fact, I’m pretty much always afraid.’
His stroking fingers gentled. ‘Hate to break it to you, baby girl, but that’s not news. I knew you were afraid the moment I met you.’
I could feel my face get hot. I thought I’d hidden it better than that, but obviously I hadn’t. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because you didn’t say a word to me. Could barely even look at me. Plus, you seemed to spend a lot of time trying to blend into the background, trying not to be noticed.’ His fingers spread out on my butt, then slid up to my hips, holding on to me. ‘Seems to me there’s a reason for that.’
I swallowed, falling back on my old excuse. ‘I don’t like people.’
‘Yeah, I don’t think that’s the issue.’
But I didn’t want to talk about my dad and the glass house I lived in. It felt too revealing, even more so when I was wearing hardly any clothes. The only reason I’d said it in the first place was to get him to talk.
‘You don’t want to hear about my pathetic weakness.’ I tried to turn around.
But his fingers firmed on my hips, holding me still. ‘Fear doesn’t make you pathetic, baby. You’re only pathetic if you let it stop you from doing what you want to do. And you definitely don’t let it stop you. Fuck, you talked your way into the clubhouse in the middle of a goddamn party, even though you were terrified. That’s not pathetic. That’s gutsy.’
The way he said it, quiet and yet full of conviction, made my throat get tight and a weird prickle start up behind my eyes. Of course I knew I wasn’t really as pathetic as I made out. And I didn’t need him to tell me that, right?
I opened my mouth to say something, I don’t even know what, but he was still talking in the same quiet tone. ‘And if you’ve got the guts to do that... Okay, you want to know something about me that no one else knows? I can’t fucking read.’
Shock pulsed through me and I was turning around before I could think better of it.
He’d loosened his grip on me and had taken a step back, standing there staring down at me with those dark amber eyes. He was only wearing a pair of half-buttoned jeans, leaving a whole lot of gorgeous sculpted muscle and dark ink on show. He casually put his hands in his pockets, his posture loose and easy, but there was a guarded expression on his face.
‘You can’t read?’ I echoed stupidly.
‘No. Always had difficulty with it when I was at school and then I had to leave and...’ He lifted one of those powerful shoulders. ‘I never learned.’
I couldn’t believe it. He was so strong, so sure of himself. So confident and yet for some reason he’d never developed one of life’s most basic skills. ‘Why not?’
Something crossed his face, gone too fast before I could see what it was. ‘Like I said, I could never get the hang of it at school. Not that I was at school a lot anyway.’
‘But how come? Why weren’t you in school? Surely you had someone who could teach you how to—’
‘My mom was a whore.’ The words were sharp, cutting me off. ‘She took johns during the day because she didn’t like doing it at night, and she needed me to look after my kid brother. So I did. And when I got older, she needed me to look after her as well, because some of those johns were violent fucks who had no respect.’ Something dark and metallic glittered in his gaze, not the bright gold of arousal but what looked like a sullen kind of anger. ‘She left when I was sixteen and took Tommy with her, and then it was too late to go back to school, so I didn’t. Joined the Knights instead. Don’t need to fucking read to be a brother.’
I blinked at him, trying to take all this in. His childhood sounded...awful. Worse than mine by a long shot. ‘Your mom was a...p-prostitute?’
‘Yeah.’ The anger in his gaze burned a little brighter. ‘You got a problem with that? She had to feed me and Tommy somehow and that was the only way she could do it.’
‘No, no problem,’ I said quickly. ‘But she left you? At sixteen?’ There was something painful in my chest, a terrible sympathy, because I knew what it was like to have a mother leave you. I knew the hole that it left, even though I tried not to think about it too often.
Unexpectedly he looked away, but not before I caught the flash of pain that glinted in his eyes. ‘She had to go. I don’t blame her for leaving.’
‘But you were sixteen. That’s so young. Why did she go?’
Another shrug, as if he didn’t care. ‘I don’t know.’
I blinked again. ‘You don’t know?’
‘She didn’t fucking tell me, okay?’ His rough voice had got sharper, harder, the anger in his eyes bleeding into his words. ‘One day I got home and she and Tommy weren’t there. She’d just...gone.’
The painful feeling in my chest ached. At least my mom had kissed me goodbye before she’d left. Told me to be a good girl for my dad and that one day she’d come back for me. She never had of course, but that was a whole other story. At least I knew why she’d gone—because living with Dad had become impossible for her.
‘I’m so sorry.’ It was trite, but I didn’t know what else to say. ‘That must have been awful.’
‘You don’t need to be fucking sorry.’ Tension had crept into his posture, his shoulders going tight. ‘Got nothing to do with you.’
‘I know that, but I know what it’s like to have a parent walk out on you. My mom did when I was little. She always told me she’d come back, but...’ I stopped. I didn’t want to make this about me. This was about him. About the fact that he’d been left alone at sixteen years old. God.
‘Parents,’ he said, as if that explained everything, his mouth twisting into a mirthless smile. ‘What are you gonna do?’
It sounded flippant, but I knew it wasn’t. I could see the anger there, glowing beneath the smile he was trying to cover it with. ‘What about your dad? Do you have any other relatives?’
‘No. Never knew who my dad was and never wanted to find out.’ He rolled his shoulders like he was trying to get rid of the tension in them. ‘The Knights are all the family I need.’
‘Do they know you can’t read?’
‘’Course not. Why do you think I said it was something no one else knew?’
‘But why didn’t you learn?’ I couldn’t seem to leave the subject alone. ‘I mean, how do you do anything? Do you get people to read to you or what?’
‘Technology, baby. It’s a wonderful thing.’ He took his hands out of his pockets and stalked towards me again, slow and fluid, tiger by name, tiger by nature. ‘I got a phone that reads shit out to me and I can dictate texts. Same with my computer. And I don’t need to read to be able to put an engine together.’
He closed the distance between us, backing me up against the workbench and pinning me there with his body, his hands coming down on either side of me once again. He was hard, I could feel him pressing against me, could see the glint of arousal in his eyes. But that anger was still there, too, and it was glowing hot.
He might act like he didn’t care about his mother leaving, or about not being able to read, but he did.
‘Why did you tell me?’ I ignored the hard ridge that was nudging between my thighs, looking up into his strong, fierce face.
‘You wanted to know. So I told you.’
‘But you haven’t told anyone else.’
‘No, because it’s a fucking depressing subject.’ He nudged me a little more firmly and a hot burst of sensation flooded through me. ‘Don’t go thinking this makes you special, baby girl. I don’t care who knows.’
Oh, yes, he did. Why else would I be the only one? It hurt that I wasn’t special to him, because he was special to me, but still...he’d told me all the same. He’d given this secret to me and no matter what he said, it did feel special to me.
I lifted my hands to his face, obeying some instinct that told me that touch was the way to connect with him, the prickle of his morning beard against my palms a delicious roughness. ‘I think you do care,’ I said calmly. ‘So why don’t you let me teach you?’