Baby For The Biker Bad Boy (Bad Boy MC Romance) (3 page)

“Crazy.”

“Yeah. That’s what I said.”

Nola turned back to the front, attempting to hear a little of what the professor was discussing. But then the girl touched her shoulder.

“So, did I see you get off the back of a Bandido’s bike this morning?”

Nola glanced at her. “You know the Bandidos?”

“Everyone around here knows the Bandidos. They run the streets.”

Nola nodded, not quite sure what she meant.

“I’d be careful if I were you. I heard about this girl who fell for a Bandido. They ended up getting her hooked on heroin and then prostituted her out until she committed suicide because she couldn’t take it anymore.”

“I’m sure that’s just a lot of rumor.”

“I don’t know. I have a cousin who ran with the Bandidos years ago. He’s serving a life sentence in federal prison for drugs. I never even met him.”

Nola glanced at her again, but had the feeling that she simply watched a little too much television.

Her next class was biology, then biochemistry. Both seemed less complicated than the professors tried to imply in their lectures and syllabuses. Their expectations were less than Nola faced at BU. It was almost a disappointment, really, the knowledge that she wouldn’t be as challenged here as she had been before.

Not that she really concentrated on her classes. Her thoughts were more focused on Scribe, on the expectation of seeing him again this afternoon. She was almost afraid he wouldn’t be there when she came out of her last class.

But, of course, he was. He even climbed off his bike as she approached.

“How’d it go?”

Nola shrugged. “It was school.”

“I bet you enjoy it. All those lectures and all the writing and stuff you have to do. I’m sure you love it.”

“Is that what you think?” She moved close to him, laying a hand on his chest just over the patch that spelled out his name. “You think I’m some sort of nerd? Does it turn you on, the idea of corrupting my ideals?”

“Maybe.”

He kissed her hard enough to make her bottom lip smart as he pressed it a little too roughly against her teeth. But then his touch softened as he slid an arm around her waist and drew her closer to the length of his body. She kind of melted there, molding her body into the angles of his.

“Or maybe you’re just turned on by the idea of being with a bad boy,” he whispered in her ear.

“Maybe.”

Chapter 4

Scribe took her back to the lake. They didn’t talk at first, just walked along the shore, hand in hand, like a couple from one of those cheesy made-for-TV movies her mother used to watch obsessively. And it was the first time in a long while that Nola’s mind was free of everything but the moment.

“Why Lubbock?”

Nola glanced at Scribe. “My dad was a pediatrician in Dallas. I grew up there; Our lives were there. But when my dad died—my mom couldn’t start over under the microscope of all the people she’d mingled with at cocktail parties, you know?”

“I get that. It would be like leaving the club and trying to go legit on their streets.”

“Yeah, exactly like that.”

“What about you? Why couldn’t you go back to BU?”

“No money.”

“Your dad must have left you pretty bad off.”

Nola blushed even as she nodded. She knew she shouldn’t be embarrassed. It was her father’s failings that created this mess, not her own. But, somehow, not being able to overcome them well enough still felt like her fault.

Her mother relied on her to keep her perfect world perfect. That was her failure.

“My dad took off when I was ten,” Scribe said. “My mother wasn’t much of a mother. When she wasn’t high, she was off with one guy or another. Left me and my brother to pretty much fend for ourselves.”

“That’s rough.”

He shrugged. “It’s a common enough story in the neighborhood where I grew up. Some parents, they cared enough to keep their kids off the streets as much as they could. But others didn’t because that was how they grew up and if it was okay for them, it was great for their kids, you know?”

“Yeah. Kind of like my dad pushing me to be a doctor because his dad was a doctor.”

“I guess, yeah. Just a little more pretentious.”

“You think I’m pretentious?”

He laughed after he caught the look of surprise on her face. “Surely you understand what a girl like you is to a guy like me. I’m not the kind who’s going to be accepted in the circles you live in.”

“Used to live in.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from life is that those who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths never travel far from that life, even when bad things happen. Just like guys like me are destined to live and die by the club rules.”

“You don’t ever see yourself doing anything more than riding with that club?”

“No, I don’t.”

Scribe lifted her hand and twirled her around until her back was pressed into his chest. Then he wrapped his arms around her and stared out at the lake with his chin resting lightly on the top of her head.

“I don’t know why you’re here with me. The moment I saw you standing in front of your car, cursing like a ten year old, I knew you were as far out of my league as a person could get. But I couldn’t resist temptation.”

“How do you know you’re out of my league? Maybe I’m not the person you think I am.”

“And maybe you’re exactly who I think you are. You’ve just decided life in your world is too hard and you want to test the waters in mine.”

She nearly laughed. It was like he could see into her mind, could read all the thoughts she had believed she was successfully hiding from everyone around her. It was like he knew what was written on her heart.

“Scribe is a good name for you.”

He pulled her closer to him, but he didn’t say anything.

***

Scribe picked her up every morning for the next few weeks, even after he returned her car to her—both the alternator and started replaced at no charge—and was waiting for her every afternoon after class. They didn’t always go to the lake, but he never took her anywhere personal, either. They went to a diner one night on the outskirts of town and had the most amazing tacos she had ever tasted. Another time he took her to a small flea market where he bought her a funny little hat that he said made her look like Annie Oakley. But mostly they just hung out in quiet places where there weren’t a lot of other people around and talked.

Scribe was like no one else Nola had ever known. Not only was he the most handsome man she’d ever met—what was it about those blue eyes that she couldn’t stop thinking about, even in the middle of the night when sleep was a distant memory?—but he had the quickest wit of anyone she’d ever met. He was street smart, but wasn’t highly school-educated; she baffled him when she tried to explain basic biology to him one afternoon, but he could figure a tip in seconds and he whispered the lines to a sonnet in her ear late one evening when he thought she couldn’t hear him.

He was an enigma. She couldn’t figure him out, but she loved trying.

She stood in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom, trying to decide if she should wear jeans or a skirt. He texted her less than twenty minutes ago and told her he wanted to see her. That could mean almost anything. The last time she got a text like that, he took her to a bookstore and bought her a book she’d mentioned she might need for her physics class.

“Where are you off to?”

Nola glanced at her mother. “A friend’s coming by to take me out.”

“Should you really be going out this late? Don’t you have classes in the morning?”

“I’m an adult, Mom, I think I can handle my own life.”

She could feel the indignation coming off of her mother before she turned and saw it written all over her face.

“What’s happened to you?” her mother asked quietly. “You never used to talk to me that way.”

“Yeah, well, that was before Daddy died and turned our lives upside down.” Nola picked up a hair brush and ran it through her long, auburn curls. “Things have changed.”

“Maybe our situation, but I’m still your mother and I still deserve respect.”

“Of course.” Nola glanced at herself in the mirror one more time. “I don’t mean to disrespect you. But I’m twenty years old. If I want to go out, I think I’ll go out.”

She dropped a kiss on her mother’s cheek before brushing past her just as the roar of Scribe’s motorcycle vibrated against the windows.

Nola ran down the front steps and took the helmet Scribe was offering, glancing back at the house as his eyebrows lifted under his safety glasses. Her mother was standing in the doorway, her arms still crossed, a shadow covering her once attractive features. Nola felt bad. She should have gone back and apologized. But then Scribe was helping her onto the back of his bike, and her regrets melted into a desire to just disappear anywhere and everywhere with him.

“What was that all about?” Scribe asked a while later as they took a booth at the back of a fast-food restaurant.

“What?”

“Your mom.”

Nola shrugged, lifting her soda straw to her lips to take a sip.

“She looked pissed.”

“My mom thinks I should be home in bed like a good little school girl.”

“Maybe you should be.”

Nola pushed at his hand where it rest on the table inches from hers. “Are you my daddy now?”

A soft smile touched his lips as he tilted his head, his eyes moving over her tight tee and low rider jeans. “There could be some benefits to that, I suppose.”

“Dirty minded.”

“How can a man spend any amount of time with you and not have dirty thoughts?”

Nola took another sip of her drink, trying to hide the hot blush that burned her cheeks. Scribe reached across the table and took her hand, pressing it between both of his.

“She doesn’t like you spending time with me.”

“She doesn’t know anything about you. She never bothered to ask.”

“And that pisses you off.”

“I don’t know what that does.” She pulled her hand from his. “Can I ask you something?”

Scribe shrugged. “You can ask anything. I just can’t promise I’ll answer.”

Nola ran her fingers through her hair, brushing it back from her face. She was nervous, but when she looked at him, the funny ache in her chest lessened a little.

“Why haven’t you introduced me to any of your friends?”

Scribe was saved from answering when their food arrived. It took the girl delivering it an inordinate amount of time to set everything down, and she seemed to need to bend low in front of Scribe a few more times than seemed necessary. Then she ignored Nola’s request for ketchup, but the moment Scribe asked for some, she instantly found a handful in the pit of one of the deep pockets of her greasy apron.

“She likes you,” Nola observed.

“She likes the jacket.”

Nola’s eyebrows rose. “Then you don’t think it has anything to do with the muscles the jacket covers up? Or those amazing blue eyes?”

Scribe cocked his head. “You think my eyes are amazing?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

She tossed a fry that he tried, unsuccessfully, to catch in his mouth. She laughed, even as this absurd thought crossed her mind. Jake—her ex—would never step foot in a place like that, let alone goof off with her the way Scribe did. None of the boys Nola had ever dated would do the things Scribe did with her. Most of them wouldn’t be caught dead in a restaurant that had less than a single Michelin star, would not eat French fries if caviar was available, and would never touch leather unless it was on their car seats. They were snobs, members of an elite society that Nola had once thought was preferable to the world she read about in novels, but never had—or wanted—to experience herself.

Except, of course, those occasional fantasies.

She’d been in love with Patrick Swayze when she was a preteen. She saw
Dirty Dancing
at a friend’s house—they were having a slumber party, and it was the only thing showing on cable that wasn’t locked by the system’s parental locks system—and knew that Johnny Castle was the man she wanted to marry someday. That was, of course, until her mother explained that women like them didn’t marry boys like that. It only happened in the movies.

But there was still something about the way Johnny broke his own car window that filled her erotic fantasies from that point forward.

Was that what Scribe was? Her real life Johnny Castle? Would he break her heart? Or would he pull her out of a corner like Johnny did for Baby?

“You don’t want to know my friends, Nola.”

She’d almost forgotten she’d asked. She looked up at Scribe and watched as he shoved a couple of fries in his mouth, quickly washing them down with his soda.

“Why not?”

“This isn’t high school. We’re not just a bunch of guys who dress tough and act tough, but go home to our middle class homes and take out the trash for our old ladies like good little boys.”

“I know that.”

“The Bandidos are the law on the street. We have a certain reputation and we live up to that reputation.”

“I know that, too. I read the newspapers.”

Scribe shook his head. “The newspapers only tell half the story.”

“But you can only compartmentalize your life so much. Eventually one is going to spill into the other.”

“Not any time soon.”

Nola picked up her burger, but she only picked at the soggy bun. The worker who’d brought their food was standing behind the counter—actually, it was more like she was laying on the counter, her chest was so far over the edge, her cleavage hanging so far out, that Nola was a little concerned she might fall over the other side. Nola took in her greasy hair and her over-the-top makeup and suspected that girl would fit in with Scribe’s club friends better than she ever would.

“Why do you keep coming around if you have to hide me from the people you spend ninety percent of your time with?”

“I’m not hiding you. My brothers know about you.”

“Your brothers?”

“The other members of the club.”

“You told them about me?”

He shrugged. “It’s like a family, Nola. I know everything about them. They know everything about me.”