Dante huffed a laugh. “Lord, she’s right. Bye, Kid.”
I couldn’t help but stare at the broad, muscular plane in that tight white t-shirt as he walked back toward the oven. Mary noticed. She winked at me. I felt my cheeks burning.
“I’m really going to be late,” I muttered, as I turned tail and nearly ran out the front door.
Before I hopped on my bike, I pulled my phone out of my pocket to shoot a quick email to my professor about my tardiness. At the top of my inbox was an unread message, which was unexpected—I pretty much always kept my school inbox at zero, and hadn’t been expecting anything.
When I opened it, it was from an obvious burner email, just a random string of letters and numbers. There was nothing in the subject line, and the body of the email simply read: WATCH YOUR BACK.
I winced and marked it as spam. That was… weird, and kind of ominous… But it was probably nothing—and it kind of looked like the other weird emails that ended up in my spam folder asking about scam bank transfers and mail-order dates. I figured it was one the dangers of having my email listed publicly on the business department’s website. Had to be a bot just trawling for emails and seeing if they’re active, looking for easy targets who would freak out at the drop of a hat.
Right?
I shoved the little edge of fear away and straddled my bike. It was just an email. I had more important things to worry about—like getting my grade knocked down a few points for excessive tardiness… or a certain tattooed, motorcycle-riding baker.
7
Heath
“As much as I enjoy doing this,” Jazz grumbled, “I’m getting really sick of moving these goddamned mats.”
I laughed as I helped Jazz drag the last mat from the closet and onto the unfinished concrete floor of the gym. Tex and another patched-in member who I didn’t know quite as well, Joker, were finishing up moving the weight training equipment aside to create as much space as possible. We had the setup down to a science at this point, but it was still a time-suck.
“We should just keep it set up this way,” I said.
“Yeah, if you can convince Jazz to stop lifting every other day,” Tex complained, “we wouldn’t have to do this.”
“If you started weightlifting,” Jazz said warmly, “maybe your arms wouldn’t be so scrawny.”
“I’m choking you out in front of everyone because you said that,” Tex said easily.
Jazz laughed as we adjusted the mat. The setup wasn’t that bad, but Tex and Jazz would take any opportunity to rib each other. And I thought the training was a great idea. Training with Jazz had been intimidating at first, but after a couple months of sessions I felt stronger, and definitely more confident in my ability to defend myself.
I hadn’t realized how much that feeling would boost my confidence—and after all the recent trouble we’d had with the Vipers, and then the ex-Liberty guys, I understood why Blade wanted us all to have a basic understanding of self-defense. And I even understood why Blade wanted Dante to help out. He had a different knowledge base of self-defense tactics, and the more variety we could get in these lessons, the better equipped our members would be.
I couldn’t help but be a little nervous about it, though. My visit to the bakery two days ago had eased the tension between us, but I was still… nervous around him.
Only, I was nervous not because of his size, or his strength, or his powerful presence in a room. But because instead of wanting to get away from him, now I’d started wanting to get closer. I liked it when he smiled at me approvingly, when his pale blue eyes lingered on me almost appraisingly. I’d never felt this way about anyone, and especially not a big guy like Dante. It made me feel off-kilter, a little fumbling—like I couldn’t figure out how to behave normally around him.
Because every time he looked at me, it was like my brain short-circuited. For some reason, I wanted him to see me as…desirable? Even if I had no plans or even ideas of acting on that. But I wanted him to see me as an adult. A man. And that wasn’t going to happen if I kept acting like a confused teenager every time he was around.
But as his chaperone, whenever he was in the clubhouse, I’d have to