Dark Guardian (Black Hoods MC #3) - Avelyn Paige Page 0,36

rap sheet a mile long. Possession. Intent to sell. Breaking and entering. Pending charges for assault. He’s not a good person.”

“That it? I can handle their father.”

“How? By making him disappear like you did with their uncle? Murder is not the answer. You can’t just kill anyone who opposes you.” The words feel foreign leaving my lips, and he doesn’t flinch once. For a normal person, this would sound absurd. For Eugene, though, it’s probably everyday decisions, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

“That’s how you see me? A savage bastard with blood on his hands? I’m not the boogeyman underneath your bed, Grace.”

“Then what are you?”

He prowls toward me, his eyes still filled with anger. A smart person would back away, but maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, because as he gets closer, I can only stand there, frozen in place.

Placing his hands on my hips, he walks me back until I’m pressed against the wall. His breath fans across my face as he glowers down at me. “Why are you so goddamn infuriating?”

I arch against him, shocking us both. His chest is hard against mine, and now my nose is mere inches from his. Panting, we stare into each other’s angry eyes.

“Why are you such a brute?” We continue to stare at each other, our gazes imprisoned in the fire burning between us, the anger morphing into something far different.

When his lips crash onto mine, I lose myself. My fingertips dig into his shoulders and pull him impossibly closer. Whimpering into his mouth, I raise up on my toes, trying to put as much of him against me as humanly possible.

Holy Mother of God. The contrast between his soft lips and his rough beard makes my knees quake beneath me, threatening to fail me altogether.

His kiss carries me outside of myself. Away from my job, my past. Away from everything but the fact that I’m a woman, and this is the first man to ever make me feel this kind of passion.

Time stands still as he presses me against that wall. He pulls me closer, his fingers curling into my hips, sending a steady buzz of heady excitement all throughout my body.

“Uh, Mr. Judge?”

His lips pause, and for a moment, we stay that way, needing a second to compose ourselves and remember our surroundings.

When he finally pulls away, I’m able to get a view of Natalie standing in the doorway, her eyes wide with confusion, her body trembling.

Eugene moves to her in an instant, his thumbs wiping away her tears as they fall. “What’s wrong, honey?”

Deciding she doesn’t care as much about what she just walked in on nearly as much as what brought her here in the first place, she shouts, “Kevin’s being a big fat jerk!”

“Come here, sugar.” Opening his arms, she throws herself into him. “What did he say to you?”

“I was trying to work on my spelling and I needed a little help, so I asked him. He just told me to get lost.”

“I’ll take care of it, Natty Kat. Why don’t you go get your homework, and maybe Miss Grace will help you with it?” He looks over his shoulder, and I nod.

She smiles up at me. “Really?”

“Of course I will.”

Pushing away from Eugene, she runs back into the living room, and I hear her taunting her brother about how much trouble he’s in.

Running back in with her book, she takes me by the hand and drags me to the kitchen table. Eugene watches us for a few minutes before heading into what I assume is a hard conversation with Kevin about his behavior. Turning my attention back to Natalie, she reads a few pages and stops, repeating a sentence over and over again.

“See!” she exclaims. “How can the word there mean three different things? It’s so confusing.”

I chuckle. There are grown adults who don’t know the difference between their, there, and they’re. “Their means belongs to them. They’re means they are. And there means the opposite of here. Like, over there.”

She wrinkles her nose. “That’s still confusing.”

She’s right. It is confusing. “Um... Let’s try them in sentences and see if you can figure out the right version of each word.”

I watch as she writes out the sentences in scribbled handwriting, and for the first time, I realize that for a child her age, she’s extremely far behind in reading, and God knows what else. She’s going to struggle unnecessarily thanks to her upbringing.

A noise draws my