“And?”
He groaned, rolled his eyes, and pulled out some Skittles from his pocket. I scanned that, took his cash, and gave him exact change back.
“See, behave like this and you won’t get your ass beat.”
Boy, I was in some mood, huh?
The kid walked off without another word.
“You really shouldn’t talk to customers like that.”
I looked up ready to snap when the voice came to me.
It wasn’t the voice of a Bandit. It wasn’t a Reaper. In fact, it wasn’t the voice of a man at all.
It was…
Tara?
I scrunched an eyebrow at her.
“Shouldn’t you be at work right now?”
“I told them I had to take care of some appointments first,” she said as if she had such gravitas at her job that such an excuse would get taken easily. “You OK? I saw all your texts last night. Sounds like you did not have a good time with Connor.”
“No, I—”
“Calm down,” she said. “You’re not going to be able to tell the story accurately if you tell it like you want to murder him. So just breathe first and then tell me the story.”
I made a show of trying to breathe, but it actually did calm me down. Granted, I was still going to cuss up a storm, but at least this way, Tara had calmed me down to where I could make sure other customers didn’t hear my story.
“Connor was just a dick. Bikers are stupid.”
“I can read your texts, Katie. I’m asking you for details.”
God, I guess she could give it back too, huh? I guess I really did need to calm down. I took a breath, this time much more deliberate, and recounted everything.
“And so,” I said when I had finished, “I’m just left feeling like I had this great date, like this guy would need some prodding to kiss me, and then when I did…what the fuck?”
Tara nodded.
“You know, it’s so funny how blind the guys are.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t mean like you do,” she said. “All of the guys almost worship Connor as a biker’s biker. They see the tattoos, the muscle, and the fuck-you-up attitude, and they think he’s the man. Not a leader so much as someone that would stare down a gun to his forehead, dare the other guy to shoot, and then beat the shit out of him even if he got shot. They think he’s always been like that.”
Tara shook his head.
“But I know what compensation looks like. You don’t think he’s a bit scared?”
I shrugged. It made sense. But…well, maybe it said something about me, but the default answer didn’t seem to be that Connor had issues here that had nothing to do with me.
“I don’t know, so I’m just speculating here,” Tara said. “But whenever I tried to interact with Connor, he’d immediately get standoffish and cold. To an unhealthy degree. He was the only guy in the club when I was dating Steele—or even Brock now, for that matter—that would not engage me in conversation. Even Garrett would be respectful.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that.
“Mind you, respectful by playboy Garrett’s terms is different.”
