Two weeks. She's been here two weeks, and I'm losing my goddamn mind.
She's everywhere. In the kitchen every morning, chatting with Mama Rosa while she helps prep lunch. In the storage room every afternoon, surrounded by boxes and spreadsheets, humming under her breath while she works. In my bar every evening, learning to pour drinks, laughing at Whiskey's terrible jokes, fitting into this world like she was born for it.
And in my head every second in between.
She brings me coffee now. Learned how I take it without asking: black, scalding hot, strong enough to strip paint. She appears in my office doorway around ten every morning with two cups, sets one on my desk, and settles into the chair in the corner with her own. She doesn't need to talk. Just sits there reading one of Preacher's books while I work, her presence filling the room like sunlight.
I find myself looking up constantly. Checking that she's still there. Looking forward to those moments when she catches me watching and smiles.
When she laughs at something Whiskey says, her whole face lighting up with genuine joy, I feel something hot and possessive curl in my chest. Something that wants to march across the bar and remind everyone that she's mine.
But she's not. Not really. I told those suits she was mine because it was the fastest way to make them back off. The club believes it now. The lies we're telling have started to feel true.
Except they're not lies. Not for me. Somewhere in the past two weeks, claiming Sparrow stopped being a strategy and started being the only thing I want.
She looks at me differently too. Less afraid. More curious. Sometimes, when she thinks I'm focused on paperwork, I catch her staring at my hands. My tattoos. The scar through my eyebrow.
She's not scared of what she sees. That might be the most dangerous thing of all.
She stays late in my office tonight.
The bar closed an hour ago. Everyone else has gone to bed or headed home. But she's still curled in her chair, book abandoned in her lap, watching me work with those bright blue eyes.
"How'd you get the scar?"
I don't look up. "Which one?"
"The eyebrow."
I pause, pen hovering over the invoice I was signing. Most people don't ask. Most people take one look at me and fill in their own stories. Bar fight. Prison. Some kind of violent past they'd rather not know the details of. She's not most people.
"Bar fight," I say. "I was nineteen. Stupid."
"What was the fight about?"
I look up. She's watching me with patient curiosity, no judgment in her expression. Just genuine interest. "A woman. Some asshole was hitting on her. She said no. He didn't listen."
"So you made him listen."
"Something like that."
She smiles, soft and knowing. "You've always been like this."
"Like what?"
"Protective."
I don't have a response to that. No one's ever called me protective before. Dangerous, yes. Violent. Ruthless. All the things that come with being president of an MC. But protective implies something gentler. Something that cares.
She unfolds from the chair, crosses the room. I tense, not knowing what she's doing, where this is going.
She stops in front of my desk. Close enough that I can smell her shampoo, something floral and sweet that doesn't belong in this world of motor oil and leather. Close enough that I can see the slight tremble in her fingers as she reaches out.
Her fingertips brush the ridge of my eyebrow, following the line of the scar from temple to brow like she's committing everymillimeter to memory, learning the shape of the damage some drunk asshole's pool cue left behind.
Every nerve in my body ignites, heat spreading from that single point of contact down my spine, through my chest, settling low in my gut.
"Don't." I catch her wrist before my brain catches up with the movement, gentle enough not to frighten her, gentle enough that she knows she can break free if she wants, but firm enough to make my point crystal clear. "I'm not a good man, Sparrow."
