Mess Me Up

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  She let out a very unladylike snort. “That’s ridiculous. I don’t do that.”

  I narrowed my eyes, finding myself grinning despite the wariness rocking through my bones, and walked to my bike. “Yesterday I got there at six, and you weren’t ready to go until six thirty. You didn’t even have the excuse of work to use seeing as you had the entire day off.”

  She giggled, and I felt something inside of my chest thump.

  “You were the one who asked for more tamales,” she pointed out. “It’s not my fault I was waiting for the last batch to finish cooking before I gave them to you.”

  She had a point.

  “Whatever,” I muttered, remembering the reason for the cardio this morning. I’d put away about twenty of her tamales, and I had to admit, they were even better than the ones she’d brought me at the prison.

  Her grandmother was good at what she did, but those tamales that Izzy made put her Abuela’s to shame.

  “I’m done except for putting on my shoes,” she continued. “I’ll be standing out on my porch when you get here.”

  I would believe that when I saw it.

  I wasn’t sure how the hell Izzy was ever on time for anything that she did.

  Not only did she walk everywhere she went, but she was also consistently late. The two together probably had quite the snowball effect in her life.

  “I’ll see you when I get there,” I murmured.

  Izzy made an agreeing sound and then hung up, leaving me staring at my phone and wondering how the hell I’d gotten myself into this position.

  I’d been bound and determined not to let her get under my skin, but after only a week, it was more than obvious that I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  It was one of the reasons why I’d avoided her for so long, too.

  She made me feel things before I even knew her name.

  At first, completely innocent—just me replying to a fan.

  But the more we wrote to each other, the more I fell for her.

  Then I met Izzy in real life but had no clue that she was RP’s Biggest Fan. I liked her, too. Ever since my son’s funeral, I’d done a whole fuckin’ lot of soul searching and I knew that Izzy deserved a fuckin’ medal for the way she took care of everything in the background during my son’s last days. Caring for Matias and inevitably me, also. She, at least, deserved a thank you. The one I hadn’t been able to give because I was too deeply entrenched in my own pain.

  I also wasn’t in a place where I could admit that she meant something to me, but she’d earned a place in my heart by taking care of both of us and bringing my son cookies.

  Those few minutes after I’d realized my son was gone, she’d held me and cried. At the time, I couldn’t see or feel anything beyond the crushing loss of my son. But in the months that followed, I couldn’t help but think about Izzy, and it was then that I realized that I was definitely feeling a strong attraction to her.

  But I also knew I needed to heal so as not to work my sorrow out on her and taint anything that had been developing between us.

  If I was going there with Izzy, it was going to be real and for the right reasons.

  After all I’d been through with Tara, and then seeing Tyler with his true soulmate, I knew exactly what I wanted.

  But the problem was I was struggling with the letting myself move on to something that would make me happy. How was I supposed to offer her my heart when half of it had died with Ty-Ty.

  Then there were Izzy’s problems.

  I had no fucking idea if she actually wanted something with me, or if she was just being nice. Maybe all that flirting that we’d done over letters for the past year hadn’t meant to her what it meant to me.

  That was another problem.

  Thinking that the author of the letters and Izzy were two different people, I would be able to hold strong. I would have probably held off, thinking that now wasn’t the best time to get into a relationship because my perfect woman didn’t exist.

  But, now that I knew Izzy and my letter writer were one and the same?

  Yeah, that was just something that I’d never be able to fight against.

  Both Izzy and my letter writer had helped me through some tough times.

  Izzy through the death of my son, and RP’s Biggest Fan through my son’s sickness.

  Learning that they were both the same person was something that I was still trying to process.

  A car’s honk startled me from my thoughts and had me looking up. I waved at the car that I’d walked in front of and mouthed an apology to the driver.

  The woman narrowed her eyes at me, and then they widened as they moved along the upper half of my body—and across my cut identifying me as a patched-in member of Bear Bottom Guardians MC.

  There was fear in her eyes, but also a little bit of attraction.

  I turned away and continued toward my bike. I got on it and headed in the direction of Izzy’s place.

  When I arrived—surprise, surprise—she was not on her front porch.

  Sighing as I shut the bike down, I kicked the stand into place and got off, heading to the door that was hanging wide open.

  Walking in without knocking, I took a look around her place.

  It was a small duplex that shared a wall with a neighbor who never seemed to be home.

  The walls were white. The furniture was white. The decorations were white.

  Hell, the only color I saw was the red dishtowel hanging over the faucet of the sink, and a black cereal bowl filled to the brim with Lucky Charms.

  Her place was immaculate—which I guess I should’ve assumed would be the case since Izzy owned her own cleaning business.

  “Iz?” I called loudly, not moving from the door.

  Izzy peeked out from the doorway just past the kitchen, and her face flushed. “I spilled my cereal on my shirt. I have to find another shirt, and I’ll be ready.”

  I looked over at her cereal.

  “Your cereal’s getting soggy,” I pointed out, trying to keep my eyes from roaming down her body, even though the only thing I could see was the long column of her neck and one bare shoulder.

  Over the last week, I’d looked at Izzy’s body a lot.

  I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  It all started out the day she’d walked over to my place, and she was wearing those tight ass yoga pants.

  Then the next day, after she’d been cleaning, she was wearing a pair of even tighter workout leggings.

  The day after that she was wearing running shorts that molded perfectly to her ass.

  The next time I saw her, she was wearing workout leggings again, this time with fuckin’ unicorns on them.

  “I know.” She sighed. “I was really looking forward to that, too. Oh well.”

  She peeked back behind the wall she’d been hiding behind, and I walked farther into her place, hoping that my boots weren’t dirty and leaving black smudges on her white tiled floor.

  Either Izzy liked white, or she hadn’t decorated at all since she’d moved in.

  Either way, the place was so white and clean, it almost felt sterile.

  “What’s with all the white?” I called out, heading to her bowl of Lucky Charms.

  They looked really good, so I picked up the bowl and took a bite.

  I moaned.

  I hadn’t had Lucky Charms in so freakin’ long that they tasted even better than I remembered.

  Just the right amount of sogginess to them, too.

  Meaning they hadn’t been sitting there all that long, and Izzy had poured herself a bowl of them knowing damn well and good that she wouldn’t be able to finish them before I got there.

  I took another bite and leaned my hips against the counter, startled by the fact that I could see straight into Iz’s bedroom.

  And I could see her naked back—sans bra—staring at her closet with quiet contemplation.

  I looked back down at the
bowl and tried not to look up again.

  Oh, I failed, but I did try.

  But then my phone rang, saving me from doing anything more stupid than what I’d already done.

  I grimaced when I saw the screen’s readout, and immediately silenced it.

  “Who was that?”

  I looked up to find Izzy hurrying out of the room, pulling her shirt down over her slightly rounded belly.

  Izzy wasn’t a size two.

  She was curvy, beautiful and everything I never knew I needed.

  She had delicious thighs, a full ass, and tits for days. On the shorter side, you’d never be able to tell that she walked as much as she did.

  She was in such great freakin’ shape that she could likely keep up with me and my appetites—that appetite growing day by day until I was worried it’d consume me.

  Seeing her now, smiling at me while I ate her cereal, I found it hard to breathe.

  “My grandmother,” I murmured, not seeing the point in lying.

  She frowned. “Your grandmother? Why didn’t you answer it?”

  I took another bite before answering.

  “My grandmother loved Tyler. When she found out what I did, she was disappointed in me. To the point where she never let me hear the end of it.” I paused. “And I just was so fucking tired of it. I heard it from everyone. I’d lost nearly every part of my support system within days, and the one person I thought I was always able to count on wouldn’t fucking stop. So, I did what I had to do.”

  “You stopped allowing her to be involved in your life,” she said, sounding understanding. “That’s something I still haven’t been able to do with my parents. They fired me before…well, you know. And though they’re still pissed off at me, they call me every day just to tell me what a disappointment I am.”

  When I’d heard that Izzy was fired from her job by her parents because she wanted to help take care of Matias, I’d been disgusted.

  What kind of parents could do that to their child?

  But then I remembered my own parents and realized that not all parents were great—mine certainly weren’t.

  Mine weren’t all that bad. They were just beggars.

  All through my childhood, they were the parents that didn’t go to anything. Not one single football practice or football game. No pep rallies or track meets. No graduation. Hell, when I signed with Notre Dame, they didn’t come to the press conference that was held afterward. But then I was the number four draft pick, and all of a sudden, they were doting parents. They cared.

  They cared so much that they begged me for money every chance they got, and eventually I gave it to them. But, once they’d gotten the house on the lake and two brand new cars, I felt like my obligation to them was over.

  So, I started to put distance between me and them.

  But, they’d gotten what they wanted, their bills almost paid for, and I hadn’t seen nor heard from them since.

  Only my grandmother had really cared about me. She was the one who had shown up to all of those events, at least she did until Tara came into my life and I lost Tyler’s friendship. When the dust had settled, in the end, my grandmother had chosen Tyler.

  Not that I blamed her.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it,” I admitted. “It’s been four years since I disappointed her so badly. I’d rather continue on like nothing’s changed.”

  Like my whole world hadn’t imploded from the inside out.

  I felt her hand brush down my arm, leaving goosebumps in its path.

  “Where are we going today?” she asked, reaching for the spoon I had halfway to my mouth.

  I carried it over so that I could put it into her mouth instead, and, like the doofus I was, I lifted the spoon up like one would an infant to ensure that she got it all off the spoon.

  Her eyes lit with humor.

  “Sorry. Habit,” I admitted.

  She shrugged, then patted the arm that she was still touching.

  “And I have to go to a meeting with the club.” I paused. “It’s not supposed to take more than ten minutes, and it’s going to be at a restaurant, so we can discuss it over food.”

  Her eyes lit up.

  Out of the week I’d been exclusively spending with her, I’d noticed that the girl didn’t skip any meals. She also didn’t skip any desserts. Oh, and she ate snacks. A lot of them.

  Really, it was no wonder she had a slightly rounded belly.

  And I loved her belly. It made me want to bury my face in its softness and go to sleep.

  I clenched my hands to keep from touching her.

  “Where else are we going?” she asked.

  I picked up her coat and handed it to her.

  I wasn’t really fond of the shorts, either, but since we weren’t going that far, and she was wearing tennis shoes, I didn’t see any reason to get her to change. Not when we were staying on back roads with a slower speed limit, and I’d never let anything happen to her.

  “You got your keys?” I asked as we stepped out onto the porch.

  “Shoot,” she said, running back inside.

  I stood there watching her ass wiggle and her thigh muscles flex in those shorts as she ran around frantically looking for her keys and felt something stir deep in my gut. A desire for a woman. But not just any woman—Izzy.

  I hadn’t felt that kind of desire in a very long time. It’d been years since I’d taken a lover.

  Not because I was on some self-imposed ban, but because I’d grown tired of fucking whoever struck my fancy—like I’d done with Tara.

  I’d learned quite a few valuable lessons that night Tyler had found Tara coming out of my house. One of them was that there were some things more important than getting your rocks off.

  “Oh!” She paused, tapping her finger on her lip. “Can you check the door handle?”

  I winced and did as she asked, pulling out a set of keys from the lock.

  “Yep.” I held them up and jingled them.

  She grinned. “Great!”

  Not great. In fact, her leaving those keys in the door was a very unsafe habit, and I got the feeling from her that this wasn’t the first time she’d done it, either.

  But that smile of hers was disarming enough that I didn’t reprimand her like I should have …at least not fully.

  “You do that often?” I wondered.

  “Do what?” She turned to look up at me.

  Her innocent eyes weren’t enough.

  I knew what she was trying to do.

  “Try to be a little more conscious of what you do,” I told her as I jingled the keys she’d left in the door. “That could’ve been really bad.”

  Her beautiful eyes were expressive, and her hair was a beautiful mess. It was up on the top of her head, and tendrils were falling down all around her face.

  She was free of makeup, and the only thing that I could see out of place at all was a sheen of Chapstick that she carried around in her pocket like it was a lifeline.

  Yes, there wasn’t a single thing about her that I didn’t notice.

  I even noticed the birthmark on her left hand in the shape of a flying bird.

  “Yes, sir. Now…giddy up,” she teased as she settled on the seat behind me.

  I tossed her a look over my shoulder, and she giggled.

  She kept giggling throughout the entire night, and by the time I was dropping her off on her front porch step hours later, she’d only picked up the pace.

  “Ah, God,” she said, wiping away at her eyes. “You have a big goose egg on your forehead!”

  We’d hit a bug on the way home, and by bug, I mean a small goddamn bird sized mutant of a bug. It’d hit my forehead and bounced off, and had hurt like a son of a bitch.

  But, it was just one of those things when you rode a motorcycle.

  “I hit a baby deer once,” I admitted. “And a possum.”

  She snorted. “I like your friends, Rome. I th
ink they missed you.”

  I’d noticed that myself.

  Tonight, every single one of them had acted like I’d come back from a long vacation…and maybe I had.

  And I had the woman in front of me to thank for it.

  Chapter 12

  Dear Diary,

  Today my friend asked me to go to the gym with him. I think I need to meet new friends.

  -Text from Izzy to Rome

  Izzy

  I hated cleaning.

  Which was funny, since I owned my own cleaning business.

  But, since I was so good at it, I did my job, and I did it well.

  “Would you mind cleaning the baseboards today, dear?” Mr. Antilles asked slowly, enunciating each and every word like he thought I was hard of hearing. “They’re looking a little dingy.”

  I looked down at the baseboards that I’d already done and didn’t see a single dingy part. But, alas, I’d go back over them again. I didn’t want an unhappy client. Especially this one.

  He was a US senator who I cleaned for weekly, but only saw when he was in his residence in Texas.

  I was not, under any circumstances, pissing him off.

  I could just see him ruining my life—and my brothers for that matter—just because I told him to go take a flying leap off a freakin’ cliff and using his dingy baseboards as a pogo stick on the way down.

  “Sure, Mr. A,” I said breezily. “Was there anything else you wanted me to focus on today?”

  He looked around, shook his head, and shrugged. “What you normally do, dear.”

  With that, he walked outside to go swim his laps.

  In his Speedo.

  Speedo.

  His way too small Speedo.

  His way too small Speedo that should never, not ever, be worn by a man with a barrel chest and a beer belly the size of a small Texas town.

  But whatever.

  If he wanted to swim, or pretend to swim, in his Speedo, I’d let him.

  As long as he had clothes on, I was a happy person.

  Mostly.

  The fact that he had so much hair on his body really grossed me out. It especially caused my gut to roil when he shaved himself and didn’t clean up the hair.

  Like this morning.