“Don’t you want to come and play?” she purrs in a seductive tone, running her finger down my arm.
“Not this game I don’t, no.”
“Come on, I can make you very happy.”
Ew.
No thanks.
“That’s super kind of you, really, but I don’t swing that way.”
Riggs chuckles. “Didn’t pick you for a prude.”
“I’m not a prude,” I snap. “I’m just not into being ... My god, are you licking my arm?”
The girl looks up at me, tongue out on my fucking arm, and bats her eyelashes at me. I flick her off and she gives up, getting back onto the floor and crawling over to the other girl, and they immediately start making out.
“You sure you don’t want to join in, Sparkler?” Riggs rasps, and I try very, very hard not to make eye contact with his penis.
It’s right there, standing on alert, looking far larger and thicker than any penis I’ve happened to see in my short sexual history. Are my cheeks flushing? Sweet Jesus make it stop.
“I do not want to join in anything that is going on here, thank you very much. What I’d like to do is go home to my bed and get some rest because some of us have to get up in the morning and work.”
Riggs grabs his dick and starts stroking it.
“Can you please stop doing that? What is wrong with you? My god.”
“You sayin’ you don’t like it?”
I shake my head and spin on my toes, turning and storming out. I can’t be standing in the room with that weird sex show. I go to the very large speaker system that is blasting the music throughout half the fucking town and take hold of the cord, ripping it right out of the wall. The music stops, and the entire room falls silent and turns to me. It’s then, and only then, that I realize I’m in a clubhouse, with a shit load of bikers, and I just turned their music off.
“Ah, hi,” I say, giving a lame wave. “My name is Eve, I live next door, and I run the café I’m sure you’ve all seen. I’m trying to sleep and this, ah, music is driving me crazy. So maybe, you can keep it down.”
“Plug the fuckin’ music back in!” someone roars.
“Plug it in, bitch.”
“Wow,” I scoff. “Let me just say, you’re all very rude.”
“Plug it back in,” a biker says, storming over and snatching the cord out of my hand and shoving it back into the wall.
The music blares once more.
Oh, so they want to play this game, do they?
I scour around until I find something sharp, which happens to be a knife the bartender was using to cut lemons. I walk back over, lift the cord into my hand, and cut clean through it. The music dies down and my anger bubbles up. “Listen here, you bunch of misfits. I don’t care who you are, or what shiny thing you ride, I am trying to get some god damned sleep and you are keeping me up!”
There are some angry eyes zoned in on me right now.
Riggs rounds the corner, looks at the knife and cord in my hand, and his brows go up. “You’ve got some balls walkin’ into a biker club and doin’ somethin’ like that.”
“What are you going to do, murder me?” I scoff.
“Wouldn’t put it past some of them,” he says seriously.
I glance at the mass of angry bikers staring at me. With a small sheepish smile, I drop the knife and the cord and rush through the crowd and outside. That probably wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.
A hand grabs my wrist and I’m being spun around to face Riggs, who has a very stern expression on his face. “You goin’ to replace my stereo system?”
“I will not, no,” I puff, jerking my hand from his.
“You sure you want to play this game?”
“What game is that?” I challenge. “The one where I ask for a little bit of god damned sleep?”
“The one where you declare war with a biker club.”
“God, you’re so dramatic. I’ll get you a new cord if you promise to keep it down.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why the hell not? Can’t you respect other peoples need to sleep? Just because you’re in there playing some sort of weird sex game doesn’t mean everyone else has to hear about it.”
He leans in close. “This is my house, my garage, I’ll do what I want.”
“I was here first,” I whisper hiss. “This is my space, and I’m not letting a bunch of bikers ruin my business.”
“Then I guess we’re back to square one,” he grins at me.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I don’t do what some prissy young girl tells me to do, so you’re goin’ to have to deal with it.”
“I will not,” I snap. “I will make you wish you never bought this lot.”
His grin gets bigger. “Bring it on.”
I throw up my hands with a frustrated grunt.
I spin and storm off, yet again.
“I’ll be waiting for my replacement cord,” Riggs shouts after me.
I flip him the bird and disappear.
It’s on.
So on.
3
“WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE, wake up!”
The sudden shrieking of voices and then the heavy bouncing at the end of my bed has my eyes popping open. Frantically, I scramble to figure out what’s happening, only to see two of my god damned pain in the ass brothers on the end of my bed, bouncing, singing in the most horrid pitch I’ve ever heard, and laughing like they’re five.
“You’re grown men,” I squeak, trying to stop my body from flinging around as their bouncing gets more frantic. “Stop!”
They don’t stop.
I groan and pull the covers over my head, only to have them bounced off once more. Frustrated, I try to kick my twin, Dom, and completely miss. I aim for my older brother, Stefano, next. I manage to hit him right in the shin and he bellows, falling backward off the bed. Dom throws
