Claimed By My Biker Daddies (Forbidden Fantasies #21)

Chapter 1

MARISA

Late afternoon, early winter wedding

The sky rips open and the mountains breathe steam.

One moment the pines stand still and solemn like a chapel choir, and the next the first hard sheet of rain turns the world to wet paper and snow threatens.

Gravel sticks to my dress shoes.

My hair glues itself to my cheeks.

The pastry crates slip and wobble in my arms as I climb the slippery slope toward a set of white tents battling from being swallowed by the storm.

I keep telling myself this was supposed to be my break, the job that would make a friend of a friend say, “Her name is Marisa, she is young, she is good, she makes a lemon bar that steadies a person’s heart.”

The more I say it, the more my throat tightens because nothing about this looks like a break.

I’ll be cursed to cook for someone else forever, even if my boss is nice.

The DJ has cocooned his speakers under a tarp that sags with brown rainwater and cold slush.

The cake tent smells of bourbon and damp linen.

Somewhere a bridesmaid is crying quietly, the kind of cry that keeps makeup intact.

Someone else hiccups with the soft rhythm of a person who is drunk before the vows.

I can almost hear the delicate edges of my sugar roses sigh as they wilt.

Three hundred tea pastries blink up at me like brave little soldiers at the wrong battle.

The lemon bars are sweating.

The panna cotta trembles in its cups, a prayer away from becoming milk.

I set the first crate down, breathe through the sting in my palms, and tell myself I will not cry before going out to get the next lot of desserts inside from the lodge to the tent.

“Hold on. Let me help with those.”

The voice is deep and quiet, but there’s a lift at the end like he’s already a little amused by me.

I turn and find a man in black, rain running off him as if the storm has agreed to stop just long enough to admire him.

His sleeves are rolled to the elbow, forearms a shade darker from summers spent under the sun.

There’s a rosary tattoo peeking from the open collar of his shirt like something private he has no intention of explaining.

“You’re going to drop that,” he adds, nodding to the crate wobbling in my arms.

“I’m not,” I insist, even though my grip is slipping and my shoes are making sad little squelching noises in the mud.

His mouth curves like he’s heard that kind of stubborn before. “Want to bet?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“Good. Then I win.”

He takes the crate from me with a kind of quiet decisiveness that makes arguing impossible.

It doesn’t even look heavy in his hands, and something about the ease in his movement is irritatingly attractive.

“Thank you,” I manage, although I’m still slightly annoyed.

“You always thank people for winning?”

I blink at him, caught between wanting to roll my eyes and keeping him here just to see what else he’ll say.

But he’s already walking into the tent, and my only option is to follow because the crate is gone and my hands feel empty without it.

I’m hit by the scents of pine, damp silk, whiskey, and wet leather inside.

String lights sag with rainwater and still try to glow, the stubborn little things. Whiskey barrels double as cocktail tables.

The bride’s veil is tangled in the rafters like a mischievous ghost.

A pair of bikers argue about whether the storm will flood the road.

Somewhere in the corner, a man with silver in his beard is coaxing life out of a dying generator.

The man in black sets the crate on my folding table and glances at the trays already there—tiny lemon tarts, almond biscotti, and dark chocolate tartlets wearing crowns of sugared berries. “You make all these?”

“Yes.” I slide past him to start triage on the sugar roses drooping under the humidity.

“They look good,” he says then corrects himself, “They look too good for this crowd.”

“Maybe they’ll behave themselves if they’re eating.”

“Doubt it.” There’s a ghost of a smile now, like he might actually enjoy seeing the chaos play out.

He studies me for a beat, eyes storm-gray and too steady, then nods toward the desserts. “Roman, but I also go by Saint.”

“Marisa,” I answer, and his name settles into the air like the start of something I’m not ready to name.

Roman sets my crate on the table and steps back, and his gaze brushes mine in a way that feels like a test he’s not grading yet.

Then he’s gone, swallowed by wet light.

I'm flustered, so I tackle it the only way I know how to and get to work.

I work like the sky dared me to stop.

I grab the final trays from my car then blot moisture from fondant with the edge of a paper towel, trying to make it look affectionate.

I dust tartlets with a veil of powdered sugar that lands like new snow on a city that has not seen winter yet.

I run a knife tip along the edge of a chocolate star and coax it upright with the patience of a woman who believes sugar will listen if you speak to it kindly.

I turn the panna cotta cups to hide the worst of the condensation rings.

Come on, ragazze, hold your shape. Hold your nerve, I whisper under my breath because I talk to food when I’m scared.

At this precise moment, a very large hand dangles a towel in front of me.

The towel is blessedly dry, which feels like sorcery after the last ten minutes of rain dripping from my hair in slow, treacherous rivulets toward the trays.

I’ve been trying to shake it back without touching anything, pretending I’m not silently panicking about hygiene while the storm turns my braid into a sponge.

“Cardamom?” His voice is a little rougher but just as amused.

I look up and see a man with iron threaded through his dark hair and a beard kept so precise it feels like a statement.

His face is calmer than the first man’s, and his eyes are a colder blue than a flame at the bottom of a wick.

He tilts his chin toward the panna cotta. “You infused it.”

“I did,” I say. “Lightly, with orange peel, just enough to make you wonder why it tastes like winter in a warm room.”

His mouth curves in quiet approval. “Deacon,” he says.

“Marisa,” I reply, and he nods like we’ve sealed something.

Roman appears again and glances between us, smirking faintly. “She intended to carry that crate in through the storm . Got pretty far without dropping a thing. You should’ve seen it.”

“I’d have carried it for her.” Deacon’s eyes flick to me. “But you got there first.”

“I’m fast,” Roman retorts, slow enough to make me wonder if he’s talking about the crate at all.

“And modest,” Deacon drawls, setting the towel beside my elbow.

He taps the table twice like a man who’s already imagined this kitchen running under his rules.

I arch a brow. “Do you two always narrate over people’s work?”

“Only when the work’s worth talking about,” Deacon says, and Roman’s smirk deepens.

A voice calls for them from across the tent—high, sharp, impatient—and they both glance back at me, sharing the same easy, conspiratorial smile before they turn to go.

I watch them leave, the sway of their shoulders cutting through the subdued light, and my cheeks are hot and my neck is uncomfortably warm.

It should be absurd to feel watched in a storm with a wedding limping toward celebration.

Yet the sensation crawls down my back in a not unwelcome way.

I’m not watched like a girl in a wet dress, more like watched like a new recipe that might hold if given time, watched like someone measuring the line of my spine and the steadiness of my hands and the fact that I am still here and still working and still trying to save the lemon bars.

“Those are pretty enough to make a man confess,” someone says to my right, and the smile in the voice eases the knot between my shoulder blades.

The third man is all sun where the others were weather.

He’s warm, with a softness that reads as earned and not easy.

His eyes are brown and lit at the corners like someone who laughs often.

His curls are wet and he pushes them back with a wrist that bears a rosary of wood beads strung tight.

He looks down at the tray of bourbon pecan bites I piped at two in the morning and lifts one between finger and thumb, pausing for permission like a gentleman hiding inside a scoundrel. “May I?” he asks.

“If you tell me the crust holds,” I say, trying not to notice the way his smile folds into itself when he’s pleased.

He bites, nods slowly, savoring, then points to the pan of candied orange peels and winks.

“Teach me that,” he says, and this time I have to look away because my cheeks are too warm.

He slides a thermos toward my hand. “Hot coffee. Too many of us here think good coffee is optional.”

“Those are the men you keep at arm’s length,” I say without thinking, and he laughs in a way that brings the whiskey barrels into the joke.

I take a sip.

It is good coffee—of course it is, I made it, laced with orange peel before the day had even begun.

The thermoses are scattered across the space now, passed from hand to hand, yet somehow this one has found its way back to me.

“Cruz,” he offers, holding out his hand like we have all the time in the world.

His palm is warm from the coffee he just handed me. “And you’re the woman keeping this whole place from falling apart before the cake is even cut.”

He watches me like I’m an anomaly. “It is nice to meet you, Marisa.”

“You do not know my name,” I say, then realize I wrote it in black ink on the menu placard, the place where I called my bourbon pecan bites Salvation because naming things gives them soul.

“I pay attention,” he says. “It is a habit. Sometimes it saves lives.”

We’re quiet together for a beat, and the tent glows around us.

Outside, a man swears at a tarp as if it can hear him.

A girl with a halo of baby’s breath in her hair asks a biker if the chickens bite.

He says only if you disrespect them.

The rain relents for a second, the way a man in confession will stop talking right before he admits the heart of it, and in that pause I feel the room shift.

Music reaches farther.

Laughter leans in.