Chapter Four
NITRO
I’m sitting in The Grind as if I belong here, which is a fucking lie. My knees are jammed up against the underside of this tiny café table, and I’m pretty sure the barista looked at me as if I were about to rob the place when I walked in ten minutes ago.
Can’t blame her.
I’m a mountain shoved into a space designed for people half my size, wearing a black T-shirt that does nothing to hide the ink crawling up my forearms, and I’m nursing a coffee that tastes like it was strained through fucking dirt.
But none of that matters.
Because somewhere in this city, Marley is walking to work, and if Ghost’s intel is correct, and it always fucking is, she stops here every morning at seven.
I check my phone. Six fifty-eight.
My heart is doing this weird hammering thing in my chest that I haven’t felt since I was a teenager trying to ask Jenny Morrison to prom.
Except I’m forty-three years old, Vice President of the Las Vegas Defiance MC, a silent owner of a billion-dollar empire I want nothing to do with, and I am literally stalking a woman I drove in my Uber four days ago.
Jesus Christ, Nitro. What the fuck are you thinking!
I shift in my seat, trying to look casual. The chair groans in protest under my weight. A couple at the table next to me glances over nervously, and I force myself to relax my shoulders and unclench my jaw.
This was supposed to be smooth.
Natural.
An accidental run-in that would give me a legitimate reason to talk to Marley again.
But sitting here, waiting, I feel as though every person in this coffee shop can see right through me.
Like they all know I’m a grown-ass man who’s been thinking about a red-haired woman with quirky glasses for four straight days.
Who left me a note in the app that somehow has shaken my foundations—‘For making me believe in decent humans again.’
Those words have been living rent-free in my head since she left them on that twenty-dollar tip. No one’s ever looked at me the way she did that night, like I was a regular, decent guy.
Not the VP of Las Vegas Defiance MC.
Not Damon Blackwell, the billionaire.
Just…
Someone who gave a shit when she needed it the most.
And now I need to see her again, like I need to breathe air.
The bell above the door chimes, and my entire body flashes on high alert.
But it’s not her.
Just some person in a business suit who looks as if he hasn’t slept in a week.
I take another sip of the terrible coffee and recheck my phone. Six-fifty-nine.
My leg is bouncing under the table, a nervous energy and a dead giveaway that something is going on that I can’t control. Queenie would laugh her ass off if she could see me right now. Her big, tough grandson reduced to a pile of anxiety over a woman he barely knows.
But that’s the thing, it doesn’t feel as though I barely know her.
It feels like I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to look at me the way she did. Vulnerable, honest, and devastatingly beautiful even through her tears.
Like maybe I could be the kind of man who deserves someone like that.
Someone like her.
The bell chimes again.
And there she is.
My breath catches in my throat, and every rational thought I had flies straight out of my goddamn brain.
Marley.
She’s wearing jeans that hug her curves in a way that makes my mouth go dry, and an olive green cardigan over a vintage Fleetwood Mac T-shirt that looks soft and worn.
Her red hair is pulled back in a messy bun with those loose curls girls love framing her face, and a pair of quirky glasses is perched on her nose, catching the morning light streaming through the windows.
She looks tired. There are faint shadows under her eyes as if she hasn’t been sleeping well, but she is smiling at the barista, and Christ, that smile does something to my chest that feels dangerous.
I watch her order something with way too many modifiers that makes the barista write furiously on the cup, and I’m frozen in my seat like a goddamn statue.
This is it.
This is my moment.
I stand up too fast, and my knee slams into the table. Coffee sloshes out of my cup, and the couple next to me jumps.
“Sorry,” I mutter, grabbing napkins and trying to mop up the mess without looking like a complete idiot.
Smooth, Nitro. Real fucking smooth.
But Marley hasn’t noticed. She’s at the pickup counter, checking her phone, and I know I have maybe thirty seconds before she receives her order and walks out of here for the morning.
I abandon the coffee disaster and head toward the door, trying to time it perfectly.
Not too obvious.
Just a natural intersection of paths.
Two people in the same place at the same time.
Totally coincidental.
Totally unplanned.
I’m almost there when she turns, drink in hand, and walks straight toward me.
This is it.
I step slightly to the left, she steps to the right—the same direction—and like magic, we collide.
Not hard.
Just enough that her shoulder bumps into my chest, and her coffee sloshes dangerously in its cup. My hands come up automatically, steadying her by her elbows, and the warmth of her through that cardigan sends electricity straight up my damn arms.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she says, looking up, and then recognition hits her like a freight train. Her eyes go wide behind those glasses, and her mouth falls open in the most adorable way. “Nitro?”
The way she says my name, surprised, delighted, and a little bit breathless, makes me feel as though I am free-falling.
“Hey,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended. “Marley. Holy shit.”
We both let out that awkward, surprised kind of laughter that happens when the universe decides to throw you a bone you weren’t expecting, knowing I totally was.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, her eyes sparkle in a way that wasn’t there four nights ago.
“Getting coffee.” I gesture vaguely toward my abandoned table. “You?”
“Same.” She holds up her cup as evidence, her hand trembling just slightly.
She’s nervous, too, and that knowledge settles something in my chest.
“This is so weird. What are the odds?” Her voice shows evident bewilderment.
Pretty good when you’ve got a tech genius for a club brother. I internally laugh at the thought.
“Vegas is smaller than people think,” I say instead.
“Right.” She’s studying me, really looking at me in the daylight, and I realize she’s never seen me without the darkness of night, and her tears are blurring everything. “You look… different without the car.”
“Good different or bad different?” I ask, raising my brow in question. The words are out before I can stop them, and I want to kick myself for being such a pussy.
What am I, fifteen?
But she smiles, really smiles. “Good different. Really good different.”
The air between us changes. It charges. That same electric crackle I felt in the car that night is back, buzzing and alive, and I know by her eyes that she feels it too.
“So,” I say, because I need to keep her here, need to find any excuse to extend this moment. “You heading to work?”
Her expression shifts, something painful flickering across her face. “Yeah… unfortunately.”
The ex-boyfriend boss.
Right.
The piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as her.
“That bad, huh?”
She laughs, but it sounds hollow. “Let’s just say it’s been a challenging few days.”
Without thinking, I reach out and touch her elbow again, gently and comforting. “You eaten breakfast yet?”
She looks down at her coffee, then back up at me. “This is breakfast.”
“That’s not breakfast, Marley. That’s flavored milk with delusions of grandeur.” I nod toward an empty table by the window. “Come on. Let me buy you a muffin or something. We can catch up.”
She hesitates, weighing the time against something. Work, probably. Or maybe the strangeness of running into her Uber driver in a coffee shop and having him offer to buy her breakfast.
But then she smiles, and this time it reaches her eyes. “You know what? Fuck it! Derek can wait.”
“Damn right he can.”
We settle into the table by the window, me taking the chair that at least gives my legs some room, her sitting across from me with the morning light turning her hair into liquid copper.
I flag down the barista and order two blueberry muffins and another coffee for myself that I probably won’t drink.
“So,” Marley says, wrapping her hands around her cup. “Uber driver by night, mysterious coffee shop lurker by morning?”
I laugh, grateful she’s making this easier. “Something like that. I drive at weird hours. Helps me… process things.”
“Process what?”
Life. Club business. The fact that I’m living three different identities, and none of them feels completely real.
But I can’t say any of that.
“Just shit,” I say instead. “You know how it is. Sometimes you need the road to clear your head.”
She nods as if she understands, and maybe she does. “Music does that for me. Or it used to, anyway.”
“Used to?”
Her fingers trace the rim of her coffee cup, and I notice she’s picking at her thumbnail under the table—an anxious habit.
“I love listening to music. All kinds. I find it helps calm me when I am anxious, or hype me up when I am excited. That’s why when you turned on the music in the Uber, I couldn’t help but join in…
” She pauses before continuing, “But Derek, my ex, he always said it was childish. That I should focus on more ‘productive’ hobbies.”
The anger that rises in my chest is immediate and hot. “That’s bullshit.” She looks up, startled. “Sorry,” I say, though I’m not. “But seriously, music isn’t childish. It’s one of the purest forms of expression there is.”
Something shifts in her expression, curiosity mixed with surprise. “You sound like you know from experience.”