RECLAIMED BY HER BIKER HUSBAND

Prologue

Nine Years Earlier

Callie Steele stood in the back office above the garage on Fifth, twenty-six years old and still wearing her wedding dress, and watched her new husband try and fail to open a bottle of champagne with a pocketknife because neither of them had thought to buy a proper opener.

“You are going to lose a finger,” she said, “and I am not driving you to the hospital on our wedding night in this dress.”

“You would drive me. You would just complain about it the whole way.” He got the cork loose at last, laughing when it hit the ceiling and left a small dark mark that would stay there for years, long after neither of them thought to notice it anymore.

He poured two glasses, handed her one, and looked at her the way he had looked at her all day, like a man who still could not quite believe his own luck. “To Mrs. Steele.”

“To the man who married the club’s bookkeeper instead of someone sensible.”

“There is nothing sensible about you. That is the whole reason I married you.” He set his glass down, crossed the small space between them, and pulled her against him, slow and unhurried, the particular ease of two people who had already spent a year learning every version of each other and still had not gotten tired of it.

“I am going to spend the rest of my life being the luckiest man in this club, and every single one of them is going to know it, because I am not going to shut up about it.”

“You already do not shut up about it. Vance told me last week you have mentioned my quarterly filings in casual conversation on three separate occasions.”

“Your quarterly filings are extraordinary. I stand by all three occasions.”

She laughed, real and unguarded, and rested her head against his chest, listening to his heart beating fast beneath her ear despite how calm he sounded, and understood, standing there in a dress she had bought without telling anyone how much it cost, that she had never once in her life felt this safe.

“I mean it,” he said, quieter now, his hand moving slow along her spine.

“Whatever this club asks of me, whatever it costs me down the road, I am not going to be the kind of man who lets you become an afterthought in your own marriage. You built something here before I ever earned the right to stand beside you while you did it. I am not going to spend the next fifty years taking that for granted.”

“You say that now.”

“I will still be saying it in fifty years. Ask me again then.”

She did not ask him again in fifty years.

She would not get the chance to, not on the timeline either of them imagined that night, standing above a garage that smelled faintly of motor oil even through the good champagne, promising each other a version of forever that neither of them yet understood how badly it could be tested.

But on that night, in that office, in a dress she would keep for the rest of her life, Callie Steele believed him completely.

She had built empires out of less certainty than that.