Page 1 of Bleed (Two Wheeled Psychos #4)

I never used to believe in serendipity. I mean chance encounters that lead to bliss?

Come on. But she changed all that the day she walked to the little coffee shop, with a laptop under her arm, and a stack of books held to her chest like a precious baby.

I watched her from across the street, a man smitten in the blink of my hazel eyes.

The autumn wind blew the fallen leaves around her feet on the sidewalk as wildly as it whipped through the flaxen hair that stuck out from under her little crochet cap.

She was beautiful, in a familiar sort of way, and as I stared at her like a creep from across the street at my “job”, I couldn’t help but think I knew her somehow.

The clatter of the commercial kitchen in the fusion restaurant I’m the head chef at breaks me from my trance.

The heat of the ten-burner gas stove and the steel flat top are scorching their way back into my bones as I shake off the feeling and go back to the numerous orders being spewed out by the POS at the register.

Memories will do me no good in a place where I could get burned from lack of attention, and from the owner if I fuck up.

I already have the scars on my arms and hands from many years of hot pots and pans singing my skin, and I barely have any feeling left in my fingertips from the amount of times I’ve burned them.

But those scars are nothing compared to the ones she eventually left me with, the ones that are so much worse than what I did to her.

But we’ll get to that soon. I have too much to do right now, and I want to be undisturbed when I tell you the story of how we met, for the second time (I told you she looked familiar), what happened, and how she changed my life.

It's romantic, in its own fucked up way. I guess you would say that she’s my soulmate, the one meant for me. But it’s not for the reasons you would think. Oh, no. It’s much, much worse, and I’ve loved every second of it, even if it did almost kill us both.

Stay with me, I’ll get to the fun parts, just you wait and see.