Page 4 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

I take a sip.

Itisgood 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 bitesSalvationbecause 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.

A thread pulls through me from somewhere I do not yet want to name.

“Time,” I say and look down as I busy myself with something, anything so that I can pretend I do not feel the air changing shape around my ribs.

A gust of wind lifts the corner of the tent and a row of votive candles gutter and scatter smoke like a warning.

A biker claps his hands once, twice, to draw attention to nothing and everything.

The bride appears in the doorway with her hem gathered in one fist and her groom’s jacket on her shoulders and her mouth parted like she wants the storm to be part of her wedding album.

The band rolls into a song that sounds like small-town Sunday mornings and big-city summer nights at once.

A shout comes from somewhere near the bonfire—something about a missing shoe and an argument over who spiked the cider.

Cruz sighs like a man who has seen this exact kind of trouble too many times and grins at me as if to say,“Welcome to the circus.”

“Duty calls.” He releases my hand with a reluctant warmth before striding toward the chaos.

Someone tries to hand him a roasting fork on his way past.

He takes it without missing a step, already laughing.

I’m left behind with coffee in my hand and the absurd awareness of all three of them—storm-eyed Roman who carried my crate without asking, quiet Deacon with the measured gaze and the towel, and now Cruz with his sun-warm laugh and wood-bead rosary.

They move in and out of the tent like they own every inch of it, and for the first time all night I’m not sure if the heat under my skin is from my work or from them.

By the time the band starts to play under the dripping lights, the table looks presentable again.

The panna cotta has decided to behave.