Caution to the Wind (The Fallen Men, #7)

by Giana Darling

Rocky because I was scrappy and loyal. He said people were prone to underestimate me due to my slight and dainty build, but they’d inevitably find out some day that I was a champion.

“Your name means elegant pearl, doesn’t it? Like the pearl seen beneath the Chinese dragon’s chin or clutched in its talon.”

“Parents hope their children will become a dragon among men. That we’ll be special.”

“Caution to the child too eager to race into the future.”

“The marriage line is too long,” she added. “Your reputation or theirs will be affected by this union. You are not very lucky, daughter. Not in love.”

“Because there is strength in softness too. There is purity, success, and happiness in finding balance between yin and yang. If you don’t learn this, the tragedies of your life will overtake you.”

“In real life, Dr. Axelsen, white knights rarely get happy endings. Only broken hearts.”

Looking back, that was the start of it for me. Falling in love with him. Ruining his life.

In ways that might have been unhealthy but explainable given the tragedy we’d lived through together, we were fiercely bonded together. Mei and I parentheses around Cleo and her tender heart.

Fuck, but this girl had so much tragedy in her small frame, so much poison. A part of me wanted to suck it out of every one of her wounds, ingestin’ it myself so she didn’t have to.

“You might drive a Harley instead of riding a white horse, but that doesn’t make you any less noble. I don’t know many men who would raise another man’s daughter better than his own. Who would sacrifice everything again and again to give her the best life he could.”

“It’s strange,” she whispered, almost to herself, and I held very still, suddenly afraid to startle her out of revealin’ her mysteries. “That you could look at me and see everything I’ve ever wanted to be.”

“One hundred hearts would not be enough to carry the love I have for you,” I croaked out in Cantonese.

Ma smiled. “One hundred hearts would never be enough to carry the love and pride I have for you, my Mei Zhen. Remember that always.”

The only way to find trouble was to throw caution to the wind and buy it.

I wanted a man to tremble as he held back his strength to touch me like I was made of glass, not because he thought I was weak, but because he thought I was precious. I wanted a man to change his career because it would have meant too much time away from me even though I’d never ask him to do so. I wanted a man who’d join a criminal motorcycle gang just to find justice for my murder. I wanted a man who would always try to save me, even when I tried to sabotage myself.

I wanted what Cleo had, but not how she had it.

I wanted Henning. Not as a father figure. But a...

Henning and his girls. And there I was, aching with the desire to be his woman. Damn, I was so going to hell one day.

A white knight didn’t just come in shining armour. My knight came in leather.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of Henning in those terms. As a tiger, also his zodiac sign, and my equal match.

Whatever the reason, I found the courage to throw caution to the wind, rise up on my toes again, and kiss him.

“Don’t romanticize me. I’m a fuckin’ outlaw biker, for fuck’s sake, Mei.” “An off-white knight, then,”

but I got the support of the mother chapter of The Fallen, and there’s no authority higher than Zeus motherfuckin’ Garro.”

It hurt to be kept like a secret by my best friend, a forbidden thing hidden from a man who hated me and whom I still loved so fucking much.

Some friendships would never die, even when you buried them alive, and I knew in my gut Cleo and Mei’s was one of them.

For an outlaw with a record and blood on his hands, Zeus Garro was bizarrely romantic.

she looked like some kinda badass Asian version of Snow White. The sight of her kicked me in the teeth and again in the fuckin’ gut.

Beneath the beauty, she was one of the most dangerous people I’d ever known.

Now, I had twenty-two tattoos all over my body, each of which had originally been drawn by Henning’s hand.

“Fuck, you’re the most dangerous thing I’ve ever known,”

Because the truth was he might have been the hero in my story, but I’d always be the girl who’d made his a tragedy.

I looked at the small TV playin’ old Degrassi reruns and arched my brows.

LOL

“Listen, I get you’re new here and everything, but we’re The motherfucking Fallen. No one hurts one of ours without serious retribution. Especially when it’s one of our women.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised when he read that in me because Axe-Man had always been good with languages and the vocabulary of Mei was no exception.

“How can I stay mad when it’s obvious you kept Cleo and me with you in every way you could over the last eight years?”

“You were just a girl before, and the moment you came to town and I saw you were a woman, you awoke this fuckin’ beast in me.”

Property of the Off-White Knight in the same small black, gothic writing of the tattoos love and loss on his knuckles.

Wrath murmured. “’Cause I might’a been wrong ’bout the look on your face, but anyone with eyes can see she lives for you, and she’d die for you in a second.”

it’d taken everythin’ in me not to kiss the fuck outta her when I’d seen her come outta the clubhouse bathroom ready to roll out with us. ’Cause even though a part of me didn’t want her in danger, another part was turned on by her competency, and the fact she could ride with us, fight with us, and hold her own.

No one had ever seen the darkness in me and enjoyed it. Not like Mei.

I wanted her to burn me down to ash and raise me up like a phoenix, reborn in the fires of her all-consumin’ love.

Mei was everywhere in the studio ’cause she was everywhere I looked inside my own head.

“You knock the wind outta me, Mei. Every fuckin’ time I lay eyes on you. And I only get it back when we touch, and the relief is a sweet, sharp ache in my goddamn chest.”

“Gonna paint you,” I told her. “Then I’m gonna fuck you like I shoulda the first time.”

“Be good for me, Rocky, and I’ll take you as close to death as pleasure can get ya.”

Her breath hitched as she realized why I’d painted her all in red and white, makin’ her into the red dragon I’d once won for her at the Calgary fair, showin’ her what I’d seen beneath her skin all along.

“I don’t think I’d be alive today without you, Dad. Mei was right when she made you into the Off-White Knight, because you don’t wear armour, but you’re the best hero I ever could’ve had.”

“Always, sweetheart. You and me against the fuckin’ world.” “You and me and Mei,”

I knew the Japanese art of kintsugi well. It was the practice of taking what was broken and repairing it with gold to show that scars have their own beauty.