Page 23 of The Biker's Brother

Just business, Brand.

He shoved the bag of stuff onto her lap as he opened the console drink holder and secured his coffee cup. She put hers in the holder beside his and brought the towel pack out of the bag. After tearing the packaging apart, she reached toward his head with a towel.

He could hardly say no since water was running from his hair down his face and neck. Taking the towel he ran it over his head roughly. When it was drenched like a washcloth in the bathtub, he threw it into the rear floorboard.

“Guess that was a good idea.” He grinned.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Maybe finding a place to wait this out would be an even better idea.”

“Under other circumstances, you’d probably be right.”

He started the car and pulled away, taking a swig of his coffee. The little groan he released at the simple pleasure had Cami’s nerve endings standing at attention.

When they were back on the road, he said, “So. Hand me the donuts and move on to Chapter Two.”

She retrieved the bag of donuts.

“You sure you want to eat this stuff?”

He gave her a look indicating that her question wasn’t worthy of an answer.

Brandon set the bag in his lap, took a bite of one of the donuts and licked his fingers.

“So where were we?”

“You found out from your friend that your groom was a fifth degree douche.”

“Yes. I did. And he was. Is. We sailed around the British Virgin Islands for a week. It was lovely. I was on top of the world. Of course that was before any of the trouble started.”

“Does the trouble include what you learned from the maid of honor?”

“Not really. If that was all there was to this…”

She seemed to get lost in thought before she finished the sentence.

Brandon sat quietly eating donuts, drinking coffee, and concentrating on the headlights finding the dotted center line. After a few minutes he said, “Hey. Did I lose you?”

“What? I, uh, no. Right here. Maybe I need therapy. Telling this stuff… It’s not easy.”

“Maybe you don’t need therapy. Maybe you just need to get it out.”

“You a nice guy, Brandon? I didn’t peg you for a nice guy at first, but you’re starting to seem like a nice guy.”

“What do you know? You’ve got shit taste in men.”

He grinned.

She laughed.

“That can’t be denied.”

“So keep going.”

“Okay. I had a condo right on the Back Bay Fens. So I could just walk straight across the park to get to work. It was nice, even on bad weather days. I loved that condo. He had the penthouse at the Folio. That’s in the financial district and he wanted to live there. When I said I’d like to stay near the museum, at first he laughed. He said, ‘You can’t think I’d consider moving into your quaint little flop, Camden’.

“There was a fight over where we were going to live. I said that, since he didn’t walk anywhere, but kept a car and driver at his disposal, it didn’t matter if he was a mile away from work. He said he couldn’t entertain guests in a place like mine, that I needed to grow up and get serious about my real job - taking care of him.

“Now that I look back on things, I can see clearly that the tug of war over where we were going to live was a turning point. During that argument he made it clear that, not only did he intend for us to live at his place, which was decorated with an obscene lack of taste, but he’d also taken it for granted that I was going to give up my job and dedicate my life to planning and hostessing dinner parties.

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