Fear the Beard (The Dixie Wardens Rejects MC #2)
Lani Lynn Vale
Chapter 1
I’m not good at peopling.
-T-shirt
Tally
“No, baby. I have to go to school.” I smoothed my daughter’s hair back gently. “When Mommy gets home, she’ll come to your room and give you a kiss, okay?”
That was if I got home on time. Last clinical I didn’t get home on time. In fact, I was home so late that I barely had the energy to make it through the door four long hours after my clinical was supposed to be over.
My daughter’s quiet pleas and sniffles with snot smeared on my scrub top had me wanting to cry right along with her.
Every single time I went to school like this, she tried to get me to stay, and each time was getting harder and harder on me.
My father took my daughter from me and settled her on his forearm.
“Go, Tally,” he ordered softly. “I’ve got her.”
My daughter’s fat tears rolled silently down her cheeks.
“Be good, baby,” I ordered. “You go right to sleep for Pawpaw, okay?”
Tallulah pursed her lips, wiped her eyes, and buried her face into my father’s neck.
My eight-month old daughter knew two words. ‘Bye-bye’ and ‘Fish.’
“You better go before you’re late,” my father ordered.
I grimaced at him.
“I’m going,” I sighed. “See you tonight.”
With one final blown kiss to Tallulah, I pushed through the door and headed down the steps to the driveway.
I looked back one final time to see my dad in the window helping Tallulah to wave at me.
I smiled at her, then unlocked the doors to my Toyota 4-Runner, my father’s hand-me-down nineteen-ninety model that needed a paint job and a tune up.
However, when you’re a twenty—almost twenty-one—year-old single mom working forty hours a week and going to school full time, luxuries such as a new car weren’t afforded.
Hell, I was lucky if I had enough money to put gas in my car to get me to school and work.
With one final look at the massive five-bedroom monstrosity my parents had lived in for the best years of my life, I pulled a U-turn in the grass and carefully eased out of the driveway.
My thoughts were on the first day of the last semester of nursing school, and I was still wondering, much like I was on the first day of school, what exactly I was thinking.
I hated nursing.
I hated it with a passion, in fact.
I didn’t like blood. I couldn’t stand seeing broken bones. I actually hated people, too.
I wasn’t a good people person, and it seemed like everyone knew it.
Like the biker at my side.
I knew he was there. We were sitting at a red light, and I could feel his eyes on me.
Did I turn to acknowledge him?
No.
What if he smiled? Was I expected to smile back? What if he waved? There was no way in hell I was waving back. Then there was the worry that he might think I was coming on to him, when I most definitely wouldn’t be.
Why? Because I wasn’t good at peopling.
I, Talith Breanna Slater, was an introvert.
I didn’t do well in crowds. Talking to someone new made me feel like I had hives. And I was about to enter into an occupation that was known primarily for interacting with human beings.
My phone rang, startling me out of my contemplation.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” my best friend hissed.
I rolled my eyes. “Be there in five,” I told her, and then hung up.
I hung up because the light turned green, and I made a promise to myself the day that I’d brought Tallulah home from the hospital and we were nearly killed by a texting teenager that I would never pick up the phone while I was driving ever again.
And it was a good thing I did, or I might’ve missed the stupidity that’d happened directly in front of me.
My foot eased off the brake, and my SUV started to inch forward.
The motorcycle next to me revved his engine and started forward as well, and I was just about to press my foot to the gas when a large white maintenance van shot through the intersection, missing the biker by only a few inches, and zoomed on like nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t just nearly run over a freakin’ person.
The biker, sometime in between then and now, had slid sideways and was perpendicular to my car, staring at the road where the van had disappeared so intently that it made me quite nervous.
I’d just about decided to get out and ask him if he was okay—and, yes, I realize how extrovert-like that would’ve been for me—when he turned and stared at me.
The only thing I could see were his eyes.
A blue so beautiful that they were piercing.
They were shocking, and pairing those eyes with a man on a motorcycle was just wrong.
Why?
Because I had a weakness for bad boys and a child to prove it.
The thing that was even worse was following those chilling eyes all the way to the school.
Right into my school, where the only people that came into said school were other nursing students and teachers.
He parked in the teacher parking lot, and I breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that I wouldn’t have to park and walk in with him since teachers had their own private entrance.
Pulling into a spot next to the familiar white car belonging to my best friend—who was in the front seat downing the largest latte that our tiny town had to offer—and shutting off my car.
I got out the same time Hadley did.
“I think you pulled in behind Dr. Tommy.”
I blinked.
“What?” I asked. “Who is that?”
She started to snicker as she straightened her black scrub top.
I looked down at my top and fingered the fourth star that I’d just sewn on this morning.
Three semesters down, one more to go.
I could do it. I could do it.
Maybe if I kept chanting that to myself, then eventually it would be true.
The tests weren’t the problem, though they were tough. No, my problem all boiled down to the hospital itself.
“That’s Dr. Bones.”
I froze, then turned, went to my tiptoes, and gasped.
The moment I could see him getting off his motorcycle, I finally registered the scrub pants.
Dr. Tomirkanivov aka Dr. Tommy aka Dr. Bones—who was dubbed that by the ghosts of nursing students past for his lady boner inducing powers—was the hot doctor who taught our critical care classes.
And this was also the semester that we spent the most of our time in the ER—my worst nightmare.
“I also saw him nearly get hit at the stoplight just down the road. I would’ve had to perform mouth to mouth with him,” I chuckled to hide the nervousness at seeing that man in a classroom and what that was doing to me.
“I think you mean on him, not with him.”
I chuckled under my breath.
“Sure. That’s what I meant.”
She rolled her eyes and hefted her backpack, and I followed suit.
“You have something cheesy looking on your shirt.”
I looked down, holding out my scrub top where she’d pointed to examine it, and laughed.
“Tallulah was having eggs and cheese when I left,” I explained. “I guess I’m lucky it’s not vomit.”
Hadley snorted.