Read RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance) for Free Online Page B

remote corner table and trying to stop my hands from shaking from the adrenaline.
    I couldn’t believe that after all these years, he still had the power to make me feel like an awkward, humiliated teenager.
    Caleb Jackson had been the hottest guy in my high school class. Oh, there were other guys who were good looking, popular, and the like. But most of them, at eighteen, still hadn’t really filled out, and still acted and seemed more like boys than men.
    Caleb, on the other hand, was already manly, in a way that was both thrilling and slightly terrifying. Unlike the boys on the football and wrestling teams, who spent most of their off hours in the weight room, Caleb was muscular in a way that didn’t come from time logged at the gym. His wide, strong shoulders tapered to a tight waist and abdomen. His thighs were lean, their muscles evident even under his jeans. His coal black hair was always slightly too long, and even in high school his face always sported the shadow of a full beard. Thick, sensual lips would curl into a panty-melting smile when girls would shamelessly flirt with him, and his dark, penetrating eyes seemed to burrow straight through you.
    He was the subject of all my reluctant fantasies.
    He was also completely out of my league.
    I was pretty much the complete opposite of Caleb in school. Where he was an early bloomer, I was a late one. To the point that by my senior year, I was despairing of ever “blooming” at all. At barely 5’3”, I would never be one of the statuesque beauties that graced the halls of our school. I wasn’t a cheerleader; I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I was just a geeky girl with a 3.8 GPA and dreams of going to a good college.
    I was no one that the likes of Caleb Jackson would ever notice.
    Which is why I should have known something was up when he started hanging around my locker.
    At first, I thought it was because Debbie Turner had the locker next to me. Lucky me, not only did I have the misfortune of living right across the street from that snotty wench, I also had to see her practically every time I came to get my books. Debbie was a raging bitch to any girl who didn’t kiss her ass, but butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth around any guy she thought was hot. She had been on the homecoming court, was one of the most popular girls in our class, and had dated the quarterback of our football team for a few months.
    The first day Caleb showed up by our bank of lockers, I just concluded he had decided to make a play for her. So when he struck up a casual conversation with me, I actually wasn’t even nervous at first. I was assuming he was about to ask me about her, so I figured I was more or less invisible to him, anyway.
    “Hey, Eva, what’s up?” he asked me as he leaned up against Debbie’s locker.
    “Uh… not much. You?” I reached up to my book shelf, avoiding his eyes.
    “Eh, you know. Just livin’ the dream.” His eyes twinkled, his tone slightly mocking. “You on your way to chem?”
    “Yeah.” Chemistry was one of the two classes we had together.
    “Want me to walk you?”
    As we made our way to Mrs. Burch’s classroom, I could barely hear what Caleb was saying, with all the blood rushing to my head. I hadn’t even known he knew my name, much less noticed we were in the same class.
    To this day I have no idea what I said to him, or if I said anything at all. All I remember was the sound of his voice, already deep and rich, like chocolate.
    Caleb wasn’t “popular,” exactly. “Popular” was a word I would use to describe people who belonged to the clique that controlled the pecking order of our class. They were the ones who decided I was a geek, and that Carol Jackson was a nerd, and that Brook Brody was a burnout.
    Caleb, on the other hand, didn’t belong to any one crowd. He mostly hung out with the tough guys who smoked cigarettes behind the bus barn after school, but no one thought to categorize him as a burner. He moved through the