HER CURVY SIN & SECRETS

STEEL

College is terrible; cheap cologne, dreams, and desperation all rolled up in ramen noodles and late-night regrets. I wasn't like the rest of them. Most had something. I had nothing. Orphanage kid who became adopted son of the sheriff. I know how fast the world will devour you if you don't beat it to the punch.

I was never destined to be here, least of all leading anything. But over the course of a semester, I wore the captain's band as if it were forever. Soccer was not a game to me; it was war with lines demarcating the battlefield and the referee's whistle a call to battle and I always played to win.

My name? Steel. Not the one I was baptized with, but one I'd earned. Today the president of Vikings MC, then just a nineteen-year-old junior attempting to bulldoze his way through a college business degree with more tattoos than textbooks.

And then she walked in.

It was orientation day, summer before last. The campus was warm and buzzing, freshmen rolling in with big eyes and bigger dreams than comprehension. I wasn't supposed to be paying attention. Already had girls waiting like a damn parade. But I felt it; her arrival caught me before her outline did.

She walked in wearing sin in sunshine form – curvy, red hair, blue-eyed, and so fucking gorgeous she didn't have a place within our reality. Her hips swiveled as if temptation had performed on stage herself. The boys started to whisper, dripping like they never laid eyes on a girl.

"Bro... that's sin walking," one of the soccer boys complained beside me.

The nickname stuck before she gave her own.

Liza.

First-year design and fine art student. Seventeen years old and not yet legal.

And the moment she batted that sweet-as-pie, clueless smile at the welcome booth, I was cooked. This girl was going to be the force that would destroy every rule I had set for myself.

I was stuck between the boys by this time. "She's out of bounds. I'm claiming dibs."

They insulted me first, but one look from me and they sliced that shit in two seconds.

"Come on, Steel, this isn't high school," one of them tried.

"Right. You boys should know better." I snarled behind her, jaws clenched. "She's mine. She just doesn't know it yet."

I followed her across the entire campus, like she was a mystery I had yet to unravel. She didn't look my way. Not yet. But I could sense something. A pull. Like she'd been created for me, shaped by whatever twisted joke the universe had up its sleeve.

It turned out it wasn't a joke, Destiny.

And destiny's a cruel mistress.

I didn't realize then her name wasn't actually just Liza, that it was also Angel Mark and that one time, in high school, I'd had her heart in my coarse-skinned palms.

I didn't realize she'd vanish one day, taking with her more than her memory.

And