All Chapters of The Captain and her Younger Biker: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 1Rory I had a rule. Never jump into black water during an active storm unless someone’s life depended on it, because in the dark you can’t tell the difference between a rescue and a suicide until it’s already too late to change your mind. I broke that rule the second I saw the kid clinging to the rail of the sinking cargo ship, screaming a name that wasn’t even his own, like grief had already started rehearsing before the ship had finished going down.“Rory, don’t you dare,” Talia yelled behind me, grabbing at my arm, but I was already out of my jacket and over the side before she finished the sentence, because that’s how it always went between us. She yelled the warning. I ignored it. We both knew the script by heart.I swam toward the sound of the kid’s screaming instead of his shape, because sound traveled better than sight out there, and I’d learned that lesson the hard way, on a night I don’t talk about.I got a fist around his life vest and started hauling him back to

Chapter 3 Rory Three weeks into the job and I still had not learned how to keep Kian Ashcroft on the deck where he belonged. The night dive was supposed to be simple. Drop, hook the last two crates, come up. Then a support line snapped somewhere above us and the debris field started folding in on itself like a fist closing, and I heard him grunt once through the comm before the whole mess shifted and I lost sight of his light. I went after him without thinking about clearance or protocol or the fact that Talia was going to murder me when we got back. I found him pinned at the shoulder by a bent strut, kicking hard, and I got both hands in the front of his wetsuit and hauled until something gave and we went tumbling up through black water that did not care if we made it. I should have shoved him off. I had shoved men off for less. My hands came up to his chest instead and stayed there, fingers curled in the zipper of his wetsuit, and neither of us moved away. The boat rolled un

Chapter 5 Rory I didn’t sleep that night either, and I was starting to think sleep just wasn’t going to be a thing that happened to me anymore for as long as this contract lasted. I sat at my kitchen table with my phone face down in front of me like it was something that might bite, the photo still sitting there in my messages, unread by nobody but me, and I kept picking it back up every twenty minutes just to stare at it again like staring harder would somehow make it less real. Talia showed up at seven with two coffees and a look on her face that told me she already knew something was wrong before I said a single word. “You didn’t answer my texts,” she said, setting one cup down in front of me. “Which means either you were asleep, which I don’t believe for a second, or something happened.” “Something happened.” I turned the phone around and slid it across the table. I watched her face change as she looked at it, watched the exact moment she understood what she was looking at an

Chapter 7 Rory Marcus started showing up more than any investor had a right to, always with some excuse ready in his back pocket, a question about the salvage schedule, a request for a dock tour, a reason to linger at the marina right around the time my crew was wrapping up for the day. By the end of that first week I’d started timing my breaks around avoiding him entirely, and by the second week I’d stopped bothering, because avoiding Marcus Holt apparently took more energy than just enduring him.“He’s not subtle,” Talia said, watching him from the wheelhouse window as he chatted up one of my deckhands down on the dock, clearly fishing for information about my schedule. “I give him credit for persistence, if nothing else.”“Persistence isn’t a compliment when it’s aimed at me.”“No, but it’s definitely aimed at you. I don’t think that man has asked one single relevant investor question since he got here.”I didn’t disagree. Marcus had a way of turning every conversation back towar

Chapter 9 RoryKian showed up the morning after the Marcus incident with two coffees and an expression like a man bracing for a conversation he wasn’t sure he wanted to have, and I let him stand there on my doorstep a second longer than necessary before I stepped back and let him in, mostly because watching him sweat felt like a small, well earned mercy after the week I’d had.“I owe you an apology,” he said, setting the coffees down on my kitchen counter without being asked, like he’d been rehearsing this on the drive over. “For getting weird about Marcus. It wasn’t fair of me to act like you’d done something wrong just because your past showed up uninvited.”“You weren’t entirely wrong to be bothered.”“Maybe not. But I made it about me instead of asking you how you were actually doing with all of it, and that’s not what I want to be for you.” He leaned against the counter, watching me with a kind of open honesty that still caught me off guard sometimes, like he hadn’t yet learned