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Unfortunately, I did.

Why?

Because I was the kind of girl who cared what people thought.

My eyes traveled back to the object of my obsession. It was the first day he’d been back since he left my apartment with his nephews in tow.

My lips twitched at the memory of the middle boy, Samuel. He was a firecracker, that one.

He’d hollered out not caring in the slightest who heard that he had to poop.

I’d immediately been able to spot that his uncle didn’t have the slightest clue what to do with him.

Honestly, I didn’t think Nightmare knew what to do with any of them. The oldest was only five or six which meant Nightmare had been in prison when they were born. It was just an assumption, but I was betting he didn’t really know what to do with two small children and an infant.

And truth be told, I kinda loved that about him, because clearly he hadn’t let that stop him. I mean, he had them with him, which meant he was willing to give it a good ol’ college try.

Ugh. There I went again, looking for reasons to like him when I shouldn’t.

He was a biker for crying out loud.

Not that I disliked bikers.

I mean, I was a biker’s daughter, and my brothers were both bikers. It was just that I didn’t want to have these feelings.

Groaning, I dropped my head back against the cushion.

There was something about him that fascinated me.

Which was ironic, because I really didn’t know much about him other than he was Pee Wee’s brother-in-law and he’d gotten out of prison a couple of months ago for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Yep.

Jaxon “Nightmare” Lewis was an ex-con who spent a decade behind bars for a murder he hadn’t committed.

Ten years!

For something he didn’t even do.

It was like one of those Netflix documentaries.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end just thinking about it.

Could you imagine what that would do to a man—being locked up when you were innocent, knowing the whole time that you shouldn’t be there, and having nobody listen.

Just no.

I was claustrophobic as fuck.

For more reasons than one, but I chose to believe it was Drew and Alex’s fault.

Why? ‘Cause the jerks zipped me up in a suitcase and stuck me on the shelf in the hall closet as a joke when I was six years old. That kind of traumatic experience stayed with you for life.

Now, I couldn’t ride in an elevator without sweating my lady balls off.

I couldn’t fathom being confined to a cell the size of my bathroom for ten years, let alone living it.

No wonder he hated everyone.