She was hired to sit with his dying mother and make the old woman believe her son turned out alright.

Nobody told her to fall for him. That part was not in the contract.

Royalty Campbell is twenty-nine, curvy, sharp-tongued, and running a quiet exit from a man who has spent two years making her smaller. She has a secret account, a plan, and one rule — do not complicate anything until she is free.

Then Christopher Wang makes her an offer.

The Iron Vanguard MC president is forty-eight, built like a consequence, and carrying guilt about a mother he has not been present enough for. Kailani is dying. She wants to meet someone before she goes. Christopher does not have someone — has not let himself have someone in twelve years, not since the last woman he trusted cost two brothers their lives.

So he finds Royalty. He makes it a transaction. Clean, temporary, professional.

His mother sees through it in twenty minutes and says nothing, because she is watching something real grow underneath the performance and she will not be the one to cut it down.

What follows is slow and earned and devastating in the specific way of two people falling for each other while pretending they are not. A harbour kiss neither of them planned. A truck on her street at one in the morning. One text. One word. Good. A confrontation at a clubhouse that ends with her hands in his shirt and neither of them pretending anymore.

Then her boyfriend gets out of jail.

He comes back with rage and a contact in Inglewood — Lorenzo Patton, president of the Hollow Kings, who has been waiting two years for the right weapon against the Iron Vanguard. The weapon he finds is Royalty. The plan ends in a warehouse. The warehouse ends with Christopher building a trap that closes from the inside and walking across the concrete floor with his hands already moving toward her face.

After the smoke clears he still has one thing left to do.

Come to her door. In the rain. With no rehearsed speech and no contract language. Just the truth.

Claimed by the Biker Giant is for every woman who was told she was too much — and the man who decides she is exactly enough.

The heat is real. The claim is earned.

CASEY PINEDA

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