Tastes Like Candy

Prologue

Author's Note: This is the second book in Amazon Bestselling author Lauren Gilley's new Lean Dogs Legacy series, a spinoff from the Dartmoor Series about the Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club of Tennessee. Book I, Snow In Texas, can be found here on Wattpad. The Dartmoor Series can be found at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This story is rated "Mature" for adult language, violence, and sex.

Happy Reading.

...

Prologue

Funny thing about legends. Generally, they're more powerful than facts. Facts are specific, reliable, unquestionable. All the best decisions are fact-based. Facts save lives. They topple empires. They run the world, one precise tidbit at a time.

But there's no romance in a fact. No quiet hum of nostalgia. Legends live in hearts, and not in heads. And when the sky goes dark, and the mind stops working, it's the legend that comes roaring up, white-fanged and open-jawed, to meet the imagination.

Men win wars.

Legends inspire them to do so.

And some legends...some are still living...

~*~

She was seven the first time she met him. Though maybe "met" wasn't right, because he'd taken no notice of her, circling his opponent in a boxing ring made of men, the fierce light of steel drum fires flickering across his skin. She was sitting on a table made of old oak barrels with a smooth vinyl top, legs drawn up and hugged to her chest against the cold.

Beside her, with the great wisdom of a nine-year-old, her Uncle Tommy leaned over and said, "That's Candyman. He can take out anybody with one punch." He demonstrated, swinging his small fist through the air so hard he almost fell off the table.

Michelle giggled. "Just like you, huh?"

He elbowed her. "Watch and see."

Candyman. What a name that was. And looking at him, she could find no resemblances to caramels, or chocolates, or sweets of any kind. He was tall, fair-haired, blue eyed, and roped with heavy muscle. He grinned at his opponent and it was a wicked gesture, bearing the promise of bad things, like when one of the customers in the pub smiled just before he broke a bottle over someone's head. He was young, too; twenty-six, she'd heard someone say. But so much could happen in twenty-six years in the MC world – in the nineteen years that separated this American fighter from her.

"Watch," Tommy repeated, leaning forward, hands knotted together in excitement. "Watch when he–"

Candyman took a massive step toward the man he was fighting – Cagey, one of the recently patched youngsters – and caught him in the chin with a quick left jab. It was starting.

"Oooohhh!" A collective exclamation from the audience.

"This is it, boys!" Will shouted. "Here we go. Now it's happening."

Cagey's head snapped back and he stumbled a step, face screwed up with pain. Candyman had large fists; doubtless they hurt. Cagey recovered, though, young and elastic, and began circling again, looking for an open spot in the American's defenses.

He wasn't going to find one.

Candyman feinted, then backtracked, pulled Cagey's attention, and landed another jab.

Another shout from the crowd, edging toward a roar.

"Do it," Tommy chanted. "Do it, do it, let's see it!" Blue eyes bright with excitement, the fire dancing in them.

Something strange happened, before the hit came. It brought to mind a trip to the beach in Brighton, when Daddy had taken her and Auntie Raven, the white cliffs rising high behind them as they chased pebbles out with the tide. The way the water rushed out. That sense of a breath being taken, held, before the waves slipped over the invisible hand of Mother Nature and came rippling back, cold as ice across their bare toes. That moment. The pause. The edge. She felt it now. Held her breath. Felt a tingling in the pit of her stomach and in the ends of her fingers and toes.

Just a moment.

The edge.

And then Candyman threw a right hook that caught Cagey square in the mouth, and landed him like a sack of flour onto the hard cobbles of the alley.

A delighted, bloodthirsty cheer from the crowd.

"Oh!" Tommy shouted. He nudged her hard. "Did you see? Did you see?"

She had a brief glimpse, before his brothers closed in around him, of Candyman grinning broadly, face glowing with perspiration, blue eyes alight with the thrill of victory. Then he was swallowed up by cuts and upraised beer mugs.

"Did you see?" Tommy asked again.

"I saw."

~*~

Legends. Sometimes, even if you were raised among then, spoon-fed them – the black dogs and hellhounds of English crossroads, and the men who tattooed the beasts into their skin – sometimes you still didn't expect to become one yourself.

That isn't the sort of thing you plan for...