Caution to the wind an a.., p.1
Caution to the Wind: An Age Gap MC Romance, page 1
Copyright 2023 Giana Darling
Published by Giana Darling
Edited by Jenny Sims @ Editing 4 Indies
Proofed by Erica Russikoff @ Erica Edits
Cover Design by Najla Qamber
Cover Model Josh John Mario
Cover Photographer Lane Dorsey
License Notes
This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This Book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
To my readers for making my dreams come true.
“The dragon teaches you that if you want to climb high you have to do it against the wind.”
– Chinese proverb
A note to my readers
This is a dark romance. Axe-Man and Mei’s story features graphic violence, kinky sex, and sensitive subject matter such as death of a loved one and violence against women. Additionally, it contains important spoilers for Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6) and the rest of the series. I urge you to consider reading those beforehand, but Caution to the Wind can be read as a standalone as well.
If you have a problem with any of these topics, please do not proceed.
Also, please note The Fallen Men books are written in Canadian English, and the Cantonese translations are in Jyutping.
You can listen to the full playlist here.
“Under The Big Top”––Cris Jacobs
“The Night We Met”––Lord Huron
“For My Crimes”––Marissa Nadler
“Never Gonna Be The Same”––Mia Wray
“Nothing Else Matters”––Miley Cyrus, WATT, Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma
“I Did Something Bad”––Taylor Swift
“Consequences”––Camila Cabello
“Blame”––Grace Carter, Jacob Banks
“Broken Bones”––KALEO
“Leave Like That”––SYML, Jenn Champion
“After You”––Meghan Trainor
“Starting Over”––Niykee Heaton
“Straw in the Wind”––The Steel Woods
“me without you”––Morgan
“I Found”––Amber Run
“Midnight City”––M83
“Hurt”––Johnny Cash
“Waking Up Without You”––Rhys Lewis
“Sorry”––Halsey
“Unconditional”––Richard Walters
“Dodged A Bullet”––Greg Laswell
“Let You Go”––WILDES
“Bad Habits”––Ed Sheeran
“Still Don’t Know My Name”––Labrinth
“New Person, Old Place”––Madi Diaz
“Hunger of the Pine”––alt-J
“Riot”––Camino
“Bridges Burn”––NEEDTOBREATHE
“Hoping”––X Ambassadors
“Where The Wind Blows”––Blacktop Mojo
“Trouble I’m In”––The Unfaithful Ways
“Run To You”––Ocie Elliott
“To Build a Home”––The Cinematic Orchestra, Patrick Watson
“Bitter Sweet Symphony”––The Verve
Contents
1. Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About Giana Darling
Other Books By Giana Darling
MEI
The day everything changed for me started with a carnival game.
The Country Fair was an annual summer attraction that appeared suddenly at the end of spring in a wide, wild field outside of the city and disappeared just as jarringly as soon as the cool autumn winds blew in from the east. The air was thick with prairie heat, hot with the scent of grease from all the fried foods and a hint of almost acrid sugar from the cotton candy motes floating on the heavy currents. A constant cacophony of fairground sounds rang across the field: the mechanical heave and whoosh of the large rides, the whoops and cries of excited children, and the errant screams of heat-induced, sugar-exasperated tantrums, the tinny jingle of canned carnival music and the spit and rattle of balls in slots, pellets hitting empty bottles, and horseshoes swinging around metal pegs. Calgary was a cosmopolitan oil and gas town, but even the wealthy wore cowboy hats and tooled leather boots. There was a sea of them that day, from white to black and every shade in between, making everyone look the same under the shadows cast by the wide brims. When I tried to remember the faces of the men in the dark, I always remembered those hats, obscuring everything from gender to race. A question mark in a cap.
My memories of that day were bright and jarring, collected pieces of a shattered funhouse mirror that didn’t make much sense, no matter how hard I tried to fit them back together.
But I remembered him.
I always remembered him.
He seemed like some kind of heathen god, big enough to kill a man with his bare hands, so broad through the shoulders it seemed like he could carry the weight of the world. The flashing lights of the carnival carved his strong features out of blue, red, and gold. His eyes shone in the shadows beneath his heavy brow, a blue-green as bright as oxidized copper. I watched as his massive hands, threaded through with prominent veins and tight cords of muscle, flexed on the rough wooden handle of the axe. He was one of the only men not wearing a cowboy hat, his burnished gold hair bright even in the deepening gloom of twilight, slightly over long and curling like ribbon ends over his ears and around his square jaw.
“Come on,” my best friend, Cleo, encouraged as she tugged at his bulky arm. “I’ve got to have the stuffed bear.”
Henning Axelsen turned his head slowly to look down at her, his stern-featured face cracking slightly around the mouth to give her that small smile he reserved only for her.
“Don’t you think you’ve got enough, Glory?”
Cleo and I looked at the prizes she struggled to carry in both arms. The head of a plushy giraffe tangled with her long brown hair, and a stuffed snake wrapped around her neck. In her arms, she carried a gorilla, a bumble bee, and a giant rabbit with pink fur.
Cleo blinked at her new friends and bit her lip as she considered his question. Even though they weren’t related, Henning and Cleo shared that same kind of thoughtfulness. They weren’t loud people or very chatty, either. They meant what they said when they spoke, so sometimes it took them a little longer to respond.
Cleo cast me a sidelong glance, noting that I only had a small doll I’d won at the bottle toss earlier. We were almost too old to go to the carnival with our parents, and we’d sworn to each other this was our last year going to the fair as kids, so I understood her desire to milk it for all it was worth.
Henning caught her gaze, then looked over her head at me with sparkling eyes. “You think maybe I should win this one for Rocky, instead?”
Glory and Rocky.
Henning had nicknames for everyone, even his stepdaughter’s best friend. Hearing it from his lips always made something inside me squiggle and squirm.
Rocky because I was scrappy and loyal. He said people were prone to underestimate me due to my slight and dainty build, but they’d inevitably find out some day that I was a champion.
Glory because Cleo’s full name was Cleopatra, which meant “glory of the father,” and Cleo was his pride and joy.
Cleo instantly nodded, grinning at her stepfather, then at me. “Definitely.”
“You’re so damn sweet.” Cleo’s mum, Kate, bumped Henning with her shoulder, then pressed a kiss there. “You know that?”
In response, he pressed a kiss to her brunette head.
“What do you want, Mei?” Cleo asked me, wiggling her hand through the stuffed animals to grab my own in a tight squeeze.
I stared up at the prizes hanging between two poles at the side of the axe-throwing game and knew immediately which one I wanted. It wasn’t the largest or boldest prize, but it meant something to me because it was a dragon.
&nbs
When I pointed at the small red animal with gold wings, Cleo protested because it was too small, but Henning only gave me that tiny, mysterious smile and stepped up to pay the carnie to take his turn at the bullseye.
“It’s a long way,” I muttered to Cleo as we stood with her mum to one side to watch him.
The target was at least thirty paces away from where he stood, and it wasn’t very big.
Cleo giggled softly, her hand still in mine, sticky with the refuse of cotton candy. “He’ll win. Didn’t I ever tell you his daddy was a builder? Hen’s been using an axe since he was younger than us.”
I didn’t think using an axe and throwing one were quite the same thing, but I didn’t say another word because Henning was getting ready to throw.
Through my twelve-year-old eyes, he seemed as big and mythical as a Viking, his thick muscles rippling under the tight white tee shirt plastered slightly to his torso by the humid summer air. He raised the axe with only one hand, back over his blond head, and then with a hard flick of his wrist, he released it with his elbow extended toward the target. I watched with my mouth hanging open as it wheeled end over end across the length of the grass until it embedded itself just to the left of the centre target.
Before I could recover my shock, Henning had picked up the second axe and sent it spinning after the first.
Thud.
It landed in the red bullseye so hard, the entire target vibrated on its legs, rocked back far enough to seem it would inevitably fall, and then tremulously righted itself again.
The three of us let out a series of whoops as we rushed Henning, hugging any part of him we could find. His soft, almost silent chuckle vibrated through my hands as I fit them around his hard waist. Kate’s soft, sweet scent was in my nose, and Cleo’s sticky hand was still glued to mine. It was such a simple moment; it felt silly to be sentimental about it, but I was. Both then, engulfed in a family hug, and now, so many years later, looking back on it.
I had my own family and traditions, my own parents and loved ones, but the moment I met Kate and Cleo, then Henning years later, I’d united with them. A click of connection I felt in my stomach like two mechanical parts fitting together to create something more.
I loved the Axelsen family, and they loved me.
It was sweet and uncomplicated.
Kate would pick Cleo and me both up after school every day and take us back to her tiny, meticulously clean bungalow so we could play and study while my parents worked. We had a routine, a unity forged by time together that meant everything to me.
Because before Cleo, I was a loner.
Kids made fun of me early on. I was different, which wasn’t really enough to tap into the human fear of and prejudice against the unknown. But I was different and loud about it. Unlike the other few non-white kids in my class, I always made a point of sitting with the other kids. I was curious about them, and when they proved not to be curious about me, I clung to my uniqueness as if it were both a weapon and a shield. I begged Old Dragon to make me smoked carp’s head so I could eat the eye in front of my peers with relish while they gagged and groaned. Sometimes, I wore traditional dress to school even when people asked me why I wore a costume.
It wasn’t that I wanted my whole identity to be Chinese. To be defined by the culture of my mother and not the place I was being raised. But I found solace in the richness of my mother and grandfather’s customs. I found community there outside of those school walls. A Chinese child was taught from an early age about the importance of history, of ancestors. That we were all linked through time and space. It was comforting for me to imagine them at that cafeteria table with me, two long lines on either side of geishas and fishmongers, of warriors and dark-eyed comrades. It helped to not feel so alone.
And then, when I was in second grade, Cleo arrived in my classroom one day. She was too thin, almost gaunt, with ashen smudges beneath her haunted eyes. There were scabs on her hands and blood on her fingernails because she picked at them nervously while she sat huddled in her seat.
At lunch that day, I knew what would happen because it had happened to me.
Ray D’Angelo and his crew of stupid boys crowded around Cleo when she sat alone at one of the tables in the cafeteria. He pushed her tray off the table, her food splattering to the linoleum, the red apple rolling and rolling until it stopped at the toe of my shoe.
To this day, I wasn’t sure if it was the red of the apple, a deeply symbolic colour, my favourite colour, or the look of shame on Cleo’s face that made me do it.
It didn’t really matter.
One moment, I sat alone at my table doing my mathematics homework and the next, I was striding over to the bullies. I bent mid-step to retrieve the red plastic tray from the ground and swung it at Ray D’Angelo’s stupid, pretty face a moment before he could turn fully to face me.
He went down like a barrel of apples.
His friends gaped at me until I raised the tray and bared my teeth at them in warning. Then, they scattered. Ray moaned on the ground for a moment, clutching the side of his head.
“Get lost, D’Angelo,” I suggested casually, pressing the toe of my sneaker into his back to give him a gentle nudge.
He cursed under his breath at me, but he did as I suggested and scrambled to his feet, red-faced with humiliation, before running out the cafeteria doors.
One of the teachers came for me then, hauling me to the principal’s office, but before they did, Cleo reached out and ran her fingers down my arm until she could squeeze my fingers in her own.
And that was it.
That little moment was the moment we became best friends.
I thought of it then, secure in this little bubble with the Axelsen family in the middle of carnival chaos. And I made myself a promise little girls often made to themselves that I would love Cleo and her family for the rest of my life.
“Here,” the carnie ambled over with a discontented expression, the red dragon in his arms. “And if you give a damn about my business, you’ll get that bleeding axe out of the target. Can’t budge the damn thing.”
Kate laughed brightly, squeezing us all once more before stepping away with an arm around both Cleo and me. Henning moved forward to take the dragon and then crouched in front of me.
He studied the fierce-eyed toy closely, then offered it to me. “I’ve noticed you have an affinity for dragons.”
I nodded, mute suddenly under the powerful force of his full attention.
“Mei Zhen,” he murmured as if suddenly realizing something.
I didn’t really know much about Henning. He’d just appeared one day after school on the back of an enormous motorcycle to pick Cleo up two years ago and never left. He worked most of the time as a resident at Rockyview Hospital, but he was also a reservist in the military, which paid for his schooling, so I rarely saw him after school at their house. But I did know he spoke at least a bit of Cantonese because sometimes, he seemed to understand me when I was talking to my parents on the phone. When I asked Cleo about it, she told me his stepmum was originally from Hong Kong just like my ma and grandfather. “Your name means elegant pearl, doesn’t it? Like the pearl seen beneath the Chinese dragon’s chin or clutched in its talon.”
