Free Sinner (MC Club Biker Urban Alpha Male Erotic Romance) by Billie Kasper

 
    Eden
     
    The Lord works in mysterious ways.
     
    That’s what my grandma always said. She used that phrase, no matter what the occasion. Out of milk at the corner store? The Lord works in mysterious ways. Flat tire? The Lord works in mysterious ways. You got laid off, your dog died, and your aunt committed suicide? Mysterious ways. Always mysterious ways.
     
    And I’m sure that’s what she would have said about my getting pregnant at fifteen and being shuttled off to a convent as soon as it was convenient for my ultra-Catholic parents. I was a dumb little girl and even though I’m only nineteen now, I like to think I’ve grown up a little bit—even if the last few years have seen me going through the routine of prayer, community service, and tending to the convent gardens.
     
    Let me back up a little bit. I’m sure this sounds positively medieval, so you’ll have to forgive me. My name is Marina, Marina Ramirez. My family is an old Cuban-Italian clan in New Orleans. We’ve been in the town for nearly two hundred years. Our family has produced cardinals and gangsters. Businessmen and war criminals.
     
    One of my great-great-great-great grandfathers was a lieutenant general under Robert E. Lee and was executed after the war for the way he treated Union prisoners.
     
    One of his brothers was the pastor who gave him final rites before they stood him in front of a firing squad.
     
    When I got pregnant, it was a huge scandal. I was just a freshman at a Catholic girls’ school outside of town. It had been with a boy I met at another school’s dance. The sex—if you can even call it that—lasted less than two minutes in the back of his car before he kicked me out and I stumbled back to the dance, my lips swollen from the way he had been gnawing on my face as he humped me like a wild animal.
     
    I didn’t think much about that night until I missed my period and from then… Well…
     
    They pulled me out of school (I would have been expelled anyway) and stuck me in a home for wayward girls that was already attached to the Lady of the Woods Convent, about thirty miles outside of New Orleans.
     
    It was understood that once I was eighteen, I would take orders and become a nun—and that’s what I did. My life, as far as I was concerned, was over. The love and warmth that my family had shown me ever since I was a child had disappeared, replaced only with their cold disapproval.
     
    Every family meal processed in silence, broken only by the terse request that one of us pass the grits or sweet potatoes. On the weekends when I went home to my parents’ house, I found myself avoiding them at all costs.
     
    I spent most of my time in my room, the family dog curled up on my feet, my nose buried in a book.
     
    After the dog died, I stopped coming home at all. I could read just as easily at the girls’ home.
     
    And the baby? I miscarried after only two months. It was there and gone in a flash. Sometimes, I wonder what would have become of the child—what would he or she have become? But it was pointless to wonder. Just like my grandma used to say, the Lord works in mysterious ways… I suppose.
     
    Whenever I saw my old friends, I couldn’t help but burn with jealousy. They went through high school, going to dances, falling in love with boys, and playing sports.
     
    Then, they went to college.
     
    They would always gasp when they saw me, telling me how much I had grown up, how beautiful I had become—it must be all the clean living at the girls’ home, they would say. I would just roll my eyes and leave as soon as I could. What did being pretty matter if I were locked up, a prisoner in all but name?
     
    I don’t even think I’m all that pretty. My mother and my sisters are much prettier—they look like old-time movie stars, with sultry looks and long, perfect blonde hair. Me, though?
     
    I look like my grandma, more Cuban than anything else, with thick dark hair, plump red lips, and smoky black eyes,