Addicted To The MC President

Chapter Six Morning Light

~ Lily ~

I woke up confused.

For several long seconds, I had absolutely no idea where I was. The ceiling wasn’t mine, the room wasn’t mine, and the mattress beneath me wasn’t the custom Italian monstrosity occupying half my penthouse bedroom. I stared upward, blinking against the sunlight filtering through unfamiliar curtains while my brain struggled to reconnect itself to reality. Somewhere nearby I could hear faint movement, and the unmistakable smell of fresh coffee drifted through the air.

Then everything came rushing back — the gala, the announcement, the hidden bar, Hector.

My stomach tightened. Not from panic. From memory.

I sat up slowly and pressed a hand against my forehead as scattered flashes from the previous night drifted through my head. After Ginger’s call I had left immediately, and not returning had been the original plan but instead I came back, ordered another drink, then another not because I was trying to get drunk, at least that had been the excuse. The truth was much harder to admit. I hadn’t wanted to leave, and somewhere between the music, the conversation, and the complete absence of expectations, I’d found myself staying as hours slipped past without either of us noticing.

At some point, the crowd had started to thin as chairs disappeared onto tables, and employees cleaned around us while Hector finished closing for the night. Most men would have treated a woman sitting alone in their bar like an opportunity — asked questions, tried to impress her, tried to flirt. But Hector had simply kept talking. About motorcycles, business, the city, terrible customers and good whiskey.

The conversation lasted for hours yet it somehow felt more genuine than most of the discussions I’d had in years.

I remembered laughing. A lot. More than I should have, more than I had in a very long time.

Then sometime after eleven at night, Hector produced a small tin from somewhere behind the bar. I remembered staring at it, then slowly staring up at him.

“Is that weed?” I’d asked.

“It would be concerning if it wasn’t,” he replied, sliding it across the bar toward me like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I laughed until I started wheezing, because I was apparently incapable of behaving like a normal human being around him.

“You own a respectable establishment,” I pointed out.

“I own several things,” he said simply.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It wasn’t a question,” he murmured, watching me with those calm, unreadable eyes.

Even now, sitting here in the morning light, I could feel the smile threatening to appear. I remembered accepting when he offered it — not because I regularly smoked, I didn’t, and not because it was smart. I accepted because I was already tipsy and because every sensible decision I’d made recently had resulted in me spending six years married to Dylan Callahan so now experimentation had suddenly felt very reasonable.

The memory made me groan quietly. God. No wonder I wasn’t entirely functional this morning.

The last thing I clearly remembered was sitting upstairs somewhere while Hector continued talking — a couch, maybe a chair, maybe both. At some point, I’d rested my head against something soft and then, apparently, fallen asleep like a child. A very wealthy child with absolutely terrible judgment.

The sound of movement outside the room finally pulled me from my thoughts, and I glanced toward the door just as it opened.

Hector stepped inside carrying two mugs, looking completely normal, like a man who routinely allowed women pass out on his furniture and considered it a Tuesday. Meanwhile, I probably resembled a woman recovering from minor head trauma. His eyes moved over me briefly,, before he held out one of the mugs.

“Morning,” he said.

I accepted it immediately. “How bad is it?”

He frowned slightly. “The coffee?”

“My appearance,” I said, steeling myself.

His gaze moved across my face in a quiet, assessing way. “You’ve looked worse,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s not reassuring.”

“It wasn’t meant to be,” he replied, completely unbothered, and sat down across from me.

A laugh escaped before I could stop it. The annoying thing was that he wasn’t even trying to be funny. I took a cautious sip of coffee. It was excellent. Naturally. Everything about this man seemed unnecessarily competent.

For several moments neither of us spoke, and the silence should have been awkward but it wasn’t and that was becoming a pattern. Around Dylan, silence had always felt like a warning sign. Around investors it meant someone was calculating leverage. Around journalists, it meant they were preparing a question specifically designed to make your life miserable. Around Hector, silence just existed. Nobody seemed in any rush to fill it, and somehow that was the most disarming thing about him.

Eventually, I lowered my mug. “So you’re not going to make this weird?”

His eyebrow lifted slowly. “Make what weird?”

I gestured vaguely around the room. “This.”

“You fell asleep,” he said, as though that settled the entire matter.

“That’s your official position?”

“It seems accurate,” he replied, completely straight-faced.

I stared at him. He held my gaze without flinching. Then I shook my head slowly. “You know most men would’ve handled this differently.”

“Most men sound exhausting,” he said, taking a calm sip from his own mug.

I laughed again, and the sound felt easier this morning — natural, dangerously natural. That realisation lingered while I studied him over the rim of my cup. There was something deeply unsettling about a man who didn’t seem interested in putting up an act. Every man in my world always kept up appearances for example politicians, executives, investors and Dylan, who had practically built a second career around it. Yet Hector sat across from me drinking his coffee as though my last name meant absolutely nothing.

The strange part was how much I liked it.

My phone suddenly vibrated against the bedside table, then again, then again. Reality had finally located me. I picked it up and immediately regretted it — messages, emails, voicemails, news alerts, lawyers, board members, public relations teams. One text from Ginger read simply: Still alive?

I smiled despite myself and sent a message saying, " Alive, unfortunately.”

Her response arrived almost instantly. You spent the night with motorcycle man.

I stared at the screen, then stared harder. How did she keep doing that?

“Bad news?” Hector asked, glancing up from his mug.

“My best friend is a menace,” I muttered, already slipping the phone back into my purse before another crisis could land.

“Fair,” he said quietly.

For the first time all morning, I noticed the clock. The day was already disappearing, and I should have been gone an hour ago. I stood reluctantly, and the movement felt strangely exhausting like stepping back into the version of myself that everyone expected, not the woman who’d spent the night laughing with a bartender she barely knew.

Hector stood too, and neither of us seemed particularly eager to acknowledge what that meant.

“Thank you,” I said.

He tilted his head slightly. “For what?”

The answer should have been simple. Instead, there were too many of them I could give him— for not asking questions, for not expecting anything, for making coffee, for treating me like a person instead of an opportunity. Rather than explain any of that, I simply smiled.

Then I reached into my purse. Old habits were hard to kill. Years of marriage had trained me to solve discomfort with money — gifts, transfers and expensive gestures plus transactions had always felt safer than vulnerability. Before I could overthink it, I pulled out my phone and transferred money into one of the business accounts listed on the payment system downstairs. A thank you, a contribution, a defence mechanism. Maybe all three.

The notification hit his phone almost immediately. Hector glanced down at the screen, and then looked back up at me slowly. For the first time all morning, he actually laughed — not politely, not quietly, genuinely laughed, the kind that reached his eyes and changed his whole face.

“What?” I asked, caught off guard by it.

He turned the screen toward me without a word. I saw the amount. Then immediately wished the floor would open and swallow me whole.

“You overpaid Lily,” he said, still grinning.

Heat rushed through my face because he must have seen my name from the transaction. “I was being generous,” I answered.

“You were being ridiculous,” he replied, and there wasn’t a trace of cruelty in it, only pure, unfiltered amusement.

I opened my mouth, closed it, and opened it again but nothing came out, which only made him laugh harder. The worst part was that he wasn’t mocking me — he genuinely seemed amused, like I’d done something unexpectedly, entirely spontaneous, and he hadn’t been expecting it from me.

I grabbed my purse and headed for the door before my dignity could suffer any further damage. Behind me, I had a feeling he was still smiling, I could just tell.

The line “You overpaid, Lily,” followed me downstairs, followed me into the waiting SUV, followed me through the slow grind of Manhattan traffic. And somehow, hours later, sitting in a boardroom full of people discussing damage control and media strategy, surrounded by lawyers and executives all competing for my attention, it was still the only thing I could hear.

You overpaid.

Nobody had ever laughed at my money before and for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.