Author's note:

Hey everyone ❤️

Thank you so much for being here, I hope you'll enjoy this story!!

Before you start reading, I would just like to mention that this is the third story in the The Outlaw Who Saved Me series. While you can read this story as a stand-alone, if you think you might want to read the first two stories too, I suggest you do that first, as there will be a lot of spoilers for them here. You can find the

first 2 stories complete

on my page:

1 - The Outlaw Who Saved Me

2 - The Outlaw Who Saved Me #2: Bruiser

If you want to stay up to date with the series or my other work, remember to follow - I post regularly what I’m working on, changes in publishing schedule and more ❤️

As always, please react, comment and review - it helps me so much! ❤️

Hugs!

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My life has always been a study in tranquility—a quiet, steady stream that never threatened to overflow its banks.

I was born in Denmark to a mother who defined hygge and an American father who treated our safety like a sacred vow. We lived there because my parents decided it was the best place to raise children, far from the grit and noise of the New York legal world where my dad had been a partner at Carter & Brown. He still consulted for them back then, but he wanted us wrapped in the soft, safe embrace of a Danish childhood.

I still feel more Danish than American most days. I carry that stillness with me. It’s a literal part of my DNA, born from a country where you are never more than thirty-two miles from the sea. I grew up with the constant, salt-tapped reassurance of the water.

When we eventually moved back to the States so my older sister, Kathrine, could pursue law school with Dad’s guidance, we landed back in New York. It was supposed to be a homecoming for him, but for me, it felt like being dropped into a centrifuge. The city was too loud, too gray, and most importantly, the water was wrong. The Hudson isn’t the North Sea; it doesn’t breathe the same way.

I lasted exactly as long as I had to before I picked a college as far west as I could go. I needed the Pacific. I needed a horizon that didn’t end in skyscrapers.

Now, I’m at Seaview University, working toward my degree in Early Childhood Education. I’m currently prepping for my student teaching observations, focusing on the four-to-eight-year-olds. There’s something honest about children that age; they haven’t learned how to build the kind of walls most people spent years perfecting.

My life is perfectly on track. Safe. Boring. Easy.

I am the girl who provides the comfort, the one who knows how to fix a scraped knee or soothe a tantrum. I’m the one who carries the “safe” foundation my parents built for me. And honestly, I don’t mind the quiet. It’s a luxury I’ve never had to question—mostly because I get all the chaos I can handle through Dante.

Dante is my roommate, my best friend, and the absolute antithesis of a Danish winter evening. We met during the first week of freshman year, two international souls trying to navigate the artificial gloss of California. He’s Italian, and like me, he’d been dragged through an American high school experience before landing at Seaview University. We bonded over missing real bread, the absurdity of American portion sizes, and the shared feeling of being from elsewhere.

When the housing department told us that a guy and a girl couldn’t share a shoebox-sized dorm room, we didn’t even argue. We just waited two weeks, packed our things, and moved into a sun-drenched apartment off-campus. My father’s success at Carter & Brown meant I didn’t have to worry about the rent, and Dante… well, Dante always seemed to have the means, though we rarely discussed where it came from.

He’s the only person I know who can make a Tuesday morning feel like the finale of a soap opera. While I’m color-coding lesson plans for my upcoming student teaching observations, Dante is usually pacing the living room, trailing the scent of expensive cologne and cigarette smoke, arguing with his on-again-off-again boyfriend.

His life is a tangle of complications that would make my father’s head spin. He doesn’t say much about his family back in Italy or the “business” connections they supposedly maintain, and I don’t ask. But the drama he brought with him from Arizona—where he lived before college—is harder to ignore. His ex is a patched member of an MC out there, a desert-based club that seems to have a permanent, jagged grip on Dante’s heart.

They’ve been “broken up” for three months now. For them, that’s a lifetime. It’s the longest stretch they’ve ever managed without one of them folding and catching a flight or sending a desperate, late-night text.