Unknown number:Are you awake?
I clicked out of the message and tapped open the MC’s membership database. The personal numbers of all brothers were listed there—the ones we used for legitimate communication that didn’t incriminate anyone. For me, it was my only phone number, but over the years I’d memorised at least six for Cam.
Not this one, though. I searched it in the database, and the ID of the brother it belonged to flashed up on my phone. A driving licence I’d already wasted hours of my life staring at when I’d inputted it into the club records more than a year ago.
FolkJulianWhitlock. Thirty-four. Male. Current address, the clubhouse compound. It was all there in black and white. Black andpinkif I was being technical, but given that the sight of his mugshot made me muse that his star sign was Cancer, no one could accuse me of that.
He was a few weeks shy of his thirty-fifth birthday. Some days I thought he hadn’t aged since I’d met him in Cyprus. Others, like today, I knew he had. That I had too. Time hadn’t been as kind to me, though. Folk possessed an energy that made him seem ageless.
Me, I was just fucking tired.
I was, however, awake. More than that, actually, as I saved Folk’s number and tapped out a reply that had little affinity to the sudden buoyancy in my pulse.
Decoy:yup. u coming through?
Folk:If I’m not disturbing you.
Decoy:u’re not.
Folk left the message on read. A few minutes later, the deep rumble of a motorbike shattered the quiet. I wasn’t enough of a petrolhead to recognise the sound of his Fat Boy from that alone, but my body knew it was him.
My nerves.
My rampaging heart.
I forced myself to stay seated, keeping my eyes down instead of tracking the headlights that punctuated the sultry summer night as the bike drew closer, parked on the street, and the engine cut off.
Boots crunched gravel and still I fixed my gaze on the grass in front of me. It was only when my thundering heart felt like it might explode that I dared look up.
Folk stared back at me, his gentle grin crooked and faint, his eyes darker than they were in the sunlight. “Hello.”
Something relaxed in me and I smiled back. “Hello.”
“I wondered if you’d be in bed.”
“Did you?”
Folk shrugged. “I wondered a lot of things. That was definitely one of them.”
He moved a little closer, helmet tucked under his arm, keys dangling from a finger that was somehow as graceful as the rest of him.
There was room on the step for him to sit down. I could’ve shifted to make more.
I didn’t. I let him ease down beside me and took a slow breath as his thigh nudged mine, an almost perfect do-over of what had happened in church. Except this time, he wasn’t upset and we didn’t have an audience.
Not that a lack of spectators changed much. I still didn’t have the balls to deepen the physical contact. The imagination to even know how, despite the fact that my mind was working a mile a minute to throw up a million possibilities. Wild images that moved too fast to manifest into real thought.
My gaze fell on the empty bottle at my feet. “You want a beer?”
The question seemed to catch Folk off guard. He turned his head a little too sharply. “Nah, I don’t drink.”
“Water?”
“I’m okay. I don’t mind if you drink, though.”
“I never have more than one when Ivy’s here.”
“She asleep?”
