“For now. She can get a bit rowdy when she hasn’t been with me for a while.”
“Jules was like that when my mum first got him. Bo sleeps like the dead, though. Nothing keeps that kid awake.”
It took me a second to catch on that he was talking about Rocco’s kids. The twin boys that lived with his parents.
I’d never known their names before now. “Bo and... Julian? Rocco named his kid after you?”
Folk shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t in the best place when they were born, so I never asked. And if he told me, I wasn’t listening.”
“Were you still serving?”
“No. I got out six months after I met you. Then there was a blank year before I bought a bike and joined the Crows.”
I winced. Couldn’t help it. It was hard to imagine how shitty things had to have been for a dude like Folk to think joining the Dog Crows was a better existence.
Folk chuckled, mellow and deep. “I know, but it wasn’t about them or even the life. Rocco needed me, and I’d let him down when his missus died having the boys. If he’d asked me to shut my mouth and ride with those idiots for a thousand years, I’d have done it.”
“I feel that way about Saint. Guess I’m lucky he came with a good package.”
“You are lucky.” Folk stretched his legs out. “In that sense. Rocco knew it too. It was always his plan to get at least Locke safe under Cam’s protection.”
“Not you?”
“I never planned to stick around that long, even when he went missing, and I knew he was dead long before Saint and Embry found him.”
Caution flared in my nerves, but I found myself leaning closer, pressing our legs together from knee to hip. “What changed your mind?”
Folk dragged his gaze from the messy pyracantha branches I’d piled on the lawn. He snared me with a deep stare, his gaze unfathomable. “Lots of things. Sometimes I tell myself it’s for Locke, but maybe the truth is that I like it here. The ocean’s cold, the friendships are warm. And there’s this hot brother I can’t stop thinking about.”
I snorted a low laugh. “That’s a matter of opinion. The hot part, I mean. But if it’s any consolation, I think about you a lot too. Always have.”
“It’s a strange world.”
“It is.”
“Kissing you the other week didn’t help.”
“We failed the test?”
Folk laughed for real this time, tipping his head back, exposing his tanned throat. “Failed? Are you mad? All these years I’ve been telling myself the memories I have are exaggerated... like, a security blanket, you know? When things were rough, it was always you I thought about. You were the one thing the devil couldn’t touch. Then when I was better, I saw it for how crazy it was, and I stopped believing in how I’d felt when I was with you.”
I wanted to ask him what happened next. But I didn’t need to. I already knew because it had happened to me too. That first glimpse across the yard. The weeks and months that had followed. I’d tried so hard to convince myself that the past belonged where we’d left it, butdamn. I still felt his lips on mine. That fire reborn. And I couldn’t see a time when I’d ever be over it.
“Wouldyoubelieve,” Folk said when I didn’t speak, “that’s not what I came over here to talk to you about?”
“You mean there’s something more important than five years of aborted foreplay?” I kept my tone light and dry, a world away from how I felt inside. “Actually, don’t answer that. What do you need from me, brother?”
Folk sunk his teeth into his bottom lip. A split-second mauling before he seemed to catch himself, and I felt that. It made my brain stupid and my tongue loose.
“Is it weird that I like it when you call me that?” he asked softly.
“Probably not.”
“Hmm. Have you seen Locke’s face when Nash says it to him?”
“I’m not an expert on Locke’s face.”
“Yeah, well, I am, and trust me, it isn’t the same when his real life brother says it.”
