Hewas six foot five, with dark blond hair, and eyes as green as the sea glass Rubi’s parents used to make jewellery from. Deep eyes that crinkled at the sides when he laughed—a phenomenon regular enough to be addictive, and rare enough that I knew he was as good as Decoy at concealing his moods.
Didn’t blame him. After the decade Locke Halliwell had survived, I didn’t blame him for anything. But he wasn’t as good at hiding his feelings as he thought he was.
Or maybe he was learning to let go.Recovering. Either way, despite his easy grin, I knew he was annoyed.
Annoyed withme.
“You’re leaving again?”
I paused outside Orla’s front door. “Twenty minutes. Gotta meet a bent copper about a dog. You don’t have to stay, though. I can call Folk.”
Locke shook his head before I finished the sentence. He never put on Folk, and the respect was so rigidly mutual that sometimes I wondered how far they’d go to protect each other.
Others, I killed the thought before it took hold. Because I was a chickenshit, and the answer to that question came with a landslide of history I wasn’t sure I could handle.
“They’ll kill him eventually, just for the fun of it. Help me get him out, man. Please.”
Goddamn, Rocco St John. He was Folk’s ghost, not mine, but some nights I heard his voice so loud it was hard to believe he was a star in the sky.
Locke lit a cigarette. “Don’t call Folk. Let him sleep.”
“What about you? You gonna sit out here all night?”
“It’s my job.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Locke snorted and went back to his cigarette. It was my cue to walk on by. To push through the door to my woman, but everything about us traipsed my feet closer to where Locke reclined against the wall, one booted foot kicked up against the plasterboard. “Folk would rather be at Orla’s door than on the road right now.”
“He’d rather be home,” Locke countered, offering me his smoke. “With his man and his kid, and he’s fuckin’ earned that shit.”
Couldn’t argue with that. Folk was a certified legend, and no one deserved a happy ending more than him and Decoy.
Didn’t change the fact thatLockedeserved something better than a solitary night in a barren corridor. “At least go inside. She gets lonely too, you know.”
“Then stay.”
His deep voice made my lungs feel smaller. As if he was asking me to stay withhim—with them both—and I gritted my teeth around the heat that barrelled through me. I hadn’t seen Orla since the early hours of this morning. Leaving her again was already killing me. Add in the weight of Locke’s sexy-as-fuck disapproval and I was a royal mess.
I passed the cigarette back. “I can’t. Brothers gonna keep blowing people up, we need feds in our pockets, and this slimy arsewipe will only talk to me.”
“Who’s going with you?”
I rattled off the names of a few trusted brothers.
Locke frowned. “That’s it?”
“No, Mats is on his way, but I figured I might get him to stay with Orls while you go home and get some sleep.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
Locke crushed his smoke in an ashtray and pushed off the wall, narrowing the distance between us in two strides of his long legs, the Gemini tat on his neck reeling me in.
The other dark ink that crept above his collar.
The sheer height of him as he towered over me, backing me against Orla’s door, making use of the extra inches I was pretty sure he hadeverywhere.
