“Hope it’s disintegrated in a vat of oil,” Cade adds, and I feel Neo shiver in my arms.
“Enough,” I bark, and then tuck my face into Neo’s neck. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just…didn’t want to think about skin floating around in a vat. You know?”
“Yeah.” I press a kiss to his steady pulse and then look up, seeing everyone talking in loud whispers.
“What’s going on?” I narrow my eyes.
Cade waggles his eyebrows. “I won the betting pool. I was the closest.”
“No, I did,” Dalton replies. “It was when they started fucking.”
“No, it’s when they said I love you,” Cade replies, which was tonight.
I tilt my head. “How did you know tonight was the first time?”
“Because Neo said, ‘You know that, right?’” Cade smirks triumphantly. “Which means that was the first time. See, I’m smart too!”
“You’re very smart,” Ansel says, patting his hand. “We definitely won.”
Neo rolls his eyes. “You’re just taking his side because you’ll benefit from him winning.”
Ansel’s lips twitch. “Can you blame me? Have youseenhow high the pot is? We won’t have to worry about money ever again.”
“Must be nice,” Neo says in a sing-song voice, before the two of them dissolve into giggles.
My brothers and I are exchanging confused looks, and I know why. Neither Neo nor Ansel needs to worry about money ever again. Even without the pot, Cade alone has more than they could spend in a lifetime.
Wyatt clears his throat. “Sometimes I think it’s harder to get used to having money than it is not having it. You constantly live in fear that you’ll wake up one day and it’ll all have disappeared.”
Neo and Ansel’s laughter fades away. Cade grabs Ansel’s chin and forces him to look at him. “You don’t worry about that, right, butterfly?”
“Not really,” Ansel says, but his rosy cheeks call him a liar. “I mean, like Wyatt said, it’s a lot to get used to.”
“We’ve had a lifetime of being used to a very different…environment,” Neo adds. “You can’t blame us.”
I kiss his cheek. “That’s okay. You have the rest of your life to acclimatize.”
He giggles and rolls his eyes, but I’m being deadly serious.
Now that he’s mine, I’m never letting him go. But if he needs time to get used to that too, that’s okay.
We have all the time in the world.
“We do need another betting pool,” Dalton says, steering the conversation back on course. I shoot him a grateful look in thanks. “I’m thinking Harley and Jules should be next.”
Harley chokes on a sip of his drink as Jules blushes. “Non. It is not like this between us. We are friends. That is all.”
Harley flushes, and something a lot like hurt moves across his face. “Friends. That’s right.”
Samson snorts. “Friends who wanna bone.”
Harley straightens as Jules slinks down in his chair. “You know what? Maybe you’ll be next, Samson. You’re going to find someone, and you’re going to be insufferable.”
“Never gonna happen.” Samson yawns. “I fucking hate everyone.”
Neo chuckles, enjoying the turn of conversation much more than what was being discussed previously.
