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"You know," he said after the last patient of the day. "If this outlaw biker shit doesn't work out, maybe I will get a job here. Then I can fuck you anytime I want."
"You're ridiculous."
"You love it."
He was right.
I did.
I really, really did.
It was easy, effortless, even.
To go from loving him to being in love with him.
I hardly even noticed it was happening until it was already done. But there was no mistaking it.
I thought I had been in love before.
I'd certainly milked the sadness of my breakups like a woman in love would have.
But now that I had Niro, I was sure that I'd never felt anything even close to what I felt for him for anyone else before.
Maybe it was unfair to compare them. I had a literal lifetime of loving Niro, of learning every little thing there was to know about him, of sharing every bit of myself with him. Mentally. Emotionally. And, finally, physically.
Nothing had ever compared.
Nothing ever could.
I was fabulously, stupidly, head-over-heels in love with my best friend.
"Ya done eye-banging each other?" Adler asked, snapping me out of my stupor. "Fallon is calling church. We have to get back."
"Duty calls," Niro said, apologetic.
I guessed I would just have to find another time to tell him how I felt.
Chapter Seventeen
Niro
The common area of the clubhouse was a war room.
In just a few hours after getting the intel we needed from Andi at the vet's office, Finn had managed to throw together a mess of information that would make his hacker aunt proud.
It was all plastered up across the walls, pictures of the Alcazar Cartel along with ones of the Soto Cartel that used to rule things.
I'd grown up with Fallon and Finn, and while Fallon had all the bravado, the penchant for violence, he'd never struck me as someone who could pull off this level of focused detail so quickly. Finn, on the other hand, shrugged it off like it was no big deal.
"You're with Andi now?" a deep, rumbling voice said at my side, making me turn to find the giant form of Malcolm standing there, staring at all the fact sheets and pictures on the wall.
"Yeah," I agreed, nodding, expecting a lecture. It didn't matter that everyone in the club had known me my entire life. Andi was still one of the girls they were raised to protect, to take care of. And to this ragtag group of violent men, that meant they all felt the need to pull me over and give me the old If you ever do anything to hurt that girl speech.
Malc was, arguably, the most protective of any of us in our generation. He somehow thought it was single-handedly his job to make sure none of them ever got hurt, ever needed for anything. It was probably watching his father be much like that with his mother that taught him it.
He was always the one hauling his ass out of bed to go drive one of the girls home from the bar instead of her taking a potentially sketchy Uber, calmly dealing with their inane drunken ramblings, their horrific chick music blasting from his speakers, pulling off to the side of the road to hold their hair back while they got sick, then never speaking a word of it again.
He was the one who drove his truck out to whatever backroad they might be stranded on, fixing flat tires or jumping dead batteries or towing their cars back to someone with a lift who could see what else might be going on with it.
He was the one the girls flocked to just a little bit more than the rest of us, despite having less in common with his reclusive, mountain man ass, despite him showing absolutely no interest in being dragged into their craziness.
I guess it was his quiet disposition paired with his patience and the most loyal heart of any of us.
The girls knew that, wanted to be close to that.
They also got a kick out of trying to shake him out of his shell, sticking flowers in his beard. And, of course, in Billie's case, hitting on his friends.
I already had my now memorized speech on my lips. Last time I counted, I'd needed to spout it off twelve times. About how I was the last person in the world who would hurt Andi, about how I wasn't even capable of taking her for granted, that I was going to spend every day of my life endeavoring to deserve her.
But Malcolm surprised me by making one of his trademark non-committal grunting noises. "'Bout time," he said, walking off toward a wall, flipping up a sheet of plain white paper that someone had the foresight to put over what looked like a pretty brutal crime scene image.
"I wonder sometimes if Reign made the right choice," Hope said, moving into the space Malc had vacated, handing me a coffee that I knew Andi must have made since Hope was more of a "Do I look like your maid?" or "You have your own two hands" type of woman.
