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“Well, if you like one of those, great. If not, you know where to find me.” He grinned. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind after this?” She waved the tear-soaked napkin.
Malik laughed. “Nah. It’s not every day I get to be someone’s white knight. I’m kinda digging it.”
That made her laugh, too. “Thank you.”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Now, do you want to split a dessert or are we each getting one of our own?”
“Um, I say we both get one so that we can have some of each.”
“You see, that’s a very good point.” He tapped at his temple and then pointed at her. “We’re going to make a good team, I can tell.”
“Should we go look at the desserts?” she asked, remembering the massive glass case they’d passed when they’d come in.
“Hell, yes.” Malik got her chair for her as she rose.
And then they picked out the decadent chocolate truffle cake and the cookies and cream mousse cake. Malik had debated the cheesecake, and she was really glad he hadn’t gotten it. She’d had enough reminders of Billy as it was.
Which made her wonder when she’d have the chance to tell him about her potential new situation. Or what he’d think about her living with another man.
Chapter Fifteen
“You ready to tell me what’s going on with you?” Noah asked Billy as they hit the locker room after WFC on Saturday afternoon.
“I’ll second that,” Mo said, revealing just how shitty his performance had been out there today. Had everyone noticed? For fuck’s sake.
Billy probably shouldn’t have taken the time away from his cases to come to the club. But forty-eight hours of being alone doing surveillance had left him nothing to do but sit and spin on his fucking mistakes. Naturally, he felt like a powder keg about to explode.
He’d needed the release. Even though he didn’t have the focus or discipline of mind right now to achieve it.
And it’d shown. Obviously. Sonofabitch.
Hands on his hips, Billy dropped his eyes away from Noah’s and Mo’s too-perceptive gazes, hung his head, and swallowed back a growl of frustration. “I fucked something up.”
“What kinda something?” Mo asked.
Billy glared. He didn’t want to talk about Shayna. Or how his failure to make a decision, to admit his own fucking feelings, even to himself, and to ensure she knew where she stood with him had lost him a chance at something—someone—he really wanted. Her.
But apparently, his silence was its own kind of answer, because Mo said, “With Shayna?”
He did growl then. Turning away from his friends, he raked his fingers through his hair and scrubbed his hands over his unshaven face.
Noah cleared his throat. “Do you remember that day we were in the ring and you’d tapped out but I didn’t hear you?”
Hands locked atop his head, Billy nodded. He knew what was coming next before Noah even said it.
“I just kept on pounding on you a good thirty seconds after you were out. And after that, you said to me something like, ‘I see where you are. I know it because I was there.’ And you told me that I’d better get a handle on it before it consumed me.”
“Yeah.” Billy leaned back against a locker on a resigned sigh. Advice that was a helluva lot easier to give than to take.
The younger man came closer. “Well, I’m saying it right back to you now. I see where you are, Billy. And I know what it is because I was just fucking there. And you gotta get a handle on it before it consumes you. I can see by the look in your eyes that it’s damn close already.”
How had the tables done this one-eighty in just a few months’ time? Because Billy couldn’t deny that they had.
Nor that Shayna was at the heart of it all. In ways both good and bad.
In daring to hope that she could be his, in finally letting himself want her, he’d crashed against the rocks of his survivors’ guilt and his fear that Ryan wouldn’t find him worthy because Billy didn’t fucking find himself worthy.
