be with him. It’d be relentless. And even if a crazy part of me wanted him to desire me, there wasn’t any reality in which he actually would. And if he found out that I wanted him, I’d die from embarrassment.
Basically I was a bundle of nerves and confusion. And the whole game would be starting in ten minutes, when I was due to meet him out front.
“Kid?” Jazz asked with his eyebrows raised. “You spaced out there. What’s up?”
I blinked back into reality. Tex and Joker were finishing the setup for the class, and I was clearly not helping, lost instead in my own thoughts. “Oh, uh. Nothing, just didn’t sleep well last night.”
From the snort of acknowledgment, Jazz clearly didn’t believe me. But he didn’t press either, for which I was grateful. Since he’d gotten out of prison, Jazz had, to my surprise, become one of my closest brothers-in-arms. And now that Jazz and Tex had gotten their act together, I was growing closer to Tex, too. They were both a little protective of me, but not in a way that felt condescending. I liked knowing that my brothers had my back—the way brothers were supposed to. The opposite of the ones I’d grown up with.
“If he gives you any trouble, just let the enforcers know,” Tex said. I didn’t have to ask to know he was talking about Dante—he was good at seeing through my bullshit. “Just because you’re the chaperone doesn’t mean you’re the only one responsible.”
I nodded. No way I could tell them I wasn’t worried about Dante trying something that was a threat to the club. I was way more worried about myself. How was I going to keep things professional between Dante and me when it seemed like all it took from him was a certain glance to get me falling all over myself to make him smile?
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I can handle him, though.”
Joker whistled low. “I know I’d like to handle him, that’s for sure.”
Jazz snorted. I tried not to roll my eyes. Joker was a patched-in member, same as me, so I had to treat him with some modicum of respect. He’d gotten patched into the club just as I began prospecting, though he wasn’t part of the inner circle, and he’d rubbed me the wrong way since the moment I met him. His tag came from his incessant, irreverent commentary on nearly everything—sometimes he was funny, sure, but I found a lot of his quips to be more passive-aggressive and cutting than anything else. But no one else seemed to be bothered by it, and he’d never been super close to the inner circle, so I kept my mouth shut.
I didn’t like Joker making cracks about Dante like that, though. It seemed disrespectful. Dante was helping us out with training, and working to build the bonds between our two clubs, and all Joker had to say in response was some half-assed joke about wanting to screw him? It grated on me—even as I knew I was disproportionately annoyed. This was just Joker being Joker.
Tex glanced at his phone. “Dante should be here by now,” he said. “You’d better go up and meet him.”
“Right.” As much as I was grateful to have a reason to put some distance between me and Joker, going straight to Dante was not exactly the way I wanted to do it. But it was my job, and I was out of time, so I hurried upstairs and onto the front porch to invite him inside.
Dante was waiting in the gravel parking lot, leaning against his bike. His long legs were crossed at the ankle, and the muscles of his thighs and calves stretched the denim of his riding jeans so visibly it looked like it might tear. He was scrolling through his phone, and since he was distracted, I took a moment to let myself look.
Sometimes guys of Dante’s size often carried themselves like they reveled in how big they were—like the ex-Liberty guy who’d come into Ankhor Works to cause trouble. Like they knew they could get what they wanted with a certain flex of their biceps or threatening set of their shoulders.
Casually scrolling through his phone, though, Dante didn’t look like that at all. He looked functionally strong, like his size was something that just happened because of the life he’d chosen to live, not because he wanted to be big and intimidating. I watched the muscles in his forearms