meant we didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time focusing on our friendship outside of the rest of our members.
Maybe it’d be good for us both.
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “That sounds good. You’re always looking out for us.”
“Well, someone’s got to,” Priest said with a laugh. His gaze darkened and flickered over my face, then down to my chest, then quickly away. “You all are always getting into trouble.”
He dropped his hand, and I immediately missed the contact. He turned to lead us out the door, but before he did, I caught his wrist in my hand. Beneath my fingers, his pulse fluttered.
“Hey,” I said.
He swallowed. “Yeah?”
His eyes met mine, and suddenly my world narrowed to the smoothness of his skin under my fingertips, and his warm blue eyes.
“Thanks,” I murmured.
“Course,” Priest said, just as softly, but there was a weight behind it.
Fuck. Whatever that look meant, I wasn’t ready to figure out. I dropped my hand and offered a small, albeit awkward smile as I pushed through the front door, trusting Priest would be on my heels. This mess with Xavier was definitely a pain in the ass, and a cause for concern. But the way I felt when Priest looked at me like that—that was the real problem.
8
Priest
Restlessly, I rolled onto my back and stared at the exposed rafters above my bed.
I’d been trying and failing to sleep for hours. Every time I closed my eyes, my brain conjured new images of Mal and that twerp Xavier rolling around in a big Monterey hotel bed. How did Mal fuck him, I wondered? Were they both drunk, fucking sloppily in the dark? Did Mal pin Xavier facedown to the bed and drive relentlessly into him, thighs flexing as he chased his own release? Or maybe Xavier pushed Mal onto his back and rode him, Mal groaning with pleasure as he thrust up into Xavier’s tight little body.
Fuck. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes. And Mal had been lying to us for months about this guy—not letting any of us know about the extent of his harassment. Maybe Xavier didn’t look like a threat, but how he looked didn’t mean anything. I remembered Dylan, who’d looked like the most average, clean-cut guy I could imagine and had nearly killed Jonah trying to get him back from Maverick. Mal keeping something like this from the club wasn’t just a danger to his own safety—it was a danger to the entire club. Mal knew better than that. So why had he been so intent on keeping this a secret?
Did he have other secrets I didn’t know about?
I knew I wasn’t privy to all the details of Mal’s life, but it was jarring to have something like this, something so big, revealed so suddenly. Especially because he wasn’t just my president—he was one of my closest friends.
Sleep was obviously a lost cause at this point. No use pretending anymore. I sat up in bed and sighed. I figured I’d sneak into the kitchen for a cup of tea or a nightcap, something to help me catch a few hours before the sun came up.
I stood and pulled on a pair of sweatpants; I figured Mal wouldn’t appreciate me wandering me into the kitchen the way I usually slept, naked. Or—the way he’d looked at me in Ballast leaped to the front of my mind. When Tru had made some crack about me being his type, I couldn’t help but smirk at the remark, expecting Mal to howl his disagreement. But instead, he’d just looked at me, his mouth slightly open, eyes wide and gleaming with interest.
So maybe he would appreciate it.
I shook my head. That didn’t matter—he was here for his own protection, not because I was horny. I’d offered my place instead of the clubhouse because, as I’d said, I did have the space, and we were both too old to listen to the members fuck through the walls. Not to turn things into a booty call, or whatever the kids called it these days.
I descended the stairs carefully, assuming Mal would be knocked out on the couch, hopefully sleeping better than I was. To my surprise, though, one of the lamps was turned on, casting the room in dim yellow light. Mal was sitting up on the couch, with the framed photo of Ankh from the hearth in his hands. He was lost in thought, so fixated on the photo that he didn’t