Michelle sighed. “I mean, he’s hot, sure. But he’s like a ... a feral puppy. Like a coyote pup or something. Bounding all over everywhere, getting into trouble, tearing up shit.”
Lyra blinked. “He sat in the back seat of my car. I didn’t notice any bounding or tearing up shit. Or getting into trouble.”
“You know what I mean,” Michelle persisted.
Yes, Lyra was pretty sure she did. However, she said, “I don’t, actually.”
“I can just tell. You know that line fromBull Durham, where Annie’s talking about Nuke and says, ‘He fucks like he pitches, sorta all over the place’? That’s Jacob. Just sitting next to him in the car for twenty minutes, I can tell that’s him. Feral puppy.”
Michelle loved all things baseball and had probably literally seen every baseball movie ever made.Bull Durhamranked very high on her list of the best ones. As her best friend, Lyra had seen it multiple times.
“When I said I’d come out with you and your new biker buddies, I did not think I was agreeing to a blind date with one of them.”
“It’s not a date if you don’t want it to be,” Lyra assured her.
Michelle gave her a sharply searching consideration. “But you want it to be, right? With the good brother? I see you making googly eyes at him.”
“I amnotmaking googly eyes.”
Michelle snorted. “Right. Whatever, you like him, don’t you?”
Turning toward the slot machines, Lyra studied the Jessup boys. Jay was on a machine; Zach stood behind him, watching. And also, she thought, guarding? There was something alert about his posture, as if he was a bodyguard at work. But that could be simply a big-brother thing, not a feral-little-brother thing. Reed got bodyguard-y when they went out together, too.
Both brothers had brought their kuttes, but neither wore it. They’d left them in her car. Zach wore the same white t-shirt and jeans he’d had on when he’d come into the kitchen. Unremarkable, except for the way he filled both out. He really was hot. As she watched, he raked his hair back from his face and did a head shake thing that had a practically pornographic effect on her. Her eyes trailed from his fingers through his hair to the swell of his bicep as his arm bent and rose, the way his sleeve tightened over that swell and his shoulder, and she swallowed hard.
“Yeah, I like him.”
Again, Michelle sighed. This one was clearly rhetorical. “Okay. I love you, and you donotget out enough, so I’ll wrangle the dumb one. Go play with the good one. Don’t go far without letting me know first, though.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I don’t want to get dragged along behind you two while you get snuggly. I’d rather teach his brother how to actually gamble. He’s at theslots, for fuck’s sake.”
“Chelle, I’m not going to go up and grab him and drag him off somewhere. Let’s just keep together.”
“Fine. We’ll start off together. But if I want to drag Dumbass off somewhere, I’ll let you know, and you do the same. Cool?”
“Yes, fine. Cool.”
“Cool.” She slipped her arm around Lyra’s. “Okay. Operation Visiting Bikers, commence.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Casinos were fine,Zach supposed, but they got boring fast. Most of his brothers, including his actual brother, loved to gamble. Zach thought it was weird, honestly. Risk was baked into half their lives. Real risk. Life or death shit. After riding more than a thousand miles shepherding a truck full of black-market weapons for very dangerous people and to very dangerous people, he didn’t get a thrill from blowing five hundred bucks at a roulette table.