Page 59 of Filthy Rich Brother's Best Friends

The question comes out of nowhere. It catches me completely off guard. “I—what?”

She tilts her head, resting her cheek against her knees. “You’ve never brought anyone around. I mean I know you’ve been photographed with women. I’ve just never actually seen you with one.”

My first instinct is to deflect. But she’s still watching me with this open curiosity, and for some reason that squashes the instinct to lie.

“I’m not great at…people,” I say finally.

She snorts quietly. “Okay. Try again.”

I lift a shoulder. “It’s true.”

“You’re smart. You’re sweet. You’re loyal as hell. How can you say you’re not great with people?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” I say, more to the floor than to her. “If no one’s interested.”

There’s a pause. Then she tilts her head again and frowns. You’d think I just said something entirely backward.

“I was.”

I look up quickly.“You…what?”

She shrugs her shoulders, eyes still on mine. “I always had a thing for you.”

My brain short-circuits. It starts throwing up errors as it attempts to reboot. The words hit, loop, and then hit again. I stare at her, trying to match this version of reality with the one I’ve been living in for years—the one where I was background noise. I spent years assuming I was invisible to her. Especially when Reid was in the room.

She had a thing for me? What?

I don’t know how to respond. My mouth opens, then closes. I run a hand through my hair because doing something is better than just sitting here like an idiot.

“I always thought it was Reid,” I finally manage to force out.

Lola scoffs and drops her gaze. “Please.”

“And Jude?”

That gets her. Something flickers across her face—guilt or hesitation, I can’t tell. The silence is answer enough.

I nod. “Right.” I push back against my desk and cross my arms.

She looks up at me, and there’s something softer in her eyes. “You really didn’t know? That I liked you?”

I have spent years paying close attention to this woman’s every reaction. How could I possibly have missed that she had feelings for me?

“Not even a little.”

“God, I thought I was so obvious.”

I huff a quiet laugh. “You weren’t.”

And the thing is—I know so much about her. I know she can’t stand silence but hates when people talk just to fill it. I know she always chews on her bottom lip when she's focusing on something difficult, and that she has a habit of tucking her hair behind her left ear when she's nervous, but never the right. I've watched her do it a thousand times.

I know that she pretends to hate reality TV but secretly binges cooking competitions. I caught her once, three seasons deep into Top Chef at 2 a.m., pretending she wasn't crying over a contestant's elimination.

And I know that despite her confident exterior, she has this tell when she feels out of place—she taps her index finger against her thumb in a specific rhythm, like she's keeping time to a song only she can hear.

There was this one time she fell asleep on the couch while the rest of us were mid-movie marathon. Her head dropped onto my shoulder somewhere between the opening credits and the first explosion. I didn’t move for the next hour. My arm went numb fifteen minutes in. I didn’t care.

That was the closest I ever let myself get.