Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
In the family.
Oh yeah.
Shit.
Mo looked to Lottie who had not only taken her feet but regained her flip flops.
She was smiling, big and white at him.
He felt that smile in his gut, his balls and his chest.
Yeah, he’d been claimed.
How the fuck had he let that happen?
Thankfully, she turned her smile from him and declared to the boys, “We were just at the grocery store. Who wants to help us carry in and put away?”
“Me!” Dante yelled, then raced to the truck.
“Me!” the youngest shouted, then followed his brother a lot less agilely.
“Is it all healthy junk?” Alex asked his aunt.
“Who am I?” Lottie answered.
So that explained the Dove ice cream bars, caramel M&Ms, Tostitos and salsa and pork rinds, all purchases Lottie had not, in three days, demonstrated she’d ever let past her lips.
Alex grinned up at her. “You’re Aunt Lottie.”
He knew there were treats in those bags for her nephews.
Mo’d been wrong.
He could not fall in love with her.
That shit was already happening.
“Go help your brothers,” she said gently, grinning back at her boy.
Alex raced to the truck.
Dante was already digging in the back cab where the groceries were.
“And this is?”
Mo had felt Jet approach, but he was engaged in doing another scan of the street.
He turned back at Jet’s question.
“Jet, this is Mo, my new mound of hunkalicious boyfriend. Mo, this is Jet, my sister,” Lottie introduced.
As previously noted, Eddie Chavez and his crew, all of them, including the ones he was linked not-so-loosely to at Nightingale Investigations, did not know about what was going down with Lottie.
Another reason, after the second letter, they didn’t bring in the cops.
Or the Feds.
This meant Lottie’s sister couldn’t know. If she did, she’d be on the phone with her husband faster than Lottie went down when her nephew tackled her.
This meant they needed a cover.
And being unprepared for this visit, he had no other cover to give even if Lottie hadn’t already decided, and communicated, what cover he was going to have. No man like him would be with a woman like her just as friends helping her grocery shop unless he was gay.
He put out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”
She stared at it, looked at her sister, then took it and looked in his eyes before her lashes swept down, and pink hit her cheeks.
“Yeah, nice to meet you.”
Sweet. Shy. Pretty. Filled out jeans great.
No wonder Chavez went for that.
But the sisters couldn’t be more different.
Yin and yang.
The kind of perfect balance that made life worth living.
He gave her hand a light squeeze, let her go and turned to Lottie.
“Gonna help the boys.”
Not missing a beat, or an opportunity, she moved into him, leaned into him, pressing her breasts against hands flattened on his chest, gazing up at him with sparkling hazel eyes, and breathing, “You do that, pookie-loo.”
If she was his, all of that would earn her a spanking.
Mo filed that away as he controlled his body’s reaction to her that close, the feel of her, how much he liked that look in her eyes, the smell of her perfume with hints of her shampoo, and he moved away to supervise the carrying in of groceries.
“Why didn’t you just go in?” he heard Lottie ask her sister.
“I keep forgetting your security code,” Jet answered.
“You’re a dork.”
“You keep track of three boys, their laundry, their mess, their mouths that demand food, football practice, a house, a husband who likes your body a whole lot more after you gave him three sons, and he liked it a lot before you did that, and a full-time job working with Tex and Duke, most of the time with those two together and bickering at each other, and remember your sister’s security code,” Jet retorted.
“You could text me…”
Mo lost track of the conversation as he hit the truck and they went inside.
His job became mostly controlling squabbling brothers who all (even the youngest) thought they could carry in six bags apiece, and they didn’t even have that many, and making sure the youngest didn’t fall flat on his face grunting and groaning with the two bags he demanded to carry while they got the shit into the house.
They put the bags on the kitchen floor, an odd choice, one Mo got when he realized this was a relatively practiced dance and the boys couldn’t reach the counters, and they all went into unpacking mode. They unpacked, but it was only Jet and Lottie, under Lottie’s strict placement plan, who put away.
“So, are you a professional wrestler?” Alex asked him.
“No,” Mo answered.
“A soldier?” Dante asked, his eyes on the gun on Mo’s belt that was in its holster looped through Mo’s cargo pants.
“No,” Mo repeated.
“He’s a commando,” Lottie announced.
Alex froze solid and stared with his mouth open at Mo.
“What’s a commando?” Dante asked.
“The coolest of the cool,” Alex whispered, then shouted, “Even cooler than Uncle Luke!”