Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 73192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“And who is this one?” Reagan gestured toward the baby in my arms, ignoring the jab of her being a trespasser.
“This one is Mellie. The one my sister is holding is Marshall and the one in the car seat is Maddie.” I pointed at each kid.
I could practically see the wheels in Reagan’s mind turning.
She wanted to know how all these kids were my sister’s when they were obviously not only close in age but also different ages.
Maybe if she was nice, I’d tell her later.
“Well, that’s a handful,” Reagan said. “All those M names will get confusing. My stepmother and dad already get confused and none of our names start with the same letter.”
I snorted. “I think that’s every parent, though. Our mother still calls us “Alana-Tyler-Henley” until she gets whichever one of us she wanted to answer.”
Reagan’s lips twitched and she looked up to see if Tara and Rome were still watching. They were. I could see them out of the corner of my eye and Rome was actually turned in his seat, smiling.
Tara was actually glaring.
Nice.
“I was going to just say hi, but now she’s glaring and I feel like I need to prove a point and join y’all…but I don’t really like talking. So, if I could just sit here and y’all ignore me, that’d be cool,” Reagan asked hopefully.
Henley snickered. “Oh, Tyler. I like her.”
“That sucks for you,” I said. “Because she hates me. Oh, and you forgot the part about her trespassing. Let’s not forget stealing.”
Reagan’s gaze burned into the side of my face. “I was looking at moss. I took moss. I don’t think you give a shit about the moss, loser. You care about the fact that I was on your property…which I’m not going to apologize for. It was all in the name of research.”
My sisters rolled their eyes in unison.
“Tyler has a thing,” Alana offered. “He doesn’t like people in his space. He’s OCD like that. He also probably will look at that patch of moss you scraped off his tree and feel moved to go scrape the rest off just because of the chunk missing.”
The hostess came back with the rolls and set them down quickly before leaving, not saying a word.
Reagan gasped. “You can’t!”
Already did.
Oops.
“Why not?” I countered.
I mean, it didn’t matter what she thought because it was already done, but I still wouldn’t mind hearing her opinions on why I shouldn’t.
What I didn’t expect was for her to go into clinical detail on why moss was good for the environment, what ate the moss, where it grew…and honestly, I was surprised that I actually listened to it all.
“Wow, I never knew,” Henley said as she reached for a roll.
I did the same, then tried to figure out how I was going to get butter on it while holding a baby.
Henley and Alana snickered at my predicament, but neither of those bitches stopped to help me figure out how to make it work.
Then Reagan snatched the roll out of my hand, slathered it with an insane amount of butter—just how I liked it—and handed it back to me.
I winked at her. “Keep doing nice things and I’m going to think that you actually like me…”
She surreptitiously flipped me off.
I winked at her to let her know I wasn’t offended in the least.
“Well…” Henley said. “These rolls aren’t going to last very long with all of us eating them.”
“That’s because they’re God’s gift to mankind…and this butter. MMMM.” Reagan moaned.
I looked away from her in the throes of a buttergasm and turned to survey the wall, trying to count to ten without allowing my dick to get hard at the sight of her.
“So…why are you here?” I asked. “Did you come to eat? Are you here with anyone?”
Reagan shook her head. “I was going to surprise my dad and bring him lunch at work, but then he got a call—he’s a SWAT officer with the Kilgore Police Department—and I decided to use the restroom in hopes that it would be a bogus call. Since he hasn’t called back, I’m assuming it wasn’t one.”
I pulled out my phone and looked at my messages.
“It wasn’t. An old lady decided she was going to hold her nurse hostage because she kept stealing her pain meds,” I read the text from a friend.
Her brows rose.
“How do you know that?” she questioned.
I wiggled my phone. “Got a lot of buddies on the force. I’m ex-military and I was on the SWAT team for a few years before I moved to Hostel.”
Her brows went up even farther.
Much farther and they’d disappear into her hairline.
“Who’s your father?” I asked, taking one last bite of roll.
It was so fuckin’ good.
“Bennett…”
“Alvarez?” I confirmed.
She nodded.
I moaned. “Shit.”
Bennett Alvarez was a buddy. A buddy who was a good enough one that I had no right in the world to find his daughter attractive.