Page 51 of The Wrong Guy
I laugh at her intentional mispronunciation. “Thanks, Maria.”
“You’d better get on in there, but don’t be a stranger around here, m’kay?” She pats my cheek with affection and a fair dose of don’t screw this up.
The dining room has been converted into a war room of sorts. There’s a dry-erase board covered in what I’m guessing are legal cases because it says things like “Jones v. City of Marshall.” All of Wren’s generals are pulled together into some mismatched Scooby-Doo gang.
Wyatt and Hazel, Winston and Avery, my mom, Bill and Pamela, Grandpa Joe and his namesake, Aunt Etta, Ben Norton, and Francine Lockewood. Everyone’s sitting around the table, staring at a screen or nose buried in a book, though it looks like Grandpa Joe is drawing in the book he’s holding. If Francine catches him defacing a book, she’ll have him cleaning bookshelves over at the city library. You don’t fuck with books on Francine’s watch.
Not wanting to interrupt everyone, I go to Wren’s side first, admiring her concentration as she reads the thick tome in her hands. She’s beautiful. Her hair is pushed behind her ears, her green eyes scan left to right, and her lips are parted slightly. I wait for her to reach a pause point in her reading, and when she glances up, likely feeling my eyes on her, she smiles brightly. “You came.”
“Of course I did. Tell me what you need me to do.”
“Kiss me first,” she commands with a tiny, flirty smile.
“Gladly,” I growl as I crowd into her space, smooshing the book between us. I bend down to meet her lips with mine, and she kisses me back with confidence. It’s over too quickly, but I can feel the stress in her body relax ever so slightly.
Knowing she needs more to fuel whatever’s going on, I crack open the Naked Mighty Mango I grabbed from the store on my way over and hold it out to her. I might not have gone all the way home to shower or change, but I sure as shit got Wren a drink. While she takes a long pull, I make a quick stack of cheese and crackers, not for me, but for Wren. I’d bet my left nut—which I’m seriously attached to—that she hasn’t had a bite to eat. She’s too focused on whatever’s triggered this little study group. I’m desperately curious what that is, but I trust that she’ll explain when she’s ready.
I hold a cracker stack in front of her, and she nibbles it from my hand without pausing in her reading. “Fank whu,” she mutters around the mouthful.
“What else?”
“Grab a book, use the index to look for those cases”—she points to the list on the side of the board—“read those sections, see if it has anything to do with company ownership changes during a contract period or anything else that seems relevant.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I rumble, smiling widely. I’m not smart the way she is. Hell, no one is, but she trusts me to help with this, the same as everyone else. I grab a medium-size blue book and sprawl out in a chair, but find eyes looking at me from every direction.
To no one’s surprise, Hazel is the first to speak. Stage-whispering to Avery, she says, “Are we all supposed to pretend that we didn’t see him waltz in here and go all caring, sweety-sweetums and Wren not rip him a new one? It’s kinda ruining both their reps.”
“Someone sounds jealous,” Wyatt teases his wife, exponentially increasing his odds of sleeping on the couch tonight. Those odds get even worse when Hazel cuts her eyes his way and instead of cowering, he glares right back like, Did I lie? and adds, “And if I did that, you’d do a lot more than rip me a new one, so don’t give me shit for throwing food at you from across the room and hoping it lands somewhere that’ll feed you or distract you from killing me.”
Thankfully, he says it all with the utmost love for my psycho sister or I’d feel compelled to defend her, which would be hard as hell because he’s totally right. There’s independent and then there’s Hazel. Of course, she learned from the best examples in Mom and Aunt Etta.
My dad died when I was a kid and far too young to take on a man-of-the-house-type role. Instead, what I grew up with was women who didn’t need a man in their life. I learned that women are stronger than almost any man, smarter than anyone gives them credit for, and all-around amazing creatures. I have the utmost respect for them.
But Hazel is talking smack about Wren, and that I won’t stand for.
I put the book in my lap, protecting my important parts, and tell Hazel, “Don’t give Wren shit when she’s doing this to save your ass. She’s taking care of us, so I’m taking care of her.”
I point at Wren, and though her eyes are cast down at the book, her lips tilt up in a small smile so I know she’s listening.
“You don’t even know what we’re doing here, since you were late,” Hazel argues accusingly.
“Don’t need to know. Wren’s been tied up in the divorce deal and has all of us here, so something’s obviously gone way off the rails. This is about that, so ipso facto, it’s for Cold Springs. And all of us. Even you, Miss I Don’t Need Nothing or No One.”
I’ve been fighting with and for my sister since we were kids, and it’s made us both stronger in the long run. And closer. No one can give her a hard time like I can, or I’d skin them alive, and I know she’s the same about me. So though everyone else is holding their breath, waiting for an explosion, I’m grinning at Hazel like I just took a chomp out of the last Popsicle in the freezer, suffering through the instant brain freeze because I know she won’t get one.
“Ipso facto?” she echoes. “What the hell have you been watching while you’ve been pining away for Wren? Jeopardy!?” A tease and a secret reveal, but one I don’t mind.
“Anything that’d get me through until I got another shot with her,” I confess easily. There’s no need to hide it. Everyone in this room already knows it.
“Aww,” Avery sings with teary eyes, burying her nose in baby Joe’s hair.
Mom’s grinning like she’s planning our wedding cake, and Bill and Pamela Ford are looking at me like they’ve never seen me before. Hopefully, I’m exceeding whatever judgment they’re passing.
It’s Wren who gives me the best response, though, coming over to where I’m sitting and gesturing at me to move my book-protective cup. When I do, she climbs into my lap, sitting sideways with her legs over the arm of the chair. She places a quick peck to my cheek and smiles at me in a way that could make the whole world seem perfect even if it was ablaze.
“What was that for?” I ask, ready to repeat whatever it was if it gets me sweet kisses like that.
“For kidnapping me,” she answers easily. And though she smiles as she goes back to reading, her parents and brothers are eyeing me with unspoken, curious threats. One, what does she mean by kidnapping? And two, if I hurt her, the next place I rest my head might be six or ten feet underground via my own crew’s excavator.