“Nice to meet you, Miss Nemi,” Reid bowed as she waved at him.
Jarrod, though, well, that man made my ovaries flutter. It wasn’t just his face. He had a voice that I could listen to all day, and he always looked like he wasn’t expending any effort when he walked. Every Klein was the whole package, but he was the package with a bow wrapped around it. Oh, and a wedding ring.
And then he had to go and talk to my daughter, and I almost melted. “It’s not every day a man meets a real-life pirate, and I doubt I’ll forget you.”
Nemi blushed and did a coy giggle, just as Bond leaned in next to me. “You’ve got a little something on your chin.”
A girl could drool. Man alive, it was a free country. Didn’t the first amendment cover drooling as part of free speech? Plus, I knew I wasn’t truly doing it, I just appreciated his brother like I would a dress or a purse that I knew I couldn’t afford.
And all of this because I refused to look too much at Bond himself. He was beautiful to look at like his brother, but his mouth had kind of ruined it for me.
Smiling sweetly at him, I said loudly, “Hey, Nemi, Bond likes to dress up as a Trojan. Maybe next time he’ll let you paint his nails for him before he goes out in his costume? He’s got a hat with a red fringe like the mohawk hairstyle you wanted.”
Nemi spun around and started jumping up and down as Bond glared at me.
Eh, he was screwed. She’d make sure she carried nail polish around with her from now on for when she bumped into him next. That’s how tenacious my baby was.
Karma, Bond. Karma!
When I’d moved to Piersville, I’d had the choice of moving in with my parents, buying one of the apartments that Jenny had been at a party in, or buying a townhouse in the new development in town. I was aware new properties in developments lacked character because they tended to be cookie-cutter builds, but I loved the amount of space we had, the layout of the house, the size of the kitchen, and also the yard space.
I hated gardening with a passion, but I’d wanted enough space for Nemi to be able to play, have a slide, maybe even a splash pool, and also for us to have some pretty flowers. We were girls who loved our flowers. So, that’s why I’d bought this house just before she was born.
It was spread out over three floors, with an open plan kitchen and dining room and a half bath downstairs, a bedroom that I’d turned into an office and the living room on the second floor with a small bathroom, and three bedrooms and two bathrooms on the top floor.
Yes, it was way more space than we needed, but it meant that Nemi had enough space to play happily in her room, and I had two spare bedrooms, even with one of them being an office most of the time. The bonus was having a toilet on each floor, including an en suite in my bedroom, so when I’d been heavily pregnant, I hadn’t had to panic when my bladder had shrunk to the size of an amoebas.
I’d also found a way around the cookie-cutter look by painting our front door a sunflower yellow and planting a shit ton of flowering plants in the front and back yards. I’d also added gnomes, fairies, dragons, and unicorns to the front one like it was an amalgamation of every fairytale in a book. So now, me and Nemi had beauty and space.
I just wished the house had more character.
“I don’t see why you don’t just knock through the wall between the living room and the bedroom on the second floor,” my brother, Cash, sighed as we walked down the stairs from the top floor.
One of the bathrooms had needed some caulking done, and, well, my hands weren’t made for stuff like that. I was good at keeping him company while he did it, though, so there was that.
It was as he stood on the fifth step down that it happened. Both of my staircases were “C” shaped, and the carpeting that’d been put in was great, but it also wasn’t at the same time. That’s why, when Cash put his foot down on it and slipped, instead of providing him some traction, the carpeting actually sped up his descent down them.
It all played out like it was happening in slow motion as he yelled and skidded toward the dividing wall of the living room from the stairs. I had my hands out to catch him, but it was too late. His body went straight into the wall, with his leg going all the way through it into the room on the other side.