If he thought I was eating a single morsel of his food, he was crazy. I wouldn’t put it past him to sneak some kind of fancy sleeping pharmaceutical into my share so he could monopolize Tucker’s attention all morning.
I’d rather starve.
Parrish muttered under his breath—something about this cold-ass morning being not worth the babysitting exchange they’d had to do with Ava. Paul must have heard, because he shot him a look. Parrish held up his hands in surrender. “Fine. But you don’t want to be here any more than I do. Admit it.”
Paul opened his mouth—probably to agree—but Brooks stopped him. “Trust me. You want to be here for this.” Then he turned to me with a smarmy smirk on his face. “Oh look. It’s all couples. Me and Mal, Diesel and Parrish, Tucker and Carter, and you and my little Paul.”
I squinted at him. “I wouldn’t want to take your little Paul from you, dear brother. Maybe you and Mal could have a third and I’ll take Tuck.”
Brooks’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, but that would leave Carter all by his lonesome. No, I think Tuck and Carter are good. But I went ahead and called Jenn so you’d have someone to share your shad with.”
I got the feeling he wasn’t talking about my fishing lures. “Now I know you’re lying. Jenn doesn’t get up before the sun. Ever.”
“And you would know that, how?” Tuck asked sharply, turning to pierce me with those familiar brown eyes.
“Because I asked her once to do the morning feed at the farm and she politely declined,” I snapped. “And I’ll have you know it was when I was at your house cleaning up cotton candy and apple pie vomit when you went overboard at Thanksgiving, thank you very much.”
Unsurprisingly, Carter looked confused. “Who has cotton candy at Thanksgiving?”
Brooks and Diesel answered at the same time. “Licking Thicket tradition.”
“Sorry,” Tucker muttered.
“Whatever,” I responded. Because my maturity level was about the same as whoever the hell invented cranberry-flavored cotton candy and made it a Thicket tradition.
“Don’t whatever me,” Tucker said, lifting up his finger to shake it at me.
“Ladies,” Brooks interrupted, reaching out to lower Tuck’s finger as if calming a gunman. “We’re here to have a nice, relaxing morning of fish murder, so I’d appreciate everyone taking a deep breath and retracting the claws. Capisce? Thank you.”
I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep drag of early morning air. He was right. I didn’t want to fight with Tucker. I loved him. I wanted him to be happy. And I knew being here on this dock by the water made him happy.
The sound of warblers tweeting from the trees reminded me of how much I loved it out here too. This old wooden dock on the edge of Bull Lake was my favorite place on earth. When Gracie, Brooks, and I were little, our great-uncle used to bring us out to his old fishing cabin on Sunday afternoons. Gracie pretended to be a teenager by laying a towel out in the scrubby grass to get a suntan while Brooks and I begged Uncle Waylon to let us fish with him. He taught us everything he knew, but I was the only one who really took to it like he did.
Eventually, Gracie stopped coming with us, and Brooks fell more in love with Ava than with fish. Then it was just me for a long time. Long, quiet afternoons on the dock with Uncle Waylon and the sound of the birds, the lake water lapping against the shore, and the gentle hush of the wind in the trees. When Uncle Waylon passed on, he left the cabin to me. By then, I’d already started the farm, so I didn’t think I needed a place to myself.
But every time I came out here to get the place ready to put on the market, I fell back in love with it all over again. And when I started bringing Tucker here, I stopped thinking about selling it altogether.
It was part of me… of us, and I wasn’t going to let one cocky heart doctor ruin it.
I opened my eyes to see Brooks and Carter already unfolding the camp chairs at the wide end of the long dock. Diesel was placing the cooler at Parrish’s direction, and Mal was already sitting in one of the chairs with a giant fleece blanket wrapped around him. Tucker stood halfway down the dock looking back at me. A little line of worry creased his forehead.
“Sorry,” I mouthed.
He rolled his eyes but with a soft expression that made me let out a breath and drop my shoulders. It was going to be fine.
We all got set up and sorted with various rods, baits, and lures. Parrish asked a lot of questions of his husband but didn’t seem to actually care one way or the other. It was awfully sweet of him to pretend for Diesel’s sake because the man looked happy as a clam if clams liked teaching people how to kill their friends.