His eyes filled fast.
“No, no, that’s not hot.”
His arms opened, and he bit his lip, and I stepped into him and kissed him. His moan of happiness made me smile against his mouth.
He didn’t sit on the stool on the stage, and I coughed so I wouldn’t smile as he glared at me. I left him to walk back up to the house because I’d left my phone in the room, but when I reached the porch, Gwen was standing there looking like someone had just hit her.
“Gwen?”
She was looking out past her front gate, toward the two-lane road, and there was a car there, idling between the rows of parked cars on both sides.
I waited and the car moved, leaving two women there to make their way between two cars and up to the gate.
“Ah,” I said, because I wasn’t stupid. Nick’s sisters had finally arrived.
“They both look…” Gwen choked out, and turned to look at me for a moment and then back. “They’re the spitting image of their––”
“Neither one of them is her,” I soothed Gwen, climbing the steps to take her hand. “Those women are not your sister, no matter how bad you want them to be, and if either of them, or both of them, say something awful to you, I want you to remember that.”
She turned to me, and I saw the pain on her face.
“I’m bossy, because that’s my job,” I told her. “When I was a cop, it was even worse, so that’s where this is coming from, but really,” I said, grimacing, “you need to listen to me.”
“Yes,” she agreed under her breath.
“Deep breath in,” I told her.
She followed directions.
“And out.”
After the exhale, she looked a fraction better.
They were overdressed for an evening of home-cooked delicacies and a sing-along and people visiting and talking deep into the night. One was in a black short-sleeve top and rose-print floral skirt, with stilettos that sank into the grass as she reached the gate. She had on oversized sunglasses and was dripping in gold and diamonds; her hair, and what I could see of her makeup, was utterly perfect. The other woman, who she waited for before opening the gate, was in a tweed Chanel skirt suit with a Peter Pan collar and nude heels. Her hair, unlike her sister’s, which was up in a French twist, was cut into a short bob that curved around her face.
“Aunt Gwen,” the first woman greeted her, carefully walking down the cobblestone path toward the stairs where we were. “We need to speak to Nick.”
She nodded and turned to me. “Well, this here is Locryn, Nick’s partner, so I expect you’ll want to talk to him instead of me.”
I was surprised that she was acknowledging my place in Nick’s life already, but I appreciated it, and she gave me a quick smile, patted my hand, and then retreated into the house to start coordinating getting the food out onto the many tables. Apparently, Gwen wasn’t going to wait to be treated poorly. She was going to nip that one right in the bud.
“Who are you?” the first woman snapped at me.
“I’m Locryn Barnes,” I told her flatly, making sure she understood how unimpressed I was by her “Who are you?”
She took a breath. “I’m Nick’s sister Danielle, Danielle Bechtel, and this,” she said, turning to the taller woman, “is my sister, Beth Samson.”
“And are you the real estate broker?”
She scowled at me, and her voice was like the crack of a whip. “I am.”
I looked at Beth. “Which makes you the owner of the PR firm.”
“Yes,” she said, and while her tone was cold, it wasn’t the clipped anger of her sister’s. “And you’re who again?”
“I work with Nick,” I told them, because why did it matter? “And right now, he’s playing for all his cousins and such, so it’s gonna be awhile.”
“We can wait.” She was curt, and I’d obviously been dismissed. When a man called her name from the gate, she turned and gestured him in.
He was taller than me, but he wasn’t as heavily muscled. He came into the yard and stopped between the two women.
“We need to speak to Nick about our father,” Beth told me. “May we come inside and wait for him?”
“I’ll check,” I said, climbing the last few stairs and going into the house.
Efrem was there, standing just inside the door.
“What do you think?” I asked him. “Do you want those people in your home?”
“You realize we’ve been here, in this house, for over thirty years, and those girls have been old enough to visit for two decades.”
“I do.”
He shook his head. “And the girls and that boy of yours are the only ties my Gwen has to her sister, and now yours is fixin’ to never come back, and those women are too good to have ever come out here to begin with.”