Canon (Klein Brothers 2)

The woman was beautiful, that’s the only way to describe it. I was five-foot-three, and she had to be at least two inches shorter, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. What I really appreciated were her curves, which looked killer in the cut-off denim shorts and white tank top she had on.

“I’m eating my heart out about your name. Did your parents name you Sin, or is it a nickname?”

“It’s short for Cynthia,” she informed me, leaning around, and waving at Tony behind me.

“My friend here is a rude bitch. My name’s Tony, and I’m the resident guru on all things awesome. I also love your name, but what Jacinda doesn’t realize is she could shorten her name to that, too.”

I glanced over my shoulder in time to see him shield his mouth with his hand and whisper, “She ain’t so smart, that’s why she has me.” Sitting back, he looked at her slowly from head to toe and back up again. “You’re British?”

Okay, so he was semi-right—I wasn’t so smart-ish. Although the accent had registered, it hadn’t stood out until he’d mentioned it. I could come up with a million excuses over why, but I’d just go with the best one: it was Monday.

“Yup, sure am.”

“Well, hell. My sister-in-law is French-British. Where about are you from?” he asked, pulling the chair forward and making an awful screeching noise on the tiled floor with the heavy metal base.

“A place called West Wickham. It’s not far away from London if that helps? Where’s your sister-in-law from?” Cyn—why couldn’t it be spelled Sin?—looked happy to find a fellow Brit in our relatively small town.

“I forget the name of the place, aside from the fact it sounds like something out of Harry Potter, but I know it’s in the West Country.”

Sitting her down and making sure she was comfortable, I went about doing Cyn’s hair while she spoke to Tony and me. What I found out was that she and her siblings had grown up in the UK, but her dad was from Texas, so they’d spent a lot of time here during school breaks. Her mom had sadly been killed by a drunk driver, so their grandma had raised her after that, while her dad kept an eye on them from here.

If I’d just heard the story from someone else, I might have been pissed at the dad for not being more present physically. But from how she described it, he’d been a huge part of their lives, even with thousands of miles and a lot of water between them.

We also found out she’d had a kid with a guy she’d met shortly after moving to the US, but he hadn’t been interested in being a dad, so she’d raised him herself. She didn’t bitch about him or sound bitter and just said it was “his loss.”

Hearing this, Evie, who’d been a single parent herself until she’d gotten together with Alex Bell, had pumped her fist in the air. “Atta girl!”

I think after all of that, we all kind of fell in love with her. Everyone pelted her with questions, and Tony and the girls kept mouthing, “I love her!” to me.

Yeah, join the club.

But mainly, she was fucking hilarious!

All of the clientele and staff in Delicious Divas were laughing as they listened to her tell a story about her sister trying waxing herself at home.

“Not only did she wax herself shut and her thigh to her nunny, but that wax ran betwixt her arse cheeks,” she wheezed, wiping a tear from under her eye.

“Betwixt,” Tony howled, holding his side. “The word makes it even more graphic in my brain.”

“I kid you not, mate, those arse cheeks were sealed tighter than a dam. They had to pull the wax off in tiny pieces because she’d poured the whole pot out.”

I had to cross my legs because I was laughing so hard by this point, I was in danger of peeing my uncomfortable, yet pretty, panties.

“Why’d she do it?” Evie asked through her laughter.

“Because she saw it online and decided to try it out. The problem was, Sadie’s never been much good at reading instructions, so she overheated it in the microwave. That was problem number one.” Cyn held up a finger. “Problem number two was that she was a monumental idiot, who burned her twat and then sealed it like a letter from the seventeenth century.”

That did it. Throwing my roller brush at Tony, I jogged to the bathroom, only just making it in time. Not to be graphic but peeing while laughing as hard as I was made it a whole new experience. It was like the bodily function version of the morse code. I swear, by the time I was done, it felt like I wouldn’t need to go again for a full two days.