Mark looked up at my question where he was wiping up the splatters farthest away from where I was standing.
“I knew you’d want to deal with the clients you had to cancel yesterday—on top of the ones you already had booked in today.”
Shit, this guy knew me too well.
Biting my tongue, I straightened up and remained silent while they talked. I needed to think more about the advice Evie and Jacinda had given me yesterday, I knew that, and I needed to give him a chance to explain. I wasn’t too big to admit I’d left it way too long, but by the time I’d realized that I was well into finishing my degree and finding a career.
Was it fair of me to prioritize that over his feelings and resolving the issue? No. There was no other way to word it apart from ‘no.’
Feeling a tug on the bottom of my pants, I looked down to see Cyn grinning at me. “Welcome back, chick. We were just saying it’s going to be slightly uncomfortable walking through the salon and sitting in your car in those pants.”
My eyes almost popped out of my head at the prospect of doing just that.
“No way in hell am I doing that, especially after yesterday. People will think I sharted, and I leave rumors like that to my brothers.” I began to panic. “Oh, God, what am I going to do?”
Jacinda looked clueless, but Cyn jumped up and walked quickly to where our small kitchen was. “Wait a second. I’ve got an idea.”
It might not have been ‘a’ second,’ but she was back within ten of them, holding a trash bag.
“Have you got any scissors in there?” she called to Jacinda, who just turned and looked at my desk, still not saying a word.
“They’re in the top drawer on the right,” I told her, wondering what Cyn had up her sleeve.
Getting them, Jacinda passed them around the doorway and watched as Cyn cut through the bottom of the bag.
“Now, step into it, and we’ll use this yellow tie thing as a belt to keep it around your waist,” she explained, holding it out for me to do as she’d said.
Still unsure, I bit my lip and stepped into it, then shimmied it up my hips until it was around my waist.
“If I hold it in place, you can take the dirty pants off,” Jacinda murmured. “You can still see the bottom of the legs and the brown stains on them, even with the bag covering the worst of it on your ass.”
Carefully, I undid my fly and managed to get the material down my legs, regardless of how much it wanted to stick to the skin. After kicking off my shoes, I finally managed to free myself of the soiled material, but I still had a problem.
Somehow, Mark knew this.
“Your panties are bothering you, aren’t they?” he guessed.
“It’s like having a chocolate milkshake wedgie, while having some sort of milkshake and material pulp smeared over my butt cheeks.”
“Well, take ‘em off,” Cyn ordered. “You can’t see through the bag, and unless the wind blows and you do a Marilyn Monroe, no one’s going to be any wiser about your lack of undergarments.”
Sighing, I went to work on removing my panties, muttering, “You just had to go and jinx me, didn’t you. Haven’t you learned by now you don’t say anything like that to someone from my family because it’ll happen? I mean, you’re related to us now, you have to have heard enough stories for you to have figured that out.”
The damn underwear was more determined to stay on my body than my pants had been, so I had to work at getting them down my legs.
“I’ve heard a lot of stories,” Cyn admitted, “and initially, I thought they were bullshit. Sure, I’ve seen a lot of stuff I didn’t think happened outside of comedies to your family, but the backstories just seemed outlandish.”
“And now?” Mark asked as he reached around me to pick up my pants.
“Now, I believe every single word. I do have questions, though.”
I was still working on the underwear, so I figured we had time for me to answer at least one of them.
“Hit me with it.”
“Okay, when you and Sonya got kidnapped, and you were running through the woods without a t-shirt on—”
“That wasn’t by choice or design,” I pointed out.