The Negotiator (Professionals 7)

All six-hundred pounds of him.

Yes, six-hundred.

The problem was, we didn’t figure out this fact until he was several months old, litter-trained, and a happy, loving member of our little family, whose favorite pastimes were begging Cora for kitchen scraps and taking naps on the living room carpet.

We figured he had just been growing, as piglets do.

Until he just… never stopped growing.

Then the vet had confirmed what we had begun to suspect.

He was a farm pig.

But this farm pig was living a well-adjusted, mostly indoor life. There was no way we could have forced him to go and live in the backyard, just because he wasn’t exactly what we had expected.

So here I was, trying to get him out of the way of his chosen nap spot directly in front of the back door.

“Come on, bub, I need to get out there,” I tried again, tapping his front hoof with my toe.

He just kept on sleeping.

“Fine,” I sighed, turning, going into the cabinet, pulling down the cereal box, rustling the bag inside of it.

I could count on a lot of things in life.

The kids would always sense when me and their father were about to have some much-needed adult time.

Alexander would always make us worry about his reckless young adult life.

Cora’s Loukoumades recipe would always be a crowd-pleaser.

And Oliver would always come running for snacks.

Especially if they were of the Cheerio variety.

“That’s a good boy,” I told him, dropping a handful on the floor, then grabbing the tray I had loaded up with snacks to bring out back.

We were in Navesink Bank for the Fall and Winter, finding that the kids liked having traditional winters with snow and family. And because of their father’s line of work—and mine, though much less frequently these days—we had long ago decided homeschooling was the safest bet for them, which allowed us to lead lives on different continents without screwing with their education. They got the best of both worlds, and had friends in both countries that they never got sick of.

We did eventually need to sell my old, cramped little house, buying something bigger with a nice yard for the kids and—let’s face it—the pig.

It was an old, but lovingly restored Victorian on five acres lined in pine trees which lent perfect privacy, something we didn’t get much of in Greece.

“I think your kid just cursed out a bug in Greek,” Gunner informed me, nodding over toward our oldest—a six-year-old, dark-haired, dark-eyed, cherub of a girl with her father’s severity and my hatred of insects.

“That sounds entirely plausible,” I agreed, nodding. “Where’re the boys?” I asked, looking around, not seeing my very rough-and-tumble five and four year-olds.

I did not see myself as a baby-making machine. But much like cooking, once I got a taste of motherhood, I was sold on it. We had three with another on the way, likely the last, but you never really know.

“I don’t think you want to know the answer to that,” Gunner told me, shaking his head.

“Oh, God. They’re not under the porch again, are they?”

“It’s not a porch,” he informed me. “It is their clubhouse.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to the raccoon who calls it home,” I told him, shaking my head. I’d had Christopher shore up the entrances to the underside of the porch three separate times. Each time, the boys found a way around the barricades.

Part of me was ticked.

The other part was kind of proud that we’d produced such willful kids.

“What’s the matter?” Christopher asked, coming up the stairs of the porch.

“Your children,” I told him, shaking my head.

“They’re only mine when they’re bad,” he said, smirking. “What’d they do now?”

“Probably got rabies,” I told him.

“You know, they’d probably leave the porch alone if you built them an actual clubhouse,” Smith observed.

“You know… that sounds an awful lot like an offer to make one!” I declared, stomping my feet hard on the porch. “Boys, Uncle Noah is going to make you a clubhouse!” I yelled, hearing a squeal, then shuffling, followed by a bang, and crying.

Being rough-and-tumble boys, the crying typically meant someone was bleeding or something was broken.

“I got it,” Gemma called, waving me to stay on the porch as she walked around to their little entrance to help pull them out.

“Never a dull moment with all these kids around,” Gunner observed, nodding at the yard full of all the various aged children we’d all accumulated over the years. “Hey, look who it is,” he added, jerking his chin toward the side yard. Where Fenway was moving up the walk with his woman at his side.

Yes, you read that right.

His woman.

As in one of them.

That he had actually done the unthinkable with.

Married.

Theirs was a hell of a story, too.

My gaze slid to Christopher, smile pulling at my lips.

Though, mine and Christopher’s would always be my favorite.