Leaning back, Cole covered his face and shuddered. When that didn’t work, he slipped off the chair and squashed his face into the seat of it.
Now it was me who was shuddering. We’d been discussing earlier how long Tate and Lily had spent in here yesterday, then how crumpled they’d been when they’d come out. I wasn’t even going to touch the desk anymore. Hell, maybe even the walls.
“Uh, Cole?” Sadie called. “You might not want to do that, mate.”
Not wanting to explain why she snapped her mouth shut and moved behind me.
“Can someone explain why Cole’s here while he focuses on getting his shit together?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at the other men.
“He wanted to check up on you to make sure you’re okay,” Gramps told me as Cole lifted his head weakly.
I was touched by it. We’d spoken on the phone and video called after it all, but knowing he’d left Ebru with the kids to do it? “Really? You came all this way to check on me?”
“Of course I did,” he huffed, glaring at me. “You’re a pecker head, but you’re still my favorite cousin.”
“Hey!” came a chorus of shouts from the doorway, but he didn’t even look in its direction.
“Aw,” Sadie sighed, leaning into my side. “Family comes first, period.”
“Stop!” Came Cole’s muffled yell, dropping his face back into the chair.
Oh, if he only knew!Later that night…
“Well, we can’t do the nasty,” I sighed, cursing my uterus again and wondering why I hadn’t gone with the pill instead of the implant last year. After ‘kidnapgate,’ we’d discussed contraception and decided to ditch condoms, and it felt like it’d taken us to a different level of commitment now. But with my period here, it put the kibosh on sex because it’s not like I could skip it like I could if I were on the pill. “How do you feel about watching a movie?”
Rolling into me on my bed, the goats, dogs, and Jerry all curled up at the bottom of it, Parker rested his head on his hand. “I want to talk to you about something.”
When he just stopped talking and didn’t say anything else, I looked around to see if one of my family or Dale had appeared behind me. Seeing the coast was clear from shitheads, I arched an eyebrow and poked him in the chest. “It drives me crazy when people just stop when they should finish their freaking sentence.”
His evil grin said it all. “I know!”
When he still didn’t say what he wanted to talk about, I burst out laughing and rolled so that my face was pressed against his chest. “If I didn’t like your penis so much, I’d do what Dale taught me.”
“What did he teach you?”
“Bow to your master.” It didn’t need any more explanation than that, I was sure.
His growl proved me right. “He’s such a fucking pain in the ass. I swear I thought I was dying when he caught me with that shit earlier.”
I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep the laughter silent, but because my nose was pressed against him, he not only felt the puffs of air coming out of me, but he also heard the snort that happened because I was trying to get oxygen into my lungs.
“Nice, Ari,” he muttered. “My balls ended up in my neck, and you’re snorting.” If he’d sounded serious, I might have felt bad. Waiting for me to settle back down again, he tipped my head back and moved my hair off my face. “I sometimes wish I was only a year older than you, you know.”
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, and a bizarre one. “What?”
With a soft expression on his face, he swept his thumb across my hairline, his eyes following it the whole way. “Because of what happened to me, I had a cut-off switch for anyone younger than me until I hit about twenty or twenty-one. They had to be the same age or older because the thought of even looking at someone and finding them attractive if they were younger than me made me feel like her.”
The explanation made sense, but it made me feel sick and angry all over again. If Chantal hadn’t been dead and cremated the week before, I would’ve gone and kicked her ass and popped her boobs.
“So, if we’d been around the same age, you’d have been interested?”
“Absolutely,” he murmured. “Then, once you came to help out with Tom’s shit, I wish I’d had the balls to go with what I was starting to feel for you. Even if I just got to know you better, that would’ve been enough for me to begin with. Instead, I wasted a year arguing with myself and making small changes to my life.”
“Necessary changes to help you get to where you are today,” I pointed out.