Joke's on You (SWAT Generation 2.0 6)

I took another bite.

And another.

And another.

Until suddenly it was all gone and I was wanting another.

“Want some milk?”

I looked up to find Booth staring at me hungrily.

I blinked rapidly at him.

“Do you have any chocolate milk?” I asked.

“I do at home,” he said.

I got up off my chair, but before I could make my way toward the door, Booth was waving me away.

“I’ll get it,” he said. “I want to grab my coffee anyway.”

And before I could say so much as another word, I was left with his family.

“That was kind of hot,” Heath, the middle and quietest child of the entire bunch, said.

I blinked, staring at him with confusion. “What was? The donut? I noticed. I love hot donuts.”

“We noticed,” Heath said as he reached for another donut. A chocolate-covered one. “Booth had to leave because he noticed.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Heath,” Nico said. “How about you pour everyone some milk?”

Heath grinned and pulled out a jug of white milk, as well as a jug of chocolate milk.

I frowned at Bourne. “If you had some, why did he go all the way back to his place for it?”

Bourne offered me a grin. “I’m sure he really wanted his coffee.”

I reached forward and nearly had my hand on another donut just as Booth came through the door.

I picked it up and bit into it right when he plopped a mug of chocolate milk in front of me.

I raised my brow at him just as I licked a stray flake of glaze off of my lip.

He groaned and turned to stare out the window that looked out over his and Bourne’s shared back yard.

“Y’all should put an outdoor kitchen out there,” I suggested. “Your yard is the size of everybody’s dream. Y’all could do so much there for entertaining purposes.”

“It doesn’t make sense to put anything into the place when it’s not ours,” Bourne said as he picked up his glass of chocolate milk Heath had set down in front of him. “Plus, we’re looking at a place off of Fuller Street right now. It’s a fifty-acre ranch with a seven-bedroom monstrosity on it.”

My brows rose. “You’re going to move?”

“Eventually, if we get it,” Booth said as he turned around and leaned his hip against the counter again. His eyes narrowed when I took another bite of my donut, then started to lick my fingers. “It needs some work, though. The house is livable, but we’re not really interested in living in ‘livable.’ We want more ‘done’ and less ‘needs a whole lot of fuckin’ work.’”

“It’s got three stories,” Asa said. “We looked at it on Monday when Mommy dropped me off. You should come look at it. It has a huge ass kitchen.”

I winced.

Delanie was going to love that one.

“Asa,” Booth snapped. “You know better.”

Asa sighed. “I was just repeating what Uncle Bourne said.”

“You were repeating an adult word, and you know that you’re not allowed to use adult words until you’re eighteen, or your mother is going to kill me,” Booth countered. “Then she’s going to question my parenting abilities and never let you stay with me again.”

Asa scowled. “She will not.”

I grinned at Booth, then turned to Asa. “Yes, she will. The last time you said the ‘s’ word, what happened?”

Asa sighed. “I was grounded from my television for a week. That wasn’t fun. I missed the World Series.”

Booth winced.

“And your mother tore me a new one,” Booth supplied, then his eyes came to me. “And so did your aunt.”

He raised his brows at me, and I flushed.

“One of our city councilmen was getting donuts from me at the time,” I explained. “He was telling me how ‘well behaved my child was’ and Asa said that ‘his daddy said that the councilman needed to get his head out of his butt and stop playing as if he knew his s-h-i-t and clearly didn’t.’”

Sadly, the city councilman for our city did ‘play as if he knew his shit’ and clearly didn’t.

The representative was a man that had been voted in only because nobody had run against him. He’d won by de facto. The man that had been running against him had a car accident and had to drop out of the race practically the week before the voting was set to take place. Hence the reason we now had this man as a member of our city government.

He didn’t have any understanding about what being a councilman entailed.

Hell, I didn’t either, and I felt like I would do a better job.

The councilman, sadly, was a frequent customer of my shop. He had an insurance business that he promoted, also. He was always playing up to the city employees. He would order my donuts for his sales calls with his police chiefs, his fire chiefs, and anybody else that he felt like he needed to meet with frequently.