Mark (Mallick Brothers 3)

I smiled at that, charmed more than I knew was possible. "And I'm sure those were his exact words."

"Absolutely," Mark agreed, backing out of the driveway. "He was very adamant about the 'big, buff, sexy' part. Kinda weird, but hey, to each his own. The chicks have always liked me," he added with a wink as we started on slowly down the back road.

The drive back to Navesink Bank took the better part of nine hours, and by the time we pulled up, we were both sore, hungry, cranky, and tired.

Mark handed me a take-away menu for some place called Famiglia, then took Nugget upstairs to give him a temporary home in the bathtub with some of the feed he was smart enough to steal from the cabin.

We ate, climbed into bed, and, too tired to even think of sex, fell into an exhausted sleep cuddled together like it was something we had been doing for ages instead of just a couple days.I wasn't sure what actually woke me the following morning.

All I knew was one minute I was blissfully unconscious. The next, I was shooting up in bed, fully awake, finding myself alone.

As if answering my unasked question, Mark walked in wearing only a pair of black and white plaid pajama pants slung indecently low on his hips, and holding a cup of steaming coffee.

"We're being invaded," he informed me, making my heart shoot up into my throat.

"What!" I shrieked, immediately assuming he meant by the cops, though why he was so damn calm about it was completely beyond me.

"Not the cops," he said, reading the situation immediately as he moved to sit down beside my legs, putting the coffee on the nightstand. "My family," he clarified, not really succeeding in calming me down one bit. His family? Meaning... his whole family? He gave me a sheepish look, likely picking up on my dread. I didn't even pack anything 'meet the familyish' at all. "My dumb ass answered the phone this morning and mentioned to Eli that you were here. And, as it always seems to happen with my family, it went from there to another of the brothers who now all have women. Then it goes from the women to my parents. And, long story short, we are being invaded. Yes, by all of them. And... right now."

As if to prove his point, there was a knocking one floor below us and, if you listened closely, the distinct sound of a rather large group of people.

"Ah, nope," I said, shaking my head a little frantically, knowing I looked like a crazy person with my huge eyes and bed-hair, and not particularly caring. "No. I can't do that today. Tell them I left. That I got sick of you already," I added, not smiling when he did because it wasn't funny to me. "Please," I asked, shoulders slumping down.

"Never did a meet-the-family thing huh?" he asked, reaching down to stroke a hand down my bare thigh, bare because I slept in only his tee and my panties. "I know it seems like it is, but it's not a big deal. They are all kind of loud and crazy, but they're chill as fuck. They aren't going to grill you or anything like that."

"Mark, you and I are barely..."

"You let me fuck you with nothing between us. For me, that isn't 'barely' anything, and I'm pretty sure it isn't 'barely' to you either. So take your cup of coffee, drink it up, take a shower, get yourself together. When you're done and ready, bring your pretty ass down and meet my crazy ass family, okay?"

There was a sort of intensity, a neediness in his face right then that made me realize how big a deal it was for him to want to introduce me to them. I had heard a lot about the Mallick family from him, like he had heard a lot about my brothers. Every time he spoke of them, even if he was bitching about them or ragging on them, it was with love, with a deep, unshakable bond. I understood how much that meant because it was exactly how I spoke of my own family.

I also knew that Mark had never been a settling-down sort, that he never introduced his family to a woman in a 'this is serious' kind of way.

So this was a big thing for him.

And he needed me to not be a chickenshit, a flight risk.

He needed me to drink my coffee, take my shower, calm down, get dressed, and go down and meet his family, take whatever they threw at me, even if he was wrong and they did want to grill me. He needed that from me. Given that he had been nothing but good to me, I owed that to him.