Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69424 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69424 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
I asked her if she would maybe want to go out to eat sometime, and the rest was history.
Two
That wasn’t very Cash Money of you.
—Calliope’s secret thoughts
CALLIOPE
Present day
“Listen,” my sister urged. “There’s no reason you can’t go with me.”
She had a point.
I could, technically, go with her.
The real thing was, I just didn’t want to.
“I don’t want to go to the farmers’ market, Searcy,” I pointed out for, like, the twelfth time.
I wasn’t winning this argument, though.
She was adamant.
“Pane Bowen Hicks, get your ass off that counter, right now, before I bust it,” Searcy snapped.
Her son, Pane, slithered down the counter in the boneless way only a three-year-old could.
Her other son, Cassidy, hurried into the room, his eyes wide.
I blinked at the boy. “Cassidy, did you, per chance, eat any of my powdered donuts that I brought with me for my breakfast?”
“No.” He shook his head adamantly.
“No?” I studied the powdered sugar on his face, chest, and fingers. “Are you sure?”
Searcy made a noise in her throat.
“No,” he continued to shake his head.
“Okay, well, I was going to share those with you. Why don’t you go get them and we can share now?”
Cassidy ran away, but not without a guilty look thrown at me over his shoulder.
“He totally ate them all, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Probably.” Searcy paused. “Sorry.”
She wasn’t sorry.
The bitch.
“I can’t go to the farmers’ market because I have to go home and wait for a package,” I told her.
“Oh, come on.” She rolled her eyes. “They can deliver it on the porch and it’ll be fine.”
“They can’t, because it’s a computer. If they leave it on the porch like they did last time, it’ll be stolen like it was last time,” I pointed out.
“Ask your neighbor to watch for it.”
I gave her a pointed look, and she had the nerve to wince apologetically.
I had a neighbor.
A Truth Teller neighbor.
One that I didn’t know was there until I’d already signed on the dotted line of my new mortgage and moved in.
Kent, my younger but no longer smaller brother, came into the room then and said, “I’ll go over there and wait for it.”
I eyed him curiously. “What’s in it for you?”
“Was going to see if Hush wanted to help me work on my bike again.”
Hush.
Even the name sent a stupid pang of thrills sweeping through my body.
Jasper “Hush” Madden was the bane of my existence.
He hated my guts—most people did—and didn’t hide the fact that he couldn’t stand me.
That was why I couldn’t believe that my sister and brother-in-law—who was just now pulling into the driveway from his overnight shift at the fire station—had let me move into a house knowing that we’d be neighbors.
I’d wondered why that stupid house had gone on the market and not sold so fast.
Now, I knew that the Truth Tellers MC crew had something to do with it.
They had enough power and influence to make a lot of things happen in Dallas, Texas. Making sure that a house didn’t sell in a good neighborhood was child’s play to them.
“There’s my man,” Searcy said as she detached the child from her boob and handed him off to me.
Searcy had three kids.
She’d had them back to back to back.
The age difference between their oldest, Pane, and their youngest, Dalton, was twenty-nine months.
There was a reason she was adamant about me going to the farmers’ market with her.
“I guess I’ll take you up on that,” I said to Kent. “Do you need a ride over there?”
Kent nodded. “You don’t mind?”
“Nah,” I said. “Why don’t you get Posy to help you load that into the back of my truck.”
“Thanks.” Kent smiled. “You’re the best.”
I hadn’t always been the best.
I’d been a selfish asshole kid when I was younger.
I hated everyone and everything.
My father had died, and my mother had spiraled into a depression so deep that she’d forgotten that she had children—five of them, in fact.
The eldest was Searcy. Then there was Koda, who was in the military and succeeding his ass off. Koda was followed by me. I was followed by Kent, who was a boy genius and kicking ass at anything he did in life. The baby was Anders, our most perfect baby sister.
Our perfect baby sister that was currently in Washington DC with her school visiting the freakin’ White House as a reward for being so smart.
Kent walked up to Posy and started talking.
Posy nodded, and the two of them loaded Kent’s bike into the back of my truck.
My truck.
I’d just finished paying it off yesterday, actually.
Now, only twenty years to go on my mortgage.
The baby in my arms burped, and I looked down at the sweetest little five-week-old in the world.
“You’re just so cute,” I said to the youngest Hicks boy. “Too bad you weren’t a girl.”
“Amen,” Searcy walked past me into the house. “Be right back. I have to see what the kids are destroying.”