It’s all she wants to eat lately. “How about we try some vegetables tonight?”
She screws up her face in disgust and wiggles for me to put her down. “No vegetables,” she says in her adorable baby voice that stumbles over the syllables and mashes them together.
I take her hand in mine and lead her to our car. “How about spaghetti?” I’ll hide the vegetables in the sauce.
“I want pizza.”
“Not tonight. I’ll make us a big bowl of spaghetti, and you can have chicken fingers on the side.”
“Can I have ice cream?” She looks up at me, her big blue eyes wide with pleading. Her blond curls are a mess after a hard day of playing, and it’s going to take a bath and careful combing to get the tangles out.
"No ice cream tonight. We’re going trick or treating.”
“Yay,” she shouts, so easy to make happy.
Maybe the citizens of Catalpa Creek would like me more if I offered them candy with every animal rescue?
CHAPTER TWO
Deacon
“Where the hell have you been?” Sebastian roars as soon as I walk through the door of Levi’s house.
All the happy goodness I’d been feeling after spending an hour at my cousins’ sanctuary farm evaporates in a cloud of bristling annoyance.
Sebastian issucha dick. But I stuff that feeling down, because the last thing I need in my life right now is a shouting match with my most annoying brother. “I was at the Weston farm,” I say. “How can I help you?” I bow low, arm out like some sort of fancy butler.
Sebastian’s growl indicates he’s less than amused. “You didn’t answer your phone.”
I pull it out of my back pocket and have no luck turning it on. “It’s dead. What’s up?”
“I needed an estimate for the Brockman job. They’ve been up my ass all day about when you’re going to be done in their kitchen.”
As a finish carpenter, the guy who handles the details like molding, flooring, and custom kitchen cabinets, I don’t like to call a job finished until it’s perfect. Sebastian, who handles demo and framing, finds details annoying. “I’ll be done by early next week. I could be done sooner if we hire a crew to help with the Endicott job.”
“Cash claims he can’t find anyone up to our exacting standards,” Sebastian says.
“We need another Stanley.” In Aspen Cove, where we lived before we moved to Catalpa Creek, Stanley was our officemanager. She kept things running smoothly and was never bothered by Sebastian’s chronic grumpiness. We weren’t able to convince her to move with us since her kids and grandkids all live in Aspen Cove.
Sebastian glares at me. “Cash is looking for a Stanley. Can’t find one. Help him.”
I cross my arms over my chest. I hate being told what to do. Especially by my obnoxious older brother. “Should I do that before or after I finish the moldings in the Endicott’s new den and the cabinets in the Brockman’s kitchen?”
If you ask me, we took on jobs too quickly after moving here. We should have staffed up and gotten an office. We definitely should have found places to live rather than all of us moving in with our brother, Levi. He moved back here first to try to get away from us all. We followed him.
Sebastian steps up, towering over me. I’m tall, at six-two, but he’s got a good two inches on me and he’s all brawny muscle, while I’m lean like the runner I am. I don’t back down.
“You’re not doing anything now,” Sebastian says. “Go help Cash.”
“Fine. But not because you’re asking me to do it, you hulking asshat, but because Cash’s been more stressed out than usual. You know he hates to be stressed out.”
Sebastian shakes his head like I’ve disappointed him and lumbers back over to sit at the dining room table behind his laptop. The table is covered with paperwork and, judging by the way Seb is glaring at the laptop screen, it’s clear he’s struggling with the computer scheduling system Stanley set up. Sebastian’s an asshole, but he’s genuinely freaking out about our business doing well here in Catalpa Creek.
“We should have family dinner here next week like we used to have in Aspen Cove,” I say, because he loves that family togetherness shit.
Sebastian doesn’t look up at me or do anything but grunt. I smile. That was his grunt of reluctant agreement.
Cash is in the bedroom we’re sharing until we can find our own homes here in Catalpa Creek, and the bed he’s sitting on looks a lot like the table Sebastian’s sitting at downstairs.
