Searcy sighed.
“Guess he could be saying titty,” Doc muttered under his breath.
“Titty!” Pane bellowed.
Doc covered his mouth with his hand and closed his eyes.
My guess was to hide his mirth.
Searcy didn’t bother to try to hide.
She just let out a giggle.
“Pane Bowen Hicks,” Calli scolded the young boy. “We do not say those kinds of words.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you have to be an adult to say them,” she said. “Remember what I said about adult words?”
Calli and Pane continued to talk in a language that I had a hard time following.
The group sat down and started to eat.
Searcy offered to take her son, but I waved her off to allow her and Doc to wrangle Cassidy and Pane.
Though, Pane tended to gravitate to his aunt and made no effort to hide how much he loved her more than the rest of them.
“I swear,” Koda said. “She’s seriously the kid whisperer.”
“Remember how Searcy had to work for hours to get us to bed.” Kent chuckled. “And all Calliope had to do was glare at us and we’d be good?”
“That was called fear,” Koda said. “Searcy would give you a thousand chances. Calliope gave you one then set you very straight.”
“That’s true,” Kent said as he reached for the stack of pancakes. “Jesus, what the hell are we going to do with all these leftovers?”
Doc did me a solid and piled food onto my plate, allowing me to eat while still hanging onto his kid.
All the while, I couldn’t take my eyes off of Calli.
Hours passed, and more and more people showed.
First it was Cutter with Milena, sans their kids who’d stayed behind with their brother, Shasha, and his wife.
Audric and Creole were next, followed shortly by Gunner, Lottie, Sutton, and their newest little one.
Copper came sans wife, but he had his adopted son with him.
“Baker’s under the weather.” He smiled. “She could barely get out of the house today. Everything was making her sick to her stomach. The laundry detergent. The smell of leftover bacon. The cab of my truck. We decided that she needed a break.”
Webber and Silver showed as well, though they’d come right on the heels of Chevy and Aella.
They’d all spilled into Searcy’s huge house, and everything was going great.
Until the men had learned that Calli and I were a thing.
Then I’d been hauled outside to “explain” myself and get the third degree.
I’d been out on the deck with the group of men that I called brothers for a solid twenty minutes, and was smiling huge when I looked through the window and saw Calli filling up a glass of wine to the very brim.
