Calli blinked. “Okay?”
“And so I walk in there and ask him what he was doing,” Gunner said.
I groaned and let my head fall back on the couch, jostling Pane just enough that he repositioned himself directly against my neck. I was fairly sure that I could feel his drool leaking down into the hollow of my collarbone.
“What did he say?” Calli sounded much more curious now.
Shit.
“He said that he was pulling out all the folded chips,” he said. “And he was going to give it to you for your Secret Santa gift.”
Calli’s head whipped around, which I could barely see from my exhausted position on the couch.
I brought my head up and my eyes met hers.
“You know I like the folded chips best?” she asked.
“The man knows a lot about you,” Doc said. “Kind of like how you wanted to decorate your place for Christmas, but you weren’t willing to do it without anyone else joining in.”
Her mouth parted.
“Oh, and you remember the time he left our meeting because he heard that she was in that wreck?” Copper asked as he took the car controller from Webber. “He left so abruptly that we had to vote without him.”
“Oh, yeah.” Gunner snorted. “I can’t tell you how many times he’s up and left work because she was stranded somewhere.”
Calli’s face flushed.
“I guess we should’ve seen it sooner,” Doc drawled.
I rolled my eyes.
They probably should have.
But I’d done my level best to stay in the shadows when I did my stalker thing.
Though, there was only so much you could hide when there was a woman that did her level best to do everything herself and fail.
“What’s the issue here?” Searcy laughed. “I’m glad that they finally got it out in the open.”
Calli turned to her sister. “Not you, too.”
“I saw it from the very beginning.” She snorted. “You both make it cosmically easy to see, though. I’m just glad you waited until you were done with college to make the move.”
The remote control started up, and Pane popped his head up off my chest like he’d been pinched.
He raised his tiny little arm to look around, and his breath caught. “Wow.”
He scrambled off my chest, leaving the blanket, and made a beeline for the car.
Doc caught him up before he could touch it and pulled him into his lap.
“Look here,” Doc ordered. “You got one, too.”
Since the only gifts that were there were the ones that Doc and Searcy bought, Searcy had to hastily reach under the tree to grab the ones we’d been intending to open that morning but hadn’t.
Upon the snow melting, everyone wanted to head over to make sure that Calli was okay.
And they’d crashed the party, so to speak.
