Willa smirked.“But you’re notnotplanning on it either, so you might want to shave your legs just in case.”Lottie chucked the pillow back at Willa until it turned into an all-out pillow fight that Parker had thought only happened on television shows or in men’s fantasies.
When they’d all settled and were back to just hanging out, the women filling Parker in on all the excitement of the upcoming Harvest Festival, she found her mind wandering back to Lottie’s prediction for her and Travis.She’d been right about Willa, but that didn’t mean she would be right about Parker.Still, the longer she thought about the possibility of the two of them being officially a couple by Thanksgiving, the more she hoped that Lottie’s abilities to tell the future were real.
Chapter Seventeen
Travis
When Travis volunteered to hang out with Kit so Parker could go to Lottie’s house for some girl time and self-care, he’d wrongly assumed that the little girl would have plenty of ideas on how to entertain herself or things for them to do, but he had been dead wrong.After they’d had pizza for dinner, Kit pulling faces the whole time at the fact that Travis liked mushrooms, they moved into the dining room where he’d laid out a puzzle for the four of them to work on.That lasted all of five minutes before Kit declared that she was bored and wanted to do something else.
Travis took her outside where they played with Boots for as long as the stray would let them which turned out to be about twenty minutes.Then they walked around the orchard for a bit, stopped by the chicken coop to say hello to the gals, and ended up back on the porch with another few hours to kill before Parker got home.When he was younger, the farm had provided its own entertainment, but Travis had also had brothers to chase around and mess with.For Kit, it had just been her and her mom for pretty much her whole life.His heart ached to think of the little girl feeling as lonely as he did most nights, so when he’d run out of ideas, he asked Kit exactly what she wanted to do.
“Are you up for anything?”She’d asked him about half an hour earlier.
When Travis replied with anything that her mom would approve of, Kit dragged him into the house and asked his mom for her nail polish and hair styling products.Travis figured she wanted to give herself a spa day like the one her mom was experiencing at that very moment.Little had he known that she had no intention of using any of those products on herself, but on him instead.
“Which do you like better, the pink or the purple?”Kit held up two equally bright nail polish colors for him to choose from.Travis wasn’t against nail polish for himself on principle, but it had just never been his thing.When you worked with your hands all day, the only thought you gave to them was which gloves to wear to keep the worst calluses at bay, not how to make them prettier.
Travis stared at the bottles thoughtfully for a moment before tapping the purple with his finger.“Think that one will look better with my hair.Don’t you?”
The moment they’d gotten upstairs and into his parents’ bathroom, Kit had sat him on the closed toilet and gathered the longer strands of his hair into two tiny pigtails, after which she added two purple bows around each one.One look of himself in the mirror had Travis nearly bursting out laughing, but he’d held it in, not wanting to offend his tiny stylist.
Kit nodded and started to shake the purple bottle.“You’re right.Pink would have looked good too though.”
Travis held out his hand and watched as Kit concentrated on polishing his large thumbnail, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth as she did.“You could always wear some if you want.”He caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror and smiled as he thought of how badly his brothers would raze him about it if they could see him in such a state.“Unless you think your mom would mind.”
Kit looked up at him, her expression thoughtful.“I don’t think she would care, but she wouldn’t want me to get used to it.”She focused back on her work while Travis let her last words play over in his mind.
They hadn’t had many luxuries.Hell, they hadn’t had many necessities, that much was obvious from the few meager belongings he’d spied around their apartment.The ache that formed in his chest anytime he thought about either or his girls going without was back, quickly followed by the sweeping realization that sometime over the last two months, he’d come to think of Parker and Kit as his.
“Fuck,” he breathed out.The fierce determination to keep Parker and Kit safe and happy, and with him permanently had been growing for some time, but now it was as deeply rooted into him as caring for the orchard was.When he looked up to see Kit with a wide-eyed look of shock on her face, he winced.“Shit, I mean shoot.”
Kit giggled at his floundering.“You said some bad words, Travis.”She shook her head in disappointment even as a mischievous smile played on her face.
Travis sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.Parker might never trust him to watch Kit again if she found out he couldn’t control his cursing.Maybe he should finally listen to his mom and make a bigger effort to stop.“Not advocating you lie or keep things from your mother, but think we can let this slipup go without mention?”
Kit twisted up her mouth for a moment as she considered his question.“Damn right we can.”When it was Travis’s turn to look wide-eyed, Kit just shrugged and laughed more.“Now we’re even.Mutually assured destruction.”
