A hard stone settled in the pit of his stomach. He ignored it to ask, “And your sister?”
She laughed. “We were fire and gasoline when we were younger. But that’s because she was wolverine mean.” Her smile went soft. “She’s mellowed with age. Still fierce, but she’s less likely to poke me in the eye or pull my hair if I make her mad.”
“What’s her name?”
“Felicity.”
He crossed his arms. “Merit, Noble, Grace, and Felicity. That’s quite the quartet.”
“I think my folks thought if they named us after a virtue then maybe we’d take on the quality of our namesakes.”
“And have you?”
She chewed on her lower lip in consideration. He barely refrained from jumping over the island to help her with the task.
“Hard to say,” she finally admitted. “I’m too close to the subject matter to be unbiased. Plus, my opinion of them is tainted because I know just what shits they all were between the ages of eight and eighteen.”
“Yourself included?” He cocked an eyebrow.
Her nod was immediate. “Of course. I was the annoying kid sister to my older brothers and the vicious big sister to Felicity.”
“You?” He regarded her from the corner of his eye. “Vicious? I don’t believe it.”
“Youshould. Big sisters are notoriously heinous. It comes with the job title. Although I’ll admit Felicity deserved everything I ever dished. Wolverine mean, remember? But there was one time I took things too far.”
When he said nothing, simply waited for her to continue, she sighed. “Felicity wasterrifiedof spiders, you see. And to get back at her for freezing my training bras, I spent an entire afternoon catching every grandaddy long legs I could find. And I founda lot.”
“Oh, no.” He fought a smile, imagining pubescent Grace scheming up an act of diabolical revenge. “What did you do with them?”
“Put them in her bed.”
A shocked chuckle shot out of him. “You didn’t.”
“I did.” She nodded again, and her mouth twisted with regret. “Felicity hadnoidea they were there until she’d snuggled under the covers and they started crawling over her face.”
She closed her eyes and shivered. “If pure, undiluted terror has a sound, it’s Felicity’s scream that night. The memory of it still haunts me.” She opened her eyes. “She was afraid to sleep in her own bed formonthsafterward. And shestillrefuses to climb into bed if she hasn’t pulled back the covers and checked for spiders.”
“I bet she never froze your bras again,” he said with a chuckle.
“Be glad you were an only child.” She made a face. “Siblings are one of the main sources of trauma.”
“But you wouldn’t trade them for the world.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No.” Her expression turned rueful. “I wouldn’t. The love we share now outweighs the damage we did to each other back then.”
Envy spiked through his heart. Or maybe it was wistfulness, a longing for something he never had and had no hope ofeverhaving. Family that was bound by blood and shared history.
“My parents were high school sweethearts,” she continued and he was glad for the interruption to his melancholy thoughts. “Fell in love at fifteen and haven’t spent more than a day or two apart ever since. Daddy’s a sheriff and Momma’s a librarian. Their favorite things to do together are garden and read. They don’t dance in the garage much, but they’re always the first to get out on the floor at weddings. They can two-step like nobody’s business. And every day of my life they’ve made me feel loved.”
There were so many thoughts and feelings swirling around inside his head. All of them were too big to articulate. So he simply said, “Sounds nice.”
“Isnice.” She parroted his words from earlier. “And they’d love you.”
Once again, everything inside him stilled. And once again, his expression had her quickly forging ahead, “Not that I think you’ll ever meet them. I just mean that hypothetically if youwereto meet them, they’d love you.”
“Why?” He hoped she couldn’t hear just how desperate he was for her answer.
“Because you’re honest and trustworthy and selfless enough to come running when yours truly”—she pointed to herself—“calls you up in dire straits.”
