I flip him the bird, and Abby laughs as she puts the bowl with the butter in the microwave and turns it on.
“Don’t encourage him, babe.”
She rolls her eyes as her husband exits the kitchen.
“I don’t know how you put up with his overbearing ass.”
She cracks up laughing before taking the bowl from the microwave and returning to the island unit. “I don’t either some days,” she says when she stops laughing. “But I love him, and none of us are perfect. He’s my world. Kai is everything to me.”
“I guess there’s no accounting for taste,” I deadpan, and she laughs again.
“It’s not just your looks that remind me of him,” she adds, whisking milk and the melted butter into the egg mixture. “You seem full of pent-up anger, much like Kai was when he first showed up here.”
“I’m nothing like him,” I snap, hating to be compared to that asshole even though I know I’m an asshole too.
“He hated me because he thought I was responsible for something that happened when we were kids.” She pours the egg mixture into the flour mixture and combines them with a whisk. “He refused to hear the truth.” She drills me with a pointed look, and I get what she’s trying to do. “He didn’t even attempt to discover it. He decided he had all the facts and set out to make my life a living hell. Hunt and Lauder too.”
“We were jackasses,” Hunt says, striding into the room with Xavier Daniels at his side.
“You were fucking pricks for the way you treated my queen,” Xavier says, squeezing Abby’s waist and peering over her shoulder. “Chocolate chip pancakes?”
“What else?” Abby grins back at him. “I had a feeling we might have guests.”
“Even though I told everyone not to do this.” Kaiden strolls into the kitchen in ripped jeans, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, and black and white Converse.
“Come on, dude, your little brother is a fucking tech genius, and you wouldn’t let us ask him anything last night. How long did you seriously think we’d hold out?”
My chest swells a little with pride at his words though I hide it. “On a scale of one to ten, how mad were you that you couldn’t locate me after my little stunt at Techxet?” I ask.
“We weren’t mad,” Sawyer says, helping himself to a coffee.
“We were frustrated as fuck,” Xavier confirms, earning a scowl from his husband.
“We had your brother breathing down our neck every five fucking seconds.” Sawyer fixes a second mug of coffee. “The pressure was real.”
“It almost killed me knowing you were in the city, and we’d come so close to finding you,” Kaiden admits, hopping up on the stool beside me.
“Yep, sure, it did.” Sarcasm laces through my tone.
“Kai hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep since these two showed up at our door in the middle of the night to show us the footage from the lobby at Techxet,” Abby supplies, adding chocolate chips to the batter. “He has been worried sick about you. All the guys were.”
I slurp lukewarm coffee to avoid responding to that.
“I can see now why you showed up in disguise,” Xavier says, accepting a mug from Sawyer. “If you looked like this that day at the apartment, we would have made the connection. The blond really suited you, by the way.”
“I see I’m not the only one who’s undergone a hairstyle change.” I eye his messy, blue-tipped silver hair.
“I’m a chameleon. I’m always experimenting with different looks.”
“You’ll have no one but yourself to blame when your hair falls out one of these days,” Sawyer says.
“There’s this thing called a hair transplant, Drill Sergeant,” he says, and a chorus of snickers goes around the room.
My brow puckers. It’s obviously some inside joke.
“Or maybe I’ll embrace my baldness.” Xavier shrugs casually.
“Bet you’d look hot,” Abby says, heating up a skillet.
