“Okay. Then the phone is good to go. Smartwatch and tablet, too.”
After trading the old phone for the new one, I find Marco staring at me.
“Welcome to the crew,” he says with one of his signature nods.
“Just the crew?” I ask, strapping on the watch. “No official name for your weird, helpful-but-still-shady-ass-mafia?”
“We’re not some government organization, we don’t need a fucking name.”
“Too bad, I was hoping for a bumper sticker.”
Marco does the blank-face thing at my attempt at a joke, but Parker lets out a loud laugh and starts digging in a drawer. “He catches onfast, huh?”
“Oh fuck, are there bumper stickers?” I ask.
“Nah. There are buttons, though.” And no shit, he tosses a fucking button at me with ‘The DeVille Crew’ in bright pink letters on it. “The girls ordered five hundred of those things,” Parker says with a grin.
Chapter 12
No, seriously, what the fuck did I get myself in to?
Luca
Marco takes me on a tour of the house. The in-ground, salt-water pool out back is heated. And the hot tub next to it is calling my name.
There’s a large gym on the first floor, a game room and theater—complete with huge reclining chairs and a popcorn machine—on the second floor, and a bowling alley and gun range with an armory in the basement. The third floor is mostly large bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. The Reno DeVilles live well, but holy shit. I’ve never seen anything like this place in real life.
When we reach the wing of the house where the girls live, we find Mia coming out of the spare room on the same side of the hallway as the bedroom Ariana doesn’t sleep in. “Oh, there you two are. Luca, I moved your things in here.”
My heart speeds up a bit, knowing I’ll be that close to Ariana. “Okay. Uh, thanks. I could have done that.”
“I’m capable of lugging a couple bags down the hall. You’ll probably be more comfortable over on this side of the house than on ours. These rooms are bigger than the guest room you slept inlast night.” She moves into the living room, and we follow. “Up until a few years ago, the girls were near us, but they begged for some privacy and independence, so we remodeled a bit. We thought these two extra rooms would get used by friends once in a while, which has never happened. They painted and decorated it all themselves.”
I haven’t spent a ton of time with the girls, but this large living space feels like them. The walls are painted a bright peach. A big window lets in natural light and has a comfy-looking window seat under it. There’s an oversized sectional couch in the middle of the room, covered in blankets and throw pillows. A ridiculously big flat-screen TV is mounted on the wall with a shelf of gaming systems under it. Bookshelves line an entire wall. A couple of Kindles are on the coffee table next to notebooks and empty to-go coffee cups. My face softens as I look around this happy place. This happy home filled with a happy family. And I try to fight the jealousy I feel bubble up.
Marco claps me on the back, breaking me out of my thoughts. “Luca, I hope you sleep like the dead.”
Before I can question that statement, I hear Ariana’s voice through the closed door of Lil’s room. “Lil! Where the fuck is my towel?”
“Um, well, I forgot mine this morning and so I used yours and tossed it in the hamper. Go me, I cleaned up after myself,” Lil yells back.
“Cool story, bro. I’ll just stand here in the shower and fucking air dry.”
“I wonder how long that would take…”
Ariana lets out a big ass growl. “Get. Me. A. Towel. Lilith. May. DeVille!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it!”
I look at a grinning Mia and scowl. “Really? Are they like this all the time?”
“No, not all the time. Sometimes, they’re sleeping. They’re usually quieter then. There’s a reason we put them on the opposite side of the house,” she smirks.
Great. I’m going to be hearing them yelling their full names at each other all the damn time. Which brings to mind another question. “Do they seriously have rhyming middle names?”
Mia smiles softly. “They didn’t always. When we brought Ari home to live with us, she didn’t know hers. She asked Lil to give her a new one, and Lil was adamant they rhyme.” She and Marco walk away, hand in hand, leaving me to settle in… and process that bit of information.
Like the house, my new bedroom is huge. A king-sized bed sits on one side of the room, and the other side is set up like an office, with a desk and chair, a bookcase, and a loveseat. The walk-in closet alone is almost as big as my room back home. In the bathroom, there’s a huge glass shower with a bunch of shower heads and an oversized soaking tub that looks more like a kiddie pool than a bathtub.
