“Emily.” Caroline begrudgingly accepts her hug.
“It’s—”
“Let’s go watch for your guests, Quinny.”
“—Emma,” she whispers to the empty spot Caroline left behind for the front door.
“Big party day, huh?” My sister’s boyfriend capitalizes on my attention as he slides a stack of gifts onto the kitchen table.
I count them—one, two, three, four, five—before turning to Emma.
I know it wasn’t her decision, but I say it anyway. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course we did. We’re family,” Nathan butts in, slapping me on the shoulder.
Not yet. Not ever, I hope.
I try not to recoil. Him in his plaid button-ups and aggressive gestures. I tolerate him. But I’ve always pictured my baby sister with someone… softer. Someone like?—
“What is Will doing here?” The question gusts from Emma’s lungs in a breathy whisper. Her eyes are glued to the back door.
I glance out the window as my childhood friend’s backward hat and six-foot frame cross the backyard.
“Right now? Probably going to Delilah’s for lunch. Before that? Building a music studio above the garage. He was going to come to the party but a guy on his crew called in sick. He’s covering for him to get the project finished by tomorrow.”
Will is a better person than I’ll ever be, always taking care of his crew and checking up on his grandmother. She raised him in the house next door after his parents died in a car accident in high school. I never asked him many questions about it back then. I was always afraid it would be a give and take conversation.
A confused look transforms Emma’s face. “You didn’t tell me you were doing that?”
“It’s… a new development.”
Kind of like living here.
Four toddlers barge into the kitchen, chasing each other in a fit of squeals around the island. Caroline must have made a great first impression with their parents because they didn’t stay to offer concern about the reporters or introduce themselves to me. After a week at a new school, followed by spring break, I don’t have the faintest clue of their names yet.
“I’m gonna go see the progress,” Emma says, drifting toward the back door. I catch a muscle in Nathan’s jaw jump before he ignores her and turns to me.
“So, Rhett, you’re really doing it… the whole domestic life thing?”
His use of my stage name irritates the hell out of me. Appearances have always been his priority over everything else. Hence the pile of gifts, the family connection to a famous music artist, and the way he uses my sister for her money.
Quinn launches herself at my legs. She grips my pants tight, hiding from a redheaded boy who was chasing her. She shrieks as he barrels into my side and reaches around to tickle her. I grip the counter to keep from losing my balance as two other kids come at me from the other side.
“Yep,” I grunt.
Nathan wouldn’t know a domestic life if it hit him in the face. Makes me question how committed he is to my sister. Over a decade on and off together and he still hasn’t popped the question.
Nathan chuckles. “This is good birth control.”
I’m not one to judge their situation. I didn’t entertain a committed relationship until four years and nine months ago. There’s nothing that makes you evaluate your life choices more than “Surprise! We’re having a baby.”
El and I had only been on two dates. The first hardly counted; I was playing a set at the country clubwhere she worked as a waitress, and she offered me a glass of whiskey while I waited for the owner to cut a check for my performance. It was after hours, moodily lit, and only the two of us. She was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever laid eyes on, and it felt as close to a date as what I was used to having at the time.
I invited her out the next night. We went dancing at a club downtown. A few drinks and some grinding later, we woke up naked the next morning with very little recollection of how we ended up on the couch in my apartment.
She came from a well-to-do family and I, well, I was so focused on my music career I didn’t have time for anything else. We parted ways until she showed up on my doorstep with that test in her hand and a terrified look in her eye. I hardly knew her and wasn’t even sure if I could fall in love with someone. But we were having a child together, and I wasn’t about to flake out on her.
The day they laid Quinn in her arms was the day I knew my answer to that question. Not onlycouldI fall in love with her, I did. I snuck away while the two of them were sleeping to ask Wade for her hand in marriage and proposed that afternoon in the hospital room.
