Jo and Allie smacked Cash at the same time from opposite sides.
He flinched back. “What?”
“That’s not fair,” Jo said. “He could be a really great guy. We haven’t seen him forever.”
Allie pulled a piece of chicken off the bone. “Yeah, plus he’s kind of hot.”
Brandon poked Allie in the side. “Watch it, Sunshine.”
She winked at him.
“What did he do?” Zoey felt a little embarrassed for asking, but she was curious about the Westbrooks. Way more curious than she should be.
“Nothing,” Allie said. “It’s just his family is a little shady.”
Zoey pulled her chin back. “The Westbrooks?” That didn’t gel with anything she’d heard from Brandon.
Brandon shook his head. “There are a lot of Westbrooks in this town. They own shops, have lots of land, and are all over.”
“Oh.”
“Dean’s Hunter’s cousin,” Allie explained, and Zoey felt a flash of heat to her cheeks that Allie had called Hunter out like that, like Zoey might have some special interest in him.
“Why just Hunter’s?” she asked as innocently as possible.
Allie laughed. “He’s the Westbrook you know best.”
“Why would you say that?” She pushed green beans around her plate with her fork.
Allie looked back and forth between Brandon and Zoey. “Brandon said you met in the barn.”
“Oh—yeah. I must have forgot.” She moved her weight to her left cheek to give the other side a reprieve.
Brandon rolled his eyes.
“Dean’s dad was the black sheep of our parents’ generation,” Cash said. “Demanded his inheritance young, ran off when they wouldn’t give it to him, and then landed himself in jail. Dean took off right after graduating—probably embarrassed because no one can look at him without seeing his dad; they could be twins. But his sisters stayed. One of them works in the library. The other is a hairstylist at the salon—the one with the pink hair.”
Allie chucked a fry at Cash. “Why are you, the kettle, calling the runaway a pot?”
Cash stole a fry from his sister-in-law’s plate in retaliation. “If you’re not going to eat my fries, I’m taking them back. These are award-winning fries, you know.”
Allie pulled her plate away from Cash protectively.
Zoey was floored by the ease among the four. She even felt a little envious. Envious of the relationship between the twins, of their relationships with their husbands, and of the group dynamic as a whole. Even Brandon and Cash seemed to have a brotherly camaraderie, or maybe it was just that they’d each married one in a set of crazy twins and had to learn to speak without words as a form of defense. Could be.
She thought about why she’d come here. She wanted her family to be as close as these four. She didn’t want to feel left out with her own brother.
“The point is,” Cash said, “I’m not sure I trust him watching the booths at night.”
Jo giggled. “What do you think he’s going to do, break in and steal our honey?”
“If I didn’t get free honey, I would,” Brandon added.
Allie kissed him. “Yeah, right. With an apology and C-note left to make up for it?”
Ah, now that was something Zoey had wanted to ask about. “That actually reminds me, you guys have, what … 40 acres?” she asked Brandon.
He nodded. “A little over.”
