"You can always move into our cottage," Mace offered.
"Uh, no."
"Garrett needs a cottage for Penny," Billy said. "They were in the corn maze kissing."
My little brothers started giggling uncontrollably.
"Silence," Hunter growled.
"The corn maze?" Parker asked me. "Youwere in a corn maze?"
"I am perfectly free to go in a corn maze," I said, leveling my gaze at him.
"Yeah, Parker, this is a free country," Remy said.
"I'm going to work," Mace announced, standing up.
"Me, too," Archer said.
"You're going to go pretend to work," Mace said.
The doorbell rang, and all the kids jumped up, chairs clattering to the floor. They raced, yelling, to answer the door.
"Stop behaving like animals!" Hunter thundered.
"Penny's not going to want to be your friend," I told them, following them into the foyer.
I shoved them out the open doorway, expecting to see Penny. Instead it was Ernest.
"Where d'ya want these pumpkins?" he asked. Behind him was a huge flatbed truck packed with crates of pumpkins. There was another truck idling in the driveway, packed with bales of hay.
"What the hell?" Archer said, coming up behind us.
"That's a hundred dollars for a swear word," Hunter told him.
"Put it on my tab. Better yet," Archer snickered, "maybe I can just pay that in pumpkins."
"Remy," I called as I signed for the shipment from Ernest. "Can you do something with these?"
My older brother ambled over. "Where does Penny want it?"
"I guess around the back."
"Sure are a lot of pumpkins," Ernest said.
"It's a big house."
* * *
Penny arrivedwhile Remy was directing my younger brothers to unload all the pumpkins, bales of hay, stalks of corn, sticks, and other fall decorations.
"Wow!" she said. "It didn't seem like that many pumpkins when they were out in the field, did it?" She sipped her pumpkin-spice latte. The creepy twins were with her, surveying the property.
"How are we going to unload everything?" Penny asked me, wide-eyed.
"We have two dozen strong-armed young men," I told her. "One of the few perks of having a large family."
Davy tried to pick up a pumpkin that was almost his size and toppled over.
