“Mayor Barry, or Great-Uncle Barry, as my sisters and I know him, took us girls in after our parents passed away.”And never gave us the inheritance, but hey, I’m not bitter…“He has always been here for us and the town. Let’s all raise a glass to toast Harrogate’s esteemed mayor!”
The crowd cheered as Mayor Barry waved.
“I’d like to say a few words,” he said, sounding slightly out of breath as I handed him the microphone.
“Serving my fellow citizens of Harrogate has been my greatest—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he blinked, let out a wheezing breath, and then collapsed on the floor.
2
Hunter
Ihad been trying to figure out how to dump Fleur without her trashing me in the tabloids when Mayor Barry collapsed. The fire and police departments were at the party, and several first responders rushed onto the stage while others ran to their trucks to fetch a stretcher. Meg and her sisters clung to each other while Susie did chest compressions.
I wanted to go to Meg to comfort her, but she was surrounded by people. Besides, with all the chaos as they rolled Barry onto a stretcher to cart him away, the last thing the now concluded party needed was my excessively large family adding our own special blend of bedlam to the mix.
I whistled to my brothers. “Let’s go.”
They ignored me.
I curled back my lips and hissed out a breath.
They all came hustling over. Well, the younger ones did at any rate. While all of us were the products of a polygamist cult-leader father and his many wives, my little half brothers—the cute preschoolers, the obnoxious middle-schoolers, and the teenagers who I refused to allow run wild in town—were all controllable. The adult ones were my full brothers and were barely civilized.
Remington—Remy for short—was the oldest and sported a bushy beard and scars, physical and psychological, from his time in the Marines. He was one of my favorite brothers, and the fact that he had even attended the party was a bit of a relief for me, because that meant he was starting to move past his war experience.
Yours truly, i.e., the only person keeping the family afloat, came after Remy. Then came Gunnar, who, with his shaggy hair and stoner attitude, was a reality TV producer.The Great Christmas Bake-Offwas popular, and now he was busy with various reality TV spin-offs, none of which I was allowing any of our brothers to participate in.
The next oldest were Archer and Mace, the twins. Leif Svensson’s genes were strong, and he also only took blond women as his wives. As a result, my brothers and I all looked eerily similar, but Mace and Archer were identical. Though they were twins, their personalities were polar opposites. Mace was the CEO of PharmaTech and was straitlaced, deliberative, and irritatingly risk averse. Archer was covered in tattoos and slept until two in the afternoon.
The one talking to his auburn-haired girlfriend was Garrett. Classic middle child, he was younger than Mace and Archer and older than Blade and Weston. Chief financial officer of Svensson PharmaTech, he was an asshole, but he was self-sufficient, which usually allowed me to excuse his more annoying behavioral quirks.
Weston and Blade, owners of the ThinkX consulting firm, were Irish twins—only nine months apart. Blade never met a spreadsheet he didn’t love, and Weston was an arrogant jerk who was only slightly tolerable. They had also recently moved their company to Harrogate, which meant I had one more thing to keep from going off the rails.
Then came my youngest full-blooded brother, Parker, who was a know-it-all scientist and CTO of Svensson PharmaTech. He had been cute when he was little, but now I was concerned he might snap one day, and if he didn’t go for us all, he’d at least poison Weston.
“I barely had anything to eat!” Weston complained to me.
“Are you serious?” I snapped at him. “The mayor just collapsed.”
“And everyone is talking about it. Ida said he’s probably just drunk. She said he’s been partaking a lot lately.” Weston mimed guzzling a bottle.
“You have no shame, do you?” Mace asked, incredulous. He turned to me. “I’m staying here; Josie wants to organize a food donation.”
“And I’m going to drive Hazel and her sisters to the hospital,” Archer told me, jingling his keys. He was engaged to Hazel, Meg’s younger sister.
I wished I was going with him. Meg looked so lost as she listened to one of the firefighters. I just wanted to wrap my arms around her.
“I hope you’re only going to be giving them healthy food,” Fleur said to Mace.
Right. She was still here.
Garrett crossed his arms.
“Fleur,” I said brusquely. “I am going to have a car take you back to Manhattan.”
“But I wanted to cook for your brothers. I was going to make grapefruit peel steaks. You’ll see—they taste just like a steak but better!”
Davy, one of the youngest, pretended to vomit while the other children laughed. I forced myself not to make a face.
